A Sense Of Purpose

Christians often claim that atheists live in a meaningless universe and have no sense of purpose, because they have no afterlife to look forward to. I think they have it rather backwards - what purpose can a Christian have? It can't be to change heaven; heaven is perfect and in any case we have no knowledge of it to change it. It can't be to get other people into heaven; no just God would have another person fail to get to heaven because I didn't do something. And you're supposed to get into heaven yourself just by becoming Christian.

So what's a Christian's purpose? It's to make this world a better place to live, for whatever value of "better" they hold to. Nothing that an atheist can't share, in other words.

But there are other goals. Man faces a whole series of challenges in this blind, unfeeling universe. We must learn to live within the resources of this planet, before we turn it into a giant Easter Island. We must watch out for possible asteroid strikes. In a billion years or so, the earth will run out of the water that runs its cooling systems, and a runaway greenhouse will turn it into a boiling hell. Sometime later, the sun will expand and possibly swallow the remains - or if not, it will run out of fuel and leave a frozen rock. And the universe itself will run out of hydrogen for stars, and heat, and the hadrons that we are made of will decay, and even the black holes will evaporate, leaving an unimaginably cold, empty wasteland.

All of these things are hard problems. Most of them, religious people will tell you not to worry about; God will take care of it. The problem of keeping a stable population is one that many religions actively interfere with, either by telling people it's God's will that they have lots of children, or by banning any contraceptives that might actually work.

Some of them may not be solvable. Population stability is, if we care enough; asteroid strikes will be if we retain a technological civilization with enough spare resources to watch for them; running out of water is physically solvable but hard work. Moving to another star is extremely hard.

Surviving the heat death of the universe may be impossible. Today's physics says it is. It won't be solved in my lifetime; all we can do is make sure that humanity's children carry on a well-educated culture that has the capacity to look for solutions, instead of scrabbling in the dirt for survival. If it can't be done, I want our descendents to be able to say "we have looked everywhere". I want them to go not gently, with their eyes open; I don't want our last representatives to be huddled in caves praying for the sun-god to relent and stop baking them.

There may be other problems once that's solved; and that's what this universe is like, but that is also what we are like. You can tell how much hand-waving there is in here by the way I described keeping the planet habitable as solvable and moved on to harder problems.

This is a goal that an atheist can have. It's a real goal; it may or may not be possible, and the stakes are unmatched - the difference it will make in future is the very survival of our descendants.

Why do I care? Either way, I'll be dead. Well, I care because I'm human. Because that's the kind of creature that evolution produces - one that uses its faculties to project the survival of its kind. Those that don't care... die out. A Christian may tell me that I believe it's just chemicals interacting, and at an intellectual level I can see that, but it doesn't change who I am, just as sugar doesn't taste any less sweet when I understand the action of taste buds and the neural path connections.

I bet that Christians will share my purpose, too; as these problems become more immediate most will decide that God wants them solved by humans. Some nuts will decide that destruction is the will of God, and I wish our descendants luck with that. Planting the seeds of doubt - suggesting that God will leave us to our own devices - is all I can do to help.