Thanks folks, that's a good start. I'll see if I can respond to some of your comments.
What I've observed is a clear distinction of those who are seeking God and others who are content with life and enjoy discussion. I am interested to know what you think about the purpose of life, why it might exist and what our role is when we each spend a time here then move on to Heaven.
Well, you can certainly count me among the latter. I'm very happy and content with my life. I feel as complete and as at peace as I could imagine, and I'm not seeking god or anything else to fill a role in my life that I feel is missing.
As for the purpose of life, I think that purpose always depends heavily on context. If you mean the purpose of life as a phenomenon on this planet, then I'm not sure that it necessarily has to have a purpose any more than rocks and trees should have to have a purpose. If I create a clip to hold a piece of paper on my fridge then that is its purpose, but it seems to me that that purpose is dependent on my perspective as the agent that intentionally created it for that purpose. Things that were not created intentionally do not necessarily have a purpose. Imagine I throw a rock into a pond and a little sphere of water subsequently appears in the splash. Does this accidental, transient blob necessarily have a purpose? Probably not, at least not in the sense I imagine you use the word purpose. Intelligent beings like us can see purpose due to context sometimes though. For example, a random lightning strike sparks a forest fire. We could say that the forest fire's purpose is that it has some role in the cycle of life in the forest, and the carbon cycle etc. But that purpose would be a purpose strictly within that context. Similarly, if you mean the purpose of a human life, I would give a similar answer. It doesn't seem to me that we necessarily have a innate purpose or role that were were intentionally placed here to fill, but we could certainly see purpose in the roles we come to fill. As I go through my life, I create values like being good to other people, and trying to contribute to society, and caring for the environment etc. I think these are like the purpose we might see in the forest fire. To me the most useful way of thinking about purpose is that purpose is something we create. Purpose is a product of intelligent cognition.
ALEXBP, I'll try to read some of what you have mentioned. Thanks for the suggestions.
Earth beneath your feet took power to come into being. The whole Universe did. This is indisputable! That's God.
Razeontherock, I certainly agree with you there, but I must admit that it doesn't seem like much of an explanation to me. It seems reasonable to assume that the universe was created by some process, but I don't feel like giving that something a name moves us any farther ahead than simply calling it "something". It's like explaining to a woman that the reason she became pregnant was that she concieved; it's not really an explanation at all, just a different word for the same thing. But I suspect that when people use the word god, they mean more than just a rebranding of a vague "something" that created the universe, or another name for the laws of physics or something.
How about you, what do you believe?
Well, that's a pretty general question. If you'd care to be more specific I'll gladly fill you in, but let me see if I can give you an overview. I believe that the universe came into existence around 13 to 14 billion years ago. I have no idea how it started existing, or what came before it. I'm quite comfortable not knowing that, as I don't really think it's something we can easily know, since we don't have acccess to evidence outside our universe. Because of this total lack of evidence, I tend to reject almost claim anyone has to knowing what created the universe. I think that life on earth began about 4.5 billion years ago and through the mechanism of natural selection evolved into the vast array of amazing creatures we find around us today. Of course, that includes us, some descendents of other primates, sharing a common ancestor with other modern apes. I think that our minds are patterns of electrochemical signals that are passed around between the neurons in our brains; essentially our minds are software that run on the hardware of our brains. I believe that things like meaning, purpose and values like good and bad are ideas that we humans create. I believe that when we die, the electrochemical pattern in our brains stops operating and so all the information contained within it is lost, but of course much of our influence, ideas, memes, etc. continues on in the world in the minds of other people. I often feel an incredible feeling of awe and wonder when I think about things like the vastness of space, the wonders of the natural world, the things that mankind has built, the incredible mechanisms and abilities of the human brain, the way life replicates itself, DNA, relativity, quantum mechanics: the incredible things that mankind has discovered by investigation, clever experiments and reasoning.
Well, that should be pretty fertile ground for discussion. I appreciate the comments I've recieved from everyone! Thanks again.
I'm not pickin' on ya Oi, you've posted some really nice stuff on this subject.
