One of the great questions of today among many people, particularly the young, is "What's the point?" I remember that when I taught in school, every year someone would ask me what the point of mathematics is.
Sometimes I provided an answer along the lines of showing how Mathematics gives us a clearer picture when solving certain problems.
For example we have this famous riddle.
Three people check into a hotel room. The clerk says the bill is £300, so each guest pays £100. Later the clerk realises the bill should only be £250. To rectify this, he gives the bellboy £50 to return to the guests. On the way to the room, the bellboy realises that he cannot divide the money equally. As the guests didn't know the total of the revised bill, the bellboy decides to give each guest £16 and keep £2 as a tip for himself. Each guest got £16 back, so now each guest only paid £84, bringing the total paid to £252. The bellboy has £2. And £252 + £2 = £254 so, if the guests originally handed over £300, what happened to the remaining £46?
Clearly, mathematics has a part to play in answering this question which I leave as an exercise in the informal fallacy to the reader (though, if pressed, I might put the solution in the comments).
I have been known to answer this question by saying that the exercises of mathematics are just that, exercises to strengthen the brain's capacity for rational thinking in the same way that a foot ball player learns ballet to strengthen muscles and to develop greater control over his/her body.
I have also answered the question, citing a luminary whose name escapes me, along the lines of "what's the point of a newborn baby?"
Indeed. What is the point of a newborn baby? What is the point of us?
This is a problem that philosophers have wrestled with over the years. Christianity does have a succinct answer in that the purpose to which we have been created is to love the One who Created us. Of course, this does open up a raft of further problems, like the Problem of Evil and the like. What Christianity does is, more or less, what mathematicians often find themselves doing. We show that a solution to a problem exists, but not what that solution is explicitly. Indeed, there are times that we simply cannot write the solution explicitly.
For example, we can easily show the existence of the number π just by drawing a circle of diameter 1' and then knowing that the circumference must be π' long. What we can't do is write down the exact value of π because it is an infinitely long, non-recurring decimal as shown as late as the 19th Century by Ferdinand von Lindemann. A solution exists, but we can't write it down.
The syllogisms (well, not quite syllogisms - Aristotle would be horrified!) that Christianity makes are
A1) If there God exists then He loves us.
A2) God exists
Therefore
A3) He loves us.
B1) To love someone means taking a personal interest in what they do.
B2=A3) God loves us.
B2=A3) God loves us.
Therefore
B3) God takes a personal interest in what we do.
C1) To take a personal interest in what someone does gives that action meaning.
C2=B3) God takes a personal interest in what we do.
C3) Our actions have meaning.
The argument is logically sound, but we do need to establish that the premises A1, A2, B1 and C1 are actually true, and this is where the theist and atheist can spend their time arguing. Nonetheless, if Christianity is correct, then it is God who give meaning to our lives and, since God creates us from Eternity, that meaning that He gives us is always there in His intention to create us.
Now, let's look at the situation without God. Ultimately, if we believe that what we do matters, then we have to be prepared to say why. We can look at the scientific fact that, in a few million years, nothing will remain of the human race whatsoever. A few thousand million years later, if the current model is correct, everything will be dust floating around in dark, empty space. Thus, there can be no long-term meaning of life in the Universe without an Eternal Being to give it and Eternal meaning.
To combat this, any belief that our life has a meaning must accept that the meaning is short-term. We have to accept that eventually all memory of us will perish, and we have to be comfortable with that. It does put saint and sinner on an equal playing field as all acts whether morally good or morally bad will fade away eventually. Adolph Hitler and Mother Theresa of Calcutta will be no different. The morality we have now is ultimately no different from any other morality. An act condemned in 1054AD may now be acceptable in 2132AD, so we cannot say that this act is absolutely moral or immoral. Thus, in a Godless universe, moral relativism is more or less the only alternative. There is no point in holding onto any single moral tenet because it won't make a hill of beans difference when reality consists of isolated neutrons drifting through an endlessly expanding cosmos.
There is much to this approach that I find troubling. First, it has to be said that human beings seem innately preoccupied with discovering meaning. Science keeps asking "why?" and "how does that work?" Mathematicians wrestle with solving Diophantine Equations and seemingly intractible problems such as Goldbach's conjecture. We look at the stars and try to understand. We look at each other and, by and large, see something unfathomable in each other. We fall in love, and that gives us some reason to keep going. We suffer and die for causes that seem bigger than us. If we do all this to try and give life a purpose, why on earth do we do so if there is no actual purpose?
The Existentialists decry any attempt to find meaning in life, and where does that get them? They still cannot answer the question why, if there is no meaning of life, one should not commit suicide? We certainly can imagine Sisyphus happy rolling his boulder uphill only for it to roll down again but why should we let his example dictate our own view of things? Why not laugh at the absurdity of life and toast it with cyanide? If life is pointless, why do we have a medical profession? If they can't stop death, why not euthanise everyone who ails? In a meaningless universe, Doctors and Nurses are the worst charlatans of them all - tyrants who will force us to go on living until we fall apart finally into our own nothingness.
But I don't believe this for a minute. I believe in my heart of hearts that each human being has an intrinsic worth no matter who they are. It's one reason why I am pro-Life even if that renders me impossible moral dilemmas. I would rather agonise over the situation where the baby is endangering the life of a mother than for neither of them to matter at all. I would rather weep bitter tears with the woman who has been raped than to say coldly that her ordeal is nothing and will be over soon anyway, because that is what the universe will say. Where does this worth, this dignity come from? Looking at humanity and its capacity for self-delusion, self-obsession and self-destruction, I simply cannot see this humanity as being the source of its own worth and dignity. Nor can I see a dispassionate universe giving us this dignity. There can only be one source and that is God Himself.
Until the Atheist can crush out from my understanding the intrinsic worth of every single human being whoever lived, I refuse not to believe in God, I refuse not to believe in His love, and I refuse not to believe in His expression of this worth He gives us as He writhes in pain upon the Cross.
I matter (even though it is difficult to believe sometimes) and you matter (I take that as a given) and the fact that you matter matters. Indeed the whole matter of matter matters to me, too. Convoluted, maybe, but the more we believe that nothing we do ultimately matters the more likely humanity will suffer loss of life on scales unprecedented as we have already seen in the 20th Century, and it will occur as something perfectly acceptable to the morality of the Day while all the other Days will look aghast and turn aside in shame.
C2=B3) God takes a personal interest in what we do.
C3) Our actions have meaning.
The argument is logically sound, but we do need to establish that the premises A1, A2, B1 and C1 are actually true, and this is where the theist and atheist can spend their time arguing. Nonetheless, if Christianity is correct, then it is God who give meaning to our lives and, since God creates us from Eternity, that meaning that He gives us is always there in His intention to create us.
Now, let's look at the situation without God. Ultimately, if we believe that what we do matters, then we have to be prepared to say why. We can look at the scientific fact that, in a few million years, nothing will remain of the human race whatsoever. A few thousand million years later, if the current model is correct, everything will be dust floating around in dark, empty space. Thus, there can be no long-term meaning of life in the Universe without an Eternal Being to give it and Eternal meaning.
To combat this, any belief that our life has a meaning must accept that the meaning is short-term. We have to accept that eventually all memory of us will perish, and we have to be comfortable with that. It does put saint and sinner on an equal playing field as all acts whether morally good or morally bad will fade away eventually. Adolph Hitler and Mother Theresa of Calcutta will be no different. The morality we have now is ultimately no different from any other morality. An act condemned in 1054AD may now be acceptable in 2132AD, so we cannot say that this act is absolutely moral or immoral. Thus, in a Godless universe, moral relativism is more or less the only alternative. There is no point in holding onto any single moral tenet because it won't make a hill of beans difference when reality consists of isolated neutrons drifting through an endlessly expanding cosmos.
There is much to this approach that I find troubling. First, it has to be said that human beings seem innately preoccupied with discovering meaning. Science keeps asking "why?" and "how does that work?" Mathematicians wrestle with solving Diophantine Equations and seemingly intractible problems such as Goldbach's conjecture. We look at the stars and try to understand. We look at each other and, by and large, see something unfathomable in each other. We fall in love, and that gives us some reason to keep going. We suffer and die for causes that seem bigger than us. If we do all this to try and give life a purpose, why on earth do we do so if there is no actual purpose?
The Existentialists decry any attempt to find meaning in life, and where does that get them? They still cannot answer the question why, if there is no meaning of life, one should not commit suicide? We certainly can imagine Sisyphus happy rolling his boulder uphill only for it to roll down again but why should we let his example dictate our own view of things? Why not laugh at the absurdity of life and toast it with cyanide? If life is pointless, why do we have a medical profession? If they can't stop death, why not euthanise everyone who ails? In a meaningless universe, Doctors and Nurses are the worst charlatans of them all - tyrants who will force us to go on living until we fall apart finally into our own nothingness.
But I don't believe this for a minute. I believe in my heart of hearts that each human being has an intrinsic worth no matter who they are. It's one reason why I am pro-Life even if that renders me impossible moral dilemmas. I would rather agonise over the situation where the baby is endangering the life of a mother than for neither of them to matter at all. I would rather weep bitter tears with the woman who has been raped than to say coldly that her ordeal is nothing and will be over soon anyway, because that is what the universe will say. Where does this worth, this dignity come from? Looking at humanity and its capacity for self-delusion, self-obsession and self-destruction, I simply cannot see this humanity as being the source of its own worth and dignity. Nor can I see a dispassionate universe giving us this dignity. There can only be one source and that is God Himself.
Until the Atheist can crush out from my understanding the intrinsic worth of every single human being whoever lived, I refuse not to believe in God, I refuse not to believe in His love, and I refuse not to believe in His expression of this worth He gives us as He writhes in pain upon the Cross.
I matter (even though it is difficult to believe sometimes) and you matter (I take that as a given) and the fact that you matter matters. Indeed the whole matter of matter matters to me, too. Convoluted, maybe, but the more we believe that nothing we do ultimately matters the more likely humanity will suffer loss of life on scales unprecedented as we have already seen in the 20th Century, and it will occur as something perfectly acceptable to the morality of the Day while all the other Days will look aghast and turn aside in shame.
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