Readings on the Big Question

There is one big question that everyone but the least curious will grapple with eventually:  What is the purpose of life?  Or, even more fundamentally, is there a purpose to life?  How and why did I come to exist, and how and why did this earth on which I stand, and the cosmos that surrounds it, come to exist?  Or is there a why?  Does any of it have any point?  Millions of words in thousands of books having been written on this subject, one might think that there is an infinite variety of opinions on the answer to these questions.  But in fact, getting right down to the bottom of everything you'll ever read on this issue, all of the answers ultimately seem to come down to only two camps.

In what we might call the materialist camp, there are those who say that everything that exists came into being as a result of pure natural coincidence and happenstance.  Each result has an undesigned and unintended natural prior cause, back through the evolution of a variety of species, the formation of the earth, and on back towards the great unprovoked beginning of all big banged things.  And, there being no purposer, there is no purpose.  If this is true, then, logically, certain other concepts must also be true.  There can be, for example, no objective morality, nothing which is, objectively, good or bad, moral or immoral, if the universe exists for no reason.  (When someone points this out to an atheist, they will often respond by missing the point.  Christopher Hitchens, before his death, could give quite a speech on how offensive it was to suggest that he had to believe in a supernatural deity to know right from wrong.  But this isn't the point.  There are probably many atheists who are good people just as there are probably many religious people who are evil.  The point is more fundamental: if there is no supernatural deity who created us for any greater purpose, if we just happen to exist, in the same way that a leaf may happen to fall in a forest, and with no greater cosmic significance, then there is, objectively speaking, no right and wrong.)  If, as Shakespeare has Macbeth say, life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, then, as Shakespeare has Hamlet say: there is no good or bad, but thinking makes it so.   We live in a world in which this fundamental and underlying belief system has become fairly pervasive, and it should therefore not surprise us that we increasingly live in a society which demands the right to determine for itself what is and is not moral.  If there is no higher moral authority to turn to, then it makes perfect sense for every society, and indeed each individual, to decide on their own what is and is not moral, what is and is not objectively true, the question ultimately being purely subjective.

In the other camp, what might be called the supernatural or divine purpose camp, there are those who believe that the earth on which we stand, the cosmos that surrounds it, and each of us who find ourselves upon this sphere were created, by a creator, for a purpose.  This point of view, likewise, leads to certain logical conclusions.  If there is a God, who created us for some divine purpose, then there must be such a thing as objective morality, and objective truth, and our lives must have some objective purpose.  Or, as Doctrine and Covenants 93:30 indicates: "All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence."  This worldview suggests that we have a duty to determine what is objectively true and moral and to act in accordance with those truths.  If someone claims to be a Prophet, with messages from God about true morality, or if some book claims to be the writings of such Prophets, including the revealed truths they have received, we have a duty to try to determine whether we believe and have faith that these claims are true, and, if so, to live, to the best of our ability, in accordance therewith.  If there is a God, communicating his objective truths to us through revelation to Prophets, and if those revelations promise that we can know the truth of that which is revealed through prayer and personal inspiration from supernatural divinity into our own hearts, we have a duty to put such claims to those tests which have allegedly been divinely provided.

I personally find the materialist view to be more difficult to believe in, and to require, in a certain sense, greater "faith" in unlikely ideas, than the spiritual view.  Reading about the big bang and the nature of time and space in a book like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, for example, makes my head spin in ways that a sermon on Heavenly Father's Plan of Happiness never does.  There is, for example, this great logical fallacy in the materialist view: that modern man has been able to glean the great truths of that view, via an instrument, the human brain, which has just happened to come into existence, but which may, therefore, be completely inadequate to the purpose, having not been "designed" to perform any such function (or, indeed, any function).  Alfred North Whitehead pointed this out, that we have no basis to believe in the reasoning of our brains unless we first presuppose that those brains are more powerful than we can explain through purely natural processes.  Ironically, if we believe our minds were given to us through divine providence, then it becomes easier to credit their ability to glean scientific truths through reason.  As C.S. Lewis put it, "One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific picture] . . . .  the whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts.  Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.  Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory--in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins.  Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.  Here is flat contradiction.  They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based." C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry", in The Weight of Glory And Other Addresses (Harper Collins e-books, 1949, Adobe Digital Edition May 2009) page 140.

Like Lewis, I hold to the spiritual, rather than the materialistic view of the cause and purpose of the world and my existence upon it.  I also feel that the prevalence of the materialistic view in the modern world is the root cause of almost every trend currently destroying civilization.

It should therefore not be surprising that I am a huge fan of C.S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man, and believe it is one of the best pieces of writing to come out of the 20th Century.  It is a book to be read, and re-read.  It is not only an argument against the deconstructionist views of Macbeth and Hamlet, but a warning and a prophecy against the world their materialist views would lead us to.  It appears, unfortunatley, to be working better as prophecy than warning. 

 

Among other great contributions to the argument for a spiritual explanation for our existence, The Abolition of Man points out the prevalance of an underlying "way" or "tao" or fundamental agreement about morality that seems to exist within all societies.  While there are plenty of arguments for why this morality has come to exist among us (in the materialistic view, it is said to have provided certain primitive societies with evolutionary survival advantages), none of them ring as true to me as simply this: we know that certain behavior is right and wrong, because certain behavior is objectively, right and wrong, and this knowledge has been placed within us, by design.

This is not however the main thesis of the Abolition of Man (or even one of its theses, though reading the book certainly brings up these kinds of thoughts).  Its main thesis has to do with the way in which a certain point of view, a reductionist materialistic point of view which teaches that there is no objective truth or beauty, or reason to be moved by a waterfall or a great piece of poetry, is destroying our souls.  I could explain more.  But it's a short book, and it should be read.