| The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. —Friedrich Nietzsche |
Why Are We Alive? May 21, 2007
Posted by Rastaban in : Atheist Culture, Meaning & Value, Naturalism , trackbackWe go to work, we eat, are entertained or entertain others with movies, music, tv, drama and comedy, we party with friends, couple, have sex , yet behind all our activities lurks the question, why do we exist? What is it all about? Why should there be life rather than not? And why us — why are we the ones who should be alive?
I think it is fair to say that this is the ultimate religious question. All of our major religions have a “story” whose purport is to answer it.
It’s likely that humans are the only species on earth who asks such a question of themselves. That observation itself, that we alone ask the question of existence, is often thought to be a clue to the answer. Perhaps other animals fail to ask why they are alive because they have no “higher purpose”; perhaps we ask because we sense that we do. That we even wonder about such things could itself be evidence that there is something “untold” about our lives, that there is “something more”.
Before continuing, let’s ask ourselves what kind of answer could ever satisfactorily resolve this question of “why?”.
Imagine God asking himself (itself/herself)
Why do I exist? What is my purpose?
For God, what could the answer be to such a query? What is it that makes God’s existence meaningful for God?
If we try to address this question from God’s point of view (rather than our own) we are likely to conclude that no possible answer could do God justice. God doesn’t have a “higher purpose” because God is the higher purpose. God doesn’t yearn for “more” because God is the “more”.
God doesn’t have to ask why his life is meaningful, or what makes it meaningful, because God is the source of meaning itself. If your life is the source of meaning, it makes no sense — indeed there is no need — to ask why or whence.
The Meaning of Meaning
But to understand this, let’s look at what it means to be meaningful. Words, as we know, are (usually) meaningful, but what makes them meaningful? Their meaning derives from the fact that they reference — that is to say, they point to — something in the world. Sometimes, to be sure, words only point to other words which point to other words and so on. But eventually there are real, existing things being pointed at which are the source of meaning (even if only in a pretend way, as in fiction), or else the whole pile of words signifies nothing.
Put simply, something is meaningful if it points at something else which serves as its source of meaning. Thus a theist would say that our human lives are meaningful because they point back to a source of meaning in God. But notice a peculiar consequence of this. Unless there is a greater God who is God’s source — and by definition there isn’t — God’s life isn’t meaningful. God has nothing to point back to for a source of meaning.
In this sense in which we use the word meaningful, if applied to God’s case we have to admit that God is not meaningful. God’s existence doesn’t reference something else. This follows because God is a source of meaning, something which meaningful things reference, and not something whose existence references elsewhere.
To our God asking himself what makes his life meaningful, the correct response would be,
God, you don’t understand — that question doesn’t apply to you because you are not meaningful but a source of meaning.
And what if the question doesn’t apply to us either? What if it makes no sense to ask the why questions about our existence because, like God, we are sources of meaning, because our living does not reference elsewhere.
Unexplainable Us
It’s not even that we must create meaning for ourselves, as Sartre maintained. After all, do we imagine God making up stories about himself, creating “reasons” for his existence? It would be unnecessary. Existence doesn’t need meaning, and the attempt to apply “meaning” can only bring it down a notch. Real beings exist; they don’t exist for a reason.
In fact, reasons are only explanations. They come afterwards, when we want to talk about things. When we want ideas to work with. Just as it would demean God to say he exists for the purpose of bringing us into the world and furthering our human careers, so it demeans us to say that God created us to carry out some grand plan of his. Meanings & explanations turn us into mere tools. To say we need a meaning is to say — beforehand — that we are tools for something else. It makes us illegitimate, makes us important for someone else, rather than important within.
All such efforts stem from the mistaken trap of believing that thought can legitimize existence. It never can.
We can smother ourselves in explanations (as we smother everything else) — and they are useful (extremely useful when the scientific method is followed) — but explanations can never justify usefulness itself, or justify us in our lives.
We are not the sort of things that need be or ever can be explained. We simply are.
De-Valuing the Body
What is curious is that theists cannot accept the possibility of bodily life being valuable on its own. From the natural perspective, this is difficult to comprehend. The atheist wonders how one could not see bodily life as inherently valuable. How can value not be embodied?
The answer is that theism derives from an incomprehensible but long-standing tradition of splitting body from soul, with all value assigned to the soul side of the equation. The body is devalued “by definition,” which means the theist faces a logically-defined barrier to identifying our bodies as valuable.
As one theist explained to me years ago,
The soul, the personality, is actually the being, not the body. The body is the mere tool or the puppet of the soul to be used for playing the game, and for communication. The truth is that you don’t need a body to experience joy and pleasure. Actually the pleasures that can be had on a ‘body’ level are quite low level when compared to the spiritual ones of serenity and exhilaration.
Life, the soul, the being, can exist with or without the body, but the body without the soul is little more than a hunk of meat with no goals, no hope, no desires, no personality. It is in short ‘dead’ for all practical purposes, except for that it can breath and perform the physical functions of life. – John Kendrix, Seekers BBS, Atlanta, GA, 11/14/1988, Msg# 6476, To: The Atheist, Re: Bodies (spelling corrected)
Kendrix’s devaluation of the body demonstrates the pernicious (if not outright evil) influence of spirituality. It represents a viewpoint endemic to theism, which effectively sets believers up for a life bordering on depression, unmoored from any stable source of value. Within its framework, God is essential of course, and in this sense devaluation of the body serves the religious priesthood well.
Yet God’s role is a disturbing one here, for deity serves as a last-ditch effort to introduce a stable and enduring source of value for our lives, a desperate way to make some kind of sense of life and why we exist as bodies.
But you can’t make sense of why we exist as bodies by denying that we are bodies or denying that bodies are valuable. And you can’t deny the body’s centrality to life and at the same time live and feel with any kind of sanity or moral ground. The problem is that adding God doesn’t make sense of things. A bodiless God, brought in to be the ground of life, is anything but grounded. Inevitably God floats off in the realm of non-existence, weightless, groundless, absurd.
The core problem with God is that he has no body, and therefore no way to move or exist, no way to be valuable, much less to serve as a source of value for us. A disembodied mind — whether God’s our ours — can’t bring value to life.
It takes a body for that.
Getting Rid of the Middleman
The natural world view enhances our inherent value because it removes the “middleman” — God — which has separated us from our worthiness. Many claim that nature without God leads to despair and loss of intrinsic value to life, but in reality we ought to be delighted to be able to dispense with the middleman. Without God, ultimate worth comes back to bodily life itself.
Remove God from your world view and everything that matters gets redirected to life.
If we think of ourselves as natural, and of the natural world view as one that folds God into nature, then we see that atheism can only enhance our worth as human beings. Naturalism eliminates God, but more importantly it eliminates the need for God. It brings value — everything we value — home to our bodies. Home to us.
Comments»
You probably think we evolved from monkeys too… God is everywhere and our purpose here is to delight in His ways. The thought of there being no higher power out there does not make a bit of sense. Read the Bible and see for yourself…how many prophecies have been fullfilled. Don’t deny the truth. You’ll live a much harder life without God in control of it. Christ is your strength, not yourself. Thinking YOU have all the power from within yourself is exactly what the Devil wants you to believe so you turn away from the true entity that created you…and who loves you so very much. I pray for you…
Thanks for the comment. I don’t think humans evolved from monkeys but I do accept the scientific evidence (which is pretty overwhelming) that humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor.
You write that “the thought of there being no higher power out there does not make a bit of sense” but you don’t reveal your reasoning. What is it exactly that doesn’t make sense about atheism? Which passages in the Bible explain the flaws of evolution or identify the logical missteps behind holding a natural view of our existence? You mention prophecies, but can you explain how stories written by humans centuries ago prove the existence of God? Or the existence of the devil for that matter?
Brian,
You are the type of Christian that compelled Ghandi to say, “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.” While I don’t entirely agree with all of Rastaban’s views, your thinking is very elementary in that you don’t seem to connect the dots. I have grown up in the church and I know the lines they feed church members from youth, “prophecies fulfilled,” “saying that there are no absolutes is an absolute,” but really all of these ‘comebacks’ are just excuses for not having better answers to atheism. Do you even understand, scientifically, the theory of evolution?
God wants us to love one another, to love your nieghbor, ect. If we don’t love one another, and don’t follow in Gods word, then we go to hell. So basically if you think about it in a christian perspective, it’s like a big game. Your born, you live, and you die, you either go to heaven or you go to hell. So did god put us here to see if we go to heaven or hell? Are we some kind of tool, to live in his word or we go to hell? Why are inocent kids, starving, dying slowly and painfully from diseases and plagues? What does God want the helpless to do? How can they live in his name when they are dying. What about the kids who don’t even know who God is? They just go to hell when they die? It just doesn’t make sense to me. There has to be more.
Ok … as philosophy is want to do, asking one major question like “why are we here” begs me to ask more; like what is our conciousness, and where does the bodies energy go when it ceases to be contained in the body, and if there are spaces for this energy to collect…. does it reform, can energy contain conciousness, or can conciousness contain energy? Does our conciousness contain power? I’m sure mine has power over me and it watches me…. effects my choices. And then I have to ask how did all the great laws of nature come into being, like gravity, and energy, and motion, and light…. and if we actually understood these laws do we become masters of them? Are they able to be manipulated? Can we or someone create new laws?
I love it!
I think one problem we have with maintenance of our bodies is lack of understanding about universal laws, and also maintenence of different components of “happiness” are dependent upon rather simple social laws which seemingly are related to more universal laws. At least I’m opening it up here… feel free to step in and interact, or connect, or how is nature connected…got energy?
Anyway, Rastaban, I was digging your groove until you started to throw out a big chunk of pie…. what a waste man, just because some people take a big concept (like God or Nature) and put little words and little meanings to it which get manipulated by MEN in POWER doesn’t mean you ditch the dessert! If you want to call it power (or whatever you want to call it) and I want to call it pie, what law are we breaking?
You see..the problem here is that the human brain is trying to understand itself and the only limitation it faces is itself. Let me make some sense here…Whatever you can comphrened or lets call this ‘conciousness’ is limited by the faculties or the processing power of the brain..so the human brain cannot think outside of the rules it was designed (by..God?…lets hold on to this for now) to think.
There is a plane or level of conciousness that the human brain can’t exceed..does this sound impossible?..not quite..lets understand by some examples
1. Single cell organell (Amoeba) - Does’nt know that it exists, so forget about it asking the question “why I exist”?
2. A bit higher form of life - Animals (Dog) - Knows that it exists, cannot think about why it exists.
3. Lets go higher on the brain development - Humans - Knows they exist, can ask this question why they exist?..but cannot answer this question - - Maybe we need to go one level higher on the conciousness scale to answer that question.
4. I am extrapolating this thought here - God(???) -Knows why he exists or for that matter - what exactly it is to exist - or what is the purpose of life.
So here the fundamental flaw is exposed and the singularity/anamaly revelaed….
Our brain is not capable of understanding its own existence…for the lay man..i’ll give an example..The musk deer has an exotic fragrance coming from its belly..that musk fragrance drives it crazy..it tries desperately to find out where that smell is coming from..but it does’nt know that the smell is coming from within itself.
Similarly, we cannot comphrend certain things..maybe we were not equipped with sufficient mental faculties to understand the meaning of our exisistance…but then there are few exceptions/anamalies/singularities…like Jesus/Mohammad/Buddha/Rama…they were the ones who could rise to that one level higher and may have understood the true meaning of our existance…
THEORIES FROM THE BIG BANG, EVOLUTION, PANSPERMIA, HAVE FLAWS AND CANNOT EXPLAIN OUR EXISTANCE COMPLETELY, RELIGION ALSO SEEMS TO HAVE GAPS IN IT’S STORY. HOWEVER ME GIVEN A CHOICE BETWEEN ASSUMING A GOD A LIVING WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THERE ISNT ONE I CHOOSE THE LATER AND IF I AM WRON I’M NO WORSE OFF THAN THE ATHEIST BUT IF IM RIGHT THAN I FEEL FOR THOSE WHO CHOSE TO IGNORE THE SOUL. WE EXIST BECAUSE WE EXIST. THOSE PEOPLE WHO CHOSE TO LIVE THERE LIFE FOR GOD SEEM TO BE MORE PEACEFULL MORE CARING AND JUST MORE PLEASANT WHILE THOSE WHO FOLLOW THE EVOLUTIONARY MODEL SEEM BENT ON GENOCIDE, POWER AND CONTROL FOR EXAMPLE STALIN, HITLER
Garrett Johns…I take your put downs as a complement on my faith. I respect all opinions but I am definitely on fire for the Lord Our God and won’t hesitate to state what I believe in. I’m sorry that you are still confused with whether to believe evolution or not when there are clearly many flaws in the “theory of evolution” now more than ever…and increasing as the years progress. I do question some specific things about my existance that I do not have answers for, but the Bible which I whole-heartedly believe in states that there are many mysteries that we will not find the answers to until we are in heaven ourselves. We could rack our brains trying to figure out how God came about to be, where exactly Heaven is, if there other forms of life out there…etc, etc…but we probably will not get clear-cut answers to half of the things we question because of the limitations of dimensions that God made us aware of while we are “living” here on Earth. I suggest you read the Bible from front to back and then compare its facts against evolutionary theory. I haven’t met a single person who has done that and hasn’t eventually chosen the later to trust in. There are countless of prophecies in the Bible…I don’t even know where to begin…that have already been fulfilled - but one huge thing sets True Christianity apart from any other believe/religion…and that is Jesus. He is the only “prophet” who claimed that He WAS God and rose up from the dead proving that in fact. No other religion has the link to God the Father who is Jesus. Accepting Jesus as your Lord and savior is the only way to enter the kingdom of Heaven according to the Bible. I’ll put my heart and my soul on Jesus and the growing truths of Bible to live my life by rather than anything else that claims that there is another way to believe but doesn’t brush the surface of the truths of the one and only Bible (Old Testament & New).
I didn’t choose to be born so can’t choose to die
I haven’t read your post and am just posting my thoughts.
Its a simplistic statement (i can choose to die anytime!! but this choice comes after infanthood) and full of fallacies (What is I ? Choose? Born (aggregation of atoms,quarks or something more fundamental)? Die?).
Language is a wonderful invention but it pains me to put my thought into words
Correction ‘I haven’t read your “blog” ‘ and the latter part is obvious.
After skimming through your thoughts about “devaluation of body” i propose a thought experiment (not original). Start cutting off your body parts….. When do u expect to loose a ’sense’ of self ? I agree that your ’sense’ would significantly change without some of the inner constituents but the question is how far can one go?
The comment mentioning ‘Amoeba’ is worth pondering over but lets just leave that for the scientists to figure out!!!
I dont understand atheism ( i m not religious btw whatever that means!).
A random comment on this blog —
Christians are the real nonbelievers. Whereas to love life means to love mortality. Not to love death and pain and dying, but to love the fact that we are capable of dying. For mortality is the very thing that makes life so overwhelmingly valuable. As no God could ever be. As immortality could never make us. —Dwight Lyman
The gentleman( god! (:)) am i trying to project my civility) so easily slips in the words “love”,”value” (concepts created by or inherent to human????) which to me are confounding.
Anonymous…it sounds like you are very confused and really have no idea what Christianity is about. I suggest you read the Bible for some food for thought. Who knows…it might turn out to be the best thing you’ve ever read
I believe that the question, “Why are we alive?” can be answered but it will only be revealed to the one seeking diligently for the answer to that question. and the answer certainly will not be easily put into words.