The Purpose of the Universe
What is the purpose for the universe? It depends whose purpose you are talking about:
- For a dolphin, it is to provide clean water and live fish.
- For a human, it is to provide a clean, safe, home and the necessary resources for life.
- For an astronomer, it is to provide trillions of mysterious objects to look at.
- For some alien artificial intelligence, it is to provide iridium atoms so it can create more artificial life.
- For you personally, you get to make it up. If you ever think of a better purpose, you can change it.
Christians look at this question in a different way. They presume a god exists, and he created the universe for some personal purpose of his own. We are all obligated to work in alignment with it. The catch is, we have no idea what this purpose is.
Some Christians believe if you pray and meditate, god will give you a vision of your personal purpose, which he has assigned. You are then obligated to dedicate the rest of your life to this purpose.
Atheists say this god is imaginary and so are the hallucinatory experiences used to assign purposes. Atheists would far sooner assign purposes themselves rationally, and change them as necessary. Oddly, Christians find this freedom terrifying and utterly intolerable.
From the atheist point of view, the universe does not a have a built-in god-assigned purpose because it has no god. You get to choose it for yourself. Atheists live in the same universe as the Christians live in, just without the imaginary tyrant god. The universe has an abundance of genuine purposes, not just silly hallucinatory ones. Christians, when confronted by atheism, behave like children left home alone without abusive parents. They should be celebrating, but they cower in terror. Christian revulsion at a universe without pre-assigned purpose is the exact same thing as their fear of a universe without an abusive parental god.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)