Ultimate Purpose

I have an assign­ment that I give my col­lege stu­dents every so often — usu­ally when I teach Social The­ory or Ethics. It goes like this: Physi­cists have dis­cov­ered beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no God (not that they could actu­ally do that). Now, out­line how you would give the human race a rea­son to live, motives to be good, and a sense of hope.

The stu­dents meet in small groups and use all of the aca­d­e­mic tools avail­able, but they always come up with the same con­clu­sion: It can­not be done. It is impos­si­ble to instill a sig­nif­i­cant sense of pur­pose and a foun­da­tion for ethics or morals if there is not some sort of judg­ment after death.

Every­thing rests on there being an Ulti­mate pur­pose or Final Judg­ment to make every­thing in law or ethics stick. With­out Divine Law there is no law. Athe­is­tic attempts merely hide in the shadow of The­is­tic accom­plish­ments. Exis­ten­tial­ism is but a spin­off of the accom­plish­ments of valid religion.

It is really very sim­ple: If there is no God, there are no ulti­mate con­se­quences. All of the lofty lan­guage and high-brow phi­los­o­phy in the world can­not com­pen­sate for the solid belief in Divine Pur­pose. No God — no con­se­quences! Now see if you can keep the social struc­ture together.

Have you ever noticed how glum athe­ists are? They make a lot of noise and live in an almost con­stant sense of fear, depri­va­tion, and control-madness. Their “enlight­ened” views reduce them to fran­tic bar­bar­ians in three piece suits. Watch them sweat when they have to answer ques­tions about any­thing ultimate.

On the other hand, a whole lot of super­sti­tion has passed itself off as valid reli­gion. There is no defense for that. Rea­son and rev­e­la­tion have to go together. Rea­son alone merely plays the field of ideas. It needs Inspired Rev­e­la­tion to be com­plete. In the end, it is impos­si­ble to have ulti­mate pur­pose with­out the Ultimate.