What Is the Purpose of Life?

In the Christian tradition, baptism wipes away original sin and the Catholic practice is to baptize infants as soon as practical. Upon baptism, a infant is absolutely sinless and ready for heaven (and even absent baptism an infant is destined for what was once called limbo, not heaven but certainly better than hell).

Beyond that, things get complicated and dangerous.

Live after baptism is, essentially, a hell hazard entailing a series of moral risks. Errors in judgment are almost inevitable. Such moral errors can be forgiven but not only is there a risk of dying with unforgiven mortal sin but even those sins forgiven require atonement in purgatory.

The moment after baptism is the pinnacle of our mortal existence; after that, life is a downward spiral. At best, a saint will achieve something close to what he had in that moment. The rest of us do even worse.

So wouldn’t we be better off to die immediately after Baptism. Where is the upside of mortal life? What is the purpose of it

Goethe offers one possible answer:

Just as Goethe's Mephistopheles is no garden variety corrupter and collector of souls, so Goethe's God is no smiling savior of obedient spirits and pious do-gooders. Neither the Hebrew God, who demands subservience, nor the Christian God, who requires faith and love, Goethe's God values something else. He prizes action, striving, risk. "Man errs so long as he will strive," God tells Mephistopheles in the "Prologue in Heaven" that precedes the play. Human error or corruption or sin or whatever you want to name it is incidental. Error is the cost of striving, of action. And so Goethe's God readily forgives it. What counts is exertion, deeds, doing something rather than nothing.[1]

Is Goethe right? Is there something in mortal life worth the risk of eternal damnation?

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1. Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings of Life by James Sloan Allen

In The World, Not of It

I often ask atheists what is the worst contradiction in the Bible. A variety of answers are possible but they tend to fall into one of three broad categories:

1. internal contradictions (e.g. the order of creation in the two Genesis accounts or the moral codes of Leviticus vs. the New Testament),
2. contradicting modern science (e.g. Genesis vs. modern cosmology and biology), and
3. contradicting modern moral sentiment (e.g. the Bible vs. GLAAD).

(One can easily find many lists of Biblical contradictions.)

Before exploring this issue further it's worth noting, in passing that one thing atheists have in common with Christian Fundamentalists is the inclination to read the Bible literally. While there exist a variety of ways to read the Bible, listing contradictions rests entirely upon a literal reading. If, for example, you were to read the Bible as a compilation of literature from various authors over the span of centuries one would hardly be shocked to find them saying different, perhaps even contradicting each other. These would not be contradictions in the logical sense anymore than the collected works of biologists over a comparable period of time.

Of course, logical contradictions are impossible by definition. What we are dealing with are apparent contradictions. And the question, then, is how best to resolve such apparent contradictions. Atheists will insist that the best way to resolve them is to treat the Bible as a work of mythology just as we do those of the Greek, Roman, and other ancient and primitive cultures.

Still, there is something to this idea of contradiction that is worth exploring further. For my money, the most significant contradiction in the Bible is this:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. [John 3:16]

Vs.

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. [1 John 2:15-16]

One the one hand, John is telling us that God loved the world. And, on the other hand, John is telling us that we must not love the world for it is nothing but a den on iniquity.

This apparent contradiction is significant for several reasons. First, it is not Old Testament vs. New Testament or the Bible vs. modern knowledge. It is not one author vs. another author. In both cases, according to Tradition, this is the Apostle John.

But this contradiction is also significant because it touches on one of the main criticisms that atheism levels against Christianity: that it is so concerned with the next life that it ignore and denigrates this life. (Judaism offers a similar criticism.) God may love the world bet we are told to reject it. As John later says:

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. [John 15:19]

Before we dismiss this apparent contradiction as a matter of context, let us note that there is a definite tradition within Christianity of rejecting the world. It is best exemplified by the monastery but has its roots in pre-Christian Jewish society (and ancient society generally), the prophets in sack cloth, the Essenes, even Jesus' own wanderings in the desert.

(I will mention, in passing, that one way to interpret John is to regard the command to reject the world as limited to sin and those who practice sin, the generality of the verse notwithstanding.)

And perhaps the most extreme example of rejecting the world was Gnosticism which held the physical world to be fundamentally flawed, an error, something from which escape is to be sought. The radical dualism of Manichaeism borrowed from Zoroastrianism the idea that good and evil were coequal powers.

Although mainstream Christianity rejected these ideas as heresy, the idea that the world is inherently and unalterable corrupt has survived. Although nobody can literally remove themselves from the world except by suicide, it remains the case that those who distance themselves from it in one way or another are regarded as holier than those who adapt to it, much less those who love the world and indulge in and exploit the things in it.

'Worldly' and 'holy' are practically antonyms.

Ultimately this question of whether to love or reject the world is yet another manifestation of the problem of evil.

The Success and Failure of Modern Science

The invention of logic and deduction by the Greeks is generally regarded as a watershed in western civilization. Less appreciated is how it retarded the discovery of science. Although the Greeks, like the Indians and Chinese, had made many astounding scientific discoveries, they never made the leap to the scientific method.

Throughout the medieval period, scholars held Aristotle and Ptolemy in near reverence and logical deduction was almost the exclusive tool of intellectual inquiry culminating with the Scholastics. Although the components of the scientific method were in long development, they did not really come together until around the 16th century. Methodological science would have to wait more than a millennium. Then human discovery and knowledge practically exploded.

Science, in its essence, is a marriage of logic and empiricism. There was no science so long as the former held primacy over the later. It did not occur to medieval scholars to test their logical deductions against observations and adjust them accordingly. The success and adoration of logic retarded the discovery of science.

Today we see something similar in the success of science. Scientists are disproportionately atheist, either formally or functionally. And most atheists base their convictions on science.

The success of science has crowded out faith and religion.

But faith, properly understood, is an essential ingredient of life. Science, itself, relies on faith and atheists can rightly be said to have placed their faith in the progress of science. Belief in science and materialism is not scientific.

Because we live in an uncertain world in which we are presented with choices that cannot await certainty we must speculate about the unknown in order to make the best decision that we can. We rely on our senses and on the knowledge of others including those who came before us.

Unlike science, religion is a philosophy that openly deals with the great unknowns, the big questions of life. Religion speculates. But it does so in a formal, methodological manner. Typically, atheists fail to appreciate religion because they imagine it to be in competition with science offering alternative explanations of the world.

The problem is that when religion is denied formally it doesn't go away, it simply hides. Scientism, the blind faith in science, rests on an unacknowledged faith in knowability of universe. The refusal to acknowledge the speculative nature of scientism places it outside the realm of reason. It becomes just another superstition.

Refusing to acknowledge the role of religion is not just dishonest, it is intellectually stunting.

Who knows what great discoveries away the proper integration of science and religion.