Alternatives to Find Meaning

TUESDAY

Our topic for this week that I introduced yesterday is meaning. “What is the purpose of life?” we often hear. Growing up I watched a number of “man on the street” interviews where someone with a microphone and camera crew would ask random people on the street a deep question like this. I thought it was a little unfair to spring that deep of a question on someone on their way to work. Nevertheless it usually revealed the person’s lack of interest in this question or their rather strange answers. After watching so many of those I thought when I became a pastor people would be asking me this question all the time. To my surprise, I’m still waiting for one person to ask me this question directly.

As we’ve been doing in this campaign, to see the irresistible nature of the gospel we must also consider the alternatives. We cannot simply reject the biblical teaching on meaning without filling that void with something. Even if that something is “nothing.”

1. Nihilism

This is essentially the belief that there is no objective ground for truth and moral truth. Traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and existence is senseless and useless. (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 11th ed.) In 1942 Albert Camus wrote an essay titled The Myth of Sisyphus in which he argued that humans should accept the absurdity and meaninglessness of life and rebel by finding joy in rolling the boulder up the hill. How one is to do that, I don’t know. This belief says that there is no meaning and we need to accept that in order to live a good life.

2. Self-Determined

This grounding for purpose proposes that an individual look inside themselves and find what gives them meaning. The goal is to know oneself and out of that knowledge be true to oneself and live out one’s desired, self-determined purpose.

The most common purpose is happiness. Whatever makes you the most happy carries the most purpose. This leads to various forms of Hedonism as we’ve already talked about in our moral law topic. In their wonderful podcast called This Cultural Moment John Mark Comer and Mark Sayers describe how the secular Western world has rooted our purpose in happiness. In this perspective, we have become the worst civilization in the history of the world to deal with suffering. At best suffering is a temporary pause to our purpose. At worst it destroys our purpose. Ironically our culture is learning the hard way that the pursuit of happiness doesn’t actually lead to happiness because happiness is not comprehensive enough to house our true purpose.

Another common grounding for happiness, in this framework, is the family. People often find that they are willing to sacrifice for their family and therefore their family provides the most meaning in life. Going a step deeper, this framework will sometimes say that the purpose of life is love. Love is loosely defined and although a part of our true purpose in Christ (which we will see later this week) still stops a step too short. But it’s on the right track at least.

Another self-determined grounding for purpose is in achievements of some sort. You’ll often hear phrases like “change the world” in conversations around meaning and purpose. This has driven people to make great advancements in technology, medicine, education, politics, etc. Again, as we will see later, this is part of our purpose and is on the right track but stops well short of our true purpose.

3. Genetic Reproduction

This last basis for meaning comes from Naturalistic Darwinian Evolution. Darwinian Evolution suggests that the purpose of living organisms is to pass their genetic code on to the next generation. So this view coupled with a naturalistic view of the world (that there is nothing supernatural that exists) would lead to the conclusion that this is the ultimate purpose of humanity. The most altruistic end of this thinking leads one to monogamy and strong family values since these have proven to be the most effective ways to raise children and therefore pass on one’s genetic code to the next generation. A more disturbing but justifiable (according to this view) approach is to simply pass your genetic code on to as many people as possible in the time you have. In college Savanna and I took Abnormal Psychology class together. In the course the professor showed us a documentary of a narcissist named Jason who took this purpose literally and had many children with lots of different women. He didn’t even know many of them. His reasoning for this was to pass on his genetic code as widely as possible because he viewed his genetics to be superior to everyone else’s.

So we see that grounding our purpose in anyone or anything other than God leads to tragic circumstances, as we are then missing the abundant life God offers his people.

Reflection

How have you seen these alternatives to purpose in your own life or in the lives of others?

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