Can an atheist have purpose?

In this entry I will offer a few thoughts in response to the second of Michael Brown’s 7 honest questions for atheists, which has to do with purpose. For my thoughts in response to Brown’s first question, see here. As with my previous entry, readers are invited to provide their own thoughts in response to Brown’s question.

In his article, Brown asks:

2. Would you say that even as an atheist, you still have a sense of purpose and destiny in your life, a feeling that you were put here for a reason and that you have a mission to accomplish? Or is it primarily people of faith who feel like this, since we are simply the products of an unguided, random evolutionary process?

Before anything, let’s do a little premise-checking here.

First, note how Brown packages “purpose” with “destiny.” This is to be expected given his mystical assumptions, and yet the two concepts are diametrically opposed to each other. Purpose in man’s life, as we will see below, is chosen, while “destiny” implies the determinism of a pre-ordained outcome from which one cannot escape. (Cf. this dictionary entry which defines ‘destiny’ as: “1. The inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person or thing is destined; one’s lot,” and “2. A predetermined course of events considered as something beyond human power or control.”) If an individual adopts the view that he is “destined” to serve some cause, then he implicitly forfeits any choice in the question of what purpose he will pursue in his life. This is the worldview of a lifelong slave.

Second, notice how Brown defines “a sense of purpose and destiny” as “a feeling that you were put here for a reason and that you have a mission to accomplish.” Brown apparently wants to know if atheists have feelings. This should be no mystery to any level-headed adult: both theists and atheists are human beings, and human beings generally are capable of experiencing a wide range of feelings. The fact that we do experience feelings is unavoidable. But feelings are not primaries, nor are they a means of determining one’s overall life goals. Moreover, feelings change quite rapidly and are not constants. That Brown equates purpose with “a feeling” suggests that whatever purpose the theist thinks he has is reducible to some subjective state with no actual connection to basic facts relevant to man’s life, facts which do not change such as the facts that man faces a fundamental alternative between life and death, that he requires values in order to live, that he must act in order to procure those values which he needs in order to live, that he needs a code of values by which he can determine what is a value to his life and what is not, etc. These do not change, but my feelings about things do.

My third objection, to the extent that Brown’s question is rationally meaningful, has to do with his use of word “still” here, as though having a purpose in life is the exclusive domain of religious devotion. The implication here seems to be that belief in supernatural beings is a necessary precondition for rightfully leading a purposeful life. But what could possibly justify such a view? My suspicion is that any case which theistic thinkers would present on behalf of such an assumption would ultimately hinge on the assumption that ‘purpose’ in the present context must at some level involve self-sacrifice. Many thinkers, religious as well as secular, have bought into the view that life can only have “meaning” or purpose if one lives it in the service of some “higher power,” and lacking belief in such a phenomenon denies the very basis of a life purpose. Hence, if a person does not “believe in the supernatural,” then on his view there is no supernatural being whose will he can serve and to whose ends he can sacrifice his life. Of course, this would not prevent one from sacrificing himself to mundane substitutes, like government bureaucracy, but religionists would likely dismiss such “noble virtue” for its location in the temporary rather than the supposedly eternal. Regardless, many secularists have adopted many of religion’s moral premises without realizing the commonality between their own views and that of the religious positions which they believe they have rejected.

In conjunction with the presumption of self-sacrifice as a necessary condition for human life to have a purpose is the tendency, suggested by Brown’s own question, to deny any “sense of purpose” from human beings if they “are simply products of an unguided, random evolutionary process.” On this view, only if human beings are products of supernatural whim can they have any legitimate claim to purpose. Even here, however, one only has to scratch the surface a little bit to find the presumed requirement for self-sacrifice underwriting the very conception of ‘purpose’ at work here. Brown does not deny that human beings are products of some antecedent cause; he only allows legitimacy if that cause is a form of extra-cosmic wishing. If human beings “are simply products of an unguided, random evolutionary process,” there’s no supernatural consciousness whose will is worthy of man’s self-sacrifice. If human beings are biological and are thus the products of biological processes, then having a purpose to living must be impossible. It is not clear how this conclusion follows, but it is widely accepted. And yet, here we are, biological organisms through and through.

A rational approach to purpose dispenses with these unfounded notions entirely and, by contrast, provides a moral basis for individual human beings to lead purposeful lives. One does not need to pretend that there is a supernatural being to whose wishes man must prostrate himself in order to conduct his life purposefully and thrive in ways which do not require him to suppress his own better judgments. Quite the contrary, attempting to sustain such a pretense will only undermine any legitimate purpose one may be attempting to achieve with his life.

Purpose is not “a feeling” or temporary emotional state, but a legitimate human need. To categorize purpose as “a feeling” invites the potential to confuse one’s own whims with actual life goals worthy of one’s commitment. The two are not the same. To equate purpose with “a feeling” or some nebulous “sense” in this way is to legitimize any fleeting impulse as though it were some mystically charged calling revealed from a supernatural realm. History is full of examples of where this can lead, some quite deadly.

Purpose is a concept that is indelibly linked to our nature as biological organisms. Teleological concepts have their basis in biology – this is the thesis of a book by Harry Binswanger; the title of his book is: The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, and I encourage readers to examine it for themselves. The case which Binswanger makes in this book is unassailable: we form concepts such as ‘goal’, ‘purpose’, ‘aim’, etc. on the basis of recognitions which apply only to biological organisms. We do not say that a rock has a purpose or a goal; a human being may have a purpose for using a rock, but the rock itself cannot pursue any purpose. To speak of an ultimate purpose, then, can only have reference to life as such, and the basis of identifying anything as an ultimate purpose has its roots in the fact that human beings are biological organisms.

In religion’s hands, concepts like ‘purpose’ are applied without reference to the biological facts which ultimately inform such concepts. Religion locates the basis these concepts in things which even on its own terms would not be biological. Christianity, for example, does not style its god as a biological organism; it is supposed to be non-physical, incorporeal, wholly other. But Christians routinely say that their god has a purpose, that it does things for a purpose, that it sets forth a purpose for human life, that it directs human history according to a purpose. These are all instances of the fallacy of the stolen concept in that they make use of a concept while ignoring or denying the metaphysical preconditions necessary for them to have any meaning in the first place.

The topic of purpose came up in Alvin Toffler’s interview of Ayn Rand for Playboy magazine back in the 1960s. What Rand states there is instructive:

Toffler: If a person organizes his life around a single, neatly defined purpose, isn’t he in danger of becoming extremely narrow in his horizons? 

Rand: Quite the contrary. A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value, which he will never find.

Of course, it depends on what purpose specifically an individual has chosen for his life; if the purpose one chooses for his life is so “neatly defined” that he is “in danger of becoming extremely narrow in his horizons,” isn’t that his choice? If, after having committed himself to “a single, neatly defined purpose,” an individual finds that his life is too restrictive to enjoy, he is at liberty to modify his choice. The possibility of making a poor choice in this regard is not evidence that choosing a purpose for one’s life is philosophically unjustifiable or that every choice will be similarly poor. Rand is not advocating that one live life as though it were a straitjacket. Rather, her point is that a rationally chosen central purpose unifies one’s efforts to live according to his own values, which are themselves hierarchically based on a central value, his life.

My choosing a purpose for myself does not mean that I have “a feeling that [I was] put here for a reason.” I understand the biological process which resulted in my birth and development as a human being; there’s nothing supernatural about any of that. Nor do I fantasize that my life is satisfying the expectations of some supernatural being, a being which I could only imagine and never actually perceive or engage in actual dialogue, a being – if it were real – could not in any way benefit from anything I could ever do. On the contrary, I recognize that to continue living requires some kind of incentive or set of incentives, and choosing which incentives to pursue is my prerogative alone. I do not outsource the responsibility of choosing a purpose for my life to mythical entities any more than I do to strangers. The purpose of my life is to live and enjoy it as the fruit of my own effort.

To draw out the contrasts between the worldview which Michael Brown represents and the path I follow, let me quote two famous characters from the history of mythology. On the one hand, we have Jesus, who according to Luke 9:23 he is to have said:

“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.”

On the other there is Mr. Spock:

“Live long and prosper.”

Here we have the difference between a sitcom and a science fiction drama. The one advocates strapping oneself to an instrument of execution while the other encourages one to flourish as only man can flourish. Socrates is said to have stated that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” No doubt some religious thinkers have co-opted this maxim in defense of their altruism (for example, see here). But notice how this is at odds with devotion to religion, which requires believers to be focused on sustaining belief in things they could not possibly know while ignoring the fact that they could not possibly know the things they are expected to accept as knowledge. Such practice is hardly a formula for self-reflection.

by Dawson Bethrick