Does the World need a Purpose?

We live in not only a planet, but a world – that is, not in a place of only physical meaning and substance, but with mental and spiritual meaning and substance as well. When I discussed this, I pointed out very something very particular about mental and spiritual meaning: they can only be perceived by one who has a mind and a spirit, respectively. Now I will take it a step further; they can only be brought about by mental and spiritual agents, by thinkers and choosers.

Order and Intention

Orders, patterns, representations, all require conscious acts; they cannot come about by accident. If they did, they would no longer be order; they would only be the sham shell of order. It is one thing to say that the cloud in the sky looks like a puppy; it is quite another to say that the cloud is an actual picture of a puppy.  A pattern that is not designed is not a pattern; it is just a random ordering of events.

Now, it may be highly unlikely that this sequence of events should, by chance, conform to what we, as those with minds, normally recognize as a pattern. This could lead into the intelligent design argument, but it is not my point, and I will leave it aside in this hyperlink if you wish to look further into it. We are not now talking about the physical side of things; we are talking about their mental, and particularly their spiritual, aspects.

A Cabin in the Woods

Imagine a grassy little clearing in a forest. A raging thunderstorm might, through some extraordinary circumstance, manage to split a few trees so that they fall into the perfect shape of a log cabin. My point is not that this is highly improbable; my point is that this is not a house. It is only a random assortment of logs that happens to look like a house. Still less is it a home.

Now suppose a builder comes along and, having nothing better to do, finds some logs and builds a wood cabin, which he takes a picture of and goes on his way. This is a house; it has mental substance as a house, because a man with a mind made it into one. But it is still not enough.

Now suppose there comes a homesteader, a man building not only a cabin, but a life, someone who will pour sweat and blood into his little log cabin, intent on filling it with the warmth and comfort of home. Only this particular arrangement of logs is able to partake of that distinct spiritual concept we call “home,” although when newly-built, it may be indistinguishable from the others.

Intention and Person

Do you see what I mean? As I’ve said before, something can be intricate and complex and still meaningless. Unless someone with a mind and a spirit made this planet, it is nothing more than a random collection of matter and energy and empty space; it is not a world, any more than a collection of words is a story. Without personality to ground it, it is all vain nothingness.

But the personality in which something is grounded must, of course, come above and before the thing itself. The homesteader must come above and before the log cabin; the composer must come above and before the symphony. If a man happens along the storm’s random piling of logs and says “aha! This must be a cabin!” he is wrong, just like the nearly-deaf great-uncle who thinks the orchestra tuning up is a symphony or the child who thought there really was a puppy-dog painted in the sky. Imagined order is not the same as intended order.

I do not have space here to elaborate on what I think this means for the world, though I suspect many of you will guess my thoughts on the matter. My point for now is this: Richard Dawkins, and those like him, seem to think it a great victory, a stroke of genius, to invent complexity without person. But if they are right and this (highly improbable) order came about randomly, their victory rings hollow. They have only succeeded in giving us the same planet we always had, only emptied of meaning and purpose.

I do not argue that the world must have a creator to have complexity. But it must have a creator to have purpose. And complexity without purpose is worthless; all of the supposed progress of the world becomes “meaningless, a chasing after wind.”

“Sunset Planet” by Hauke Musicaloris is licensed under CC BY 2.0