Argument from Purpose and Contingency

Argument from Purpose and Contingency

I have many friends who have read my take over the Argument from Purpose and have disagreed with my view which I expressed (though most scholarly atheists do not) that without God there can be no purpose to life. The following essay is me laying out that claim in a much more technical way by essentially viewing the differences between necessity and contingency in the hopes that it makes this claim easier to understand. As I mentioned in my previous writing over the Argument from Purpose, this will not prove that God exists but simply prove that He must exist for purpose to.

"Why is there something rather than nothing?"

That's Leibniz' Argument from Contingency.

Contingency: the absence of necessity; the fact of being so without having to be so.

This argument is used to explain that this whole universe is contingent, meaning that it is not logically necessary that this universe be here. The universe very well could have never come about. It's contingent, and therefore everything in it must then be contingent as well. If the universe is not logically necessary then the things that compose the universe (i.e. every material thing) must not be logically necessary as well. For if something in the universe is necessary, then the universe itself must be necessary since this thing is dependent upon the universe for it's existence (since it is composed of the material found in the universe). If the universe or anything in it is necessary then the universe as a whole is necessary and furthermore the entire structure of the universe is necessary. If you are to claim that the universe must exist, then you must also defend that the universe must exist the way that we see it and couldn't possibly exist any other way. For if it could exist any other way then the universe is contingent because changing it's structure or it's anatomy is changing it. If my body was composed of atoms with the atomic number 1 then it wouldn't be my body, but hydrogen; it would be something else entirely. Therefore if the universe could exist any other way it would fail to be the universe and must then not be logically necessary.

Now all of that is essentially to say that everything in this world, including ourselves, is contingent. My argument that I'm making today is that purpose can not stem from contingency. Purpose must be rooted in something that is logically necessary. If you say your purpose is to help others but others could very well have never existed at all then your purpose can not come from them. If you say your purpose is to play poker but the game of poker could have never been invented then your purpose could not come from playing poker. If you say your purpose is to be happy but the feeling of happiness or you yourself for that matter could have never existed then that feeling can't bring you purpose nor can you bring yourself purpose. The idea that we can make our own purpose when humanity in and of itself has no purpose is the equivalent of saying a corpse can give itself life.

So, purpose can only come from something that is logically necessary. Purpose can come from anything in this universe if and only if this universe is logically necessary. Otherwise purpose must come from something that is non material (for all matter composes the universe) or else purpose must not exist at all. Furthermore, if you are to claim that some nonphysical entity is necessary then it must also be the origin of all material entities. If there is a necessary thing then all contingent things spur from it. So do we have anything or know of anything that is nonphysical and necessary? The answer would be God, because that is the very definition of God; God is a immaterial, necessary being. It then concludes that purpose can only come from God or else there must be no purpose.

Again this doesn't prove that God exists, but it does prove that He must if your life is to have any bit of purpose, meaning, or significance to it at all. It should, at the very least, prove that the (possible) existence of God is nothing to brush off lightly and must be carefully scrutinized by each and every one of us.