Meaning and Purpose: Thinkers
How do we find such meaning and purpose in life, then?
According to faith-based perspectives, the meaning and purpose of life is to be found only in God. An example of a prominent recent religious thinker is Karl Barth, one of the most important Protestant thinkers of modern times. In his The Epistle to the Romans , he calls modern people’s attention to God in Christ, where the true meaning and purpose of life must be found.
Another example is The Purpose Driven Life (2002), a popular book written by Rick Warren, a Christian mega church leader. Warren’s book epitomizes the traditional faith-based perspective on meaning and purpose in life. In his book, he argues that the most basic question everyone faces in life is “Why am I here” and “What is my purpose?” The answer that Warren provides is that “real meaning and significance comes from understanding and fulfilling God's purposes for putting us on earth.” The book describes five specific purposes that Warren claims God has for all of us: 1) We were planned for God's pleasure, and thus the first purpose is to offer real worship; 2) We were formed for God's family, and thus the second purpose is to engage in real Christian fellowship; 3) We were created to become like Christ, so the third purpose is to learn real discipleship; 4) We were shaped for serving God, so the fourth purpose is to practice real ministry; 5) We were made for a mission, so the fifth purpose is to live out real evangelism.
While Warren represents the mainstream faith-based view, some thinkers disagree with the notion that religion is the only way to find meaning and purpose in life. The prominent philosopher John Dewey argued for a pragmatic and naturalistic approach to evaluating life’s big questions, such as finding meaning and purpose. He called for empirical testing and validation of any abstract claims, grounding out such claims in how they would guide behavior, and then evaluating whether such conduct would be beneficial. In other words, Dewey’s approach to meaning and purpose would involve seeing how any framework of thinking about meaning and purpose actually guided human action, and then evaluating whether that action actually led to a richer and deeper sense of meaning and purpose (Dewey). Jean-Paul Sartre, in his 1957 Existentialism and Human Emotions, advances the notions of “existentialism,” the philosophical perspective that all meaning and purpose originates from the individual. The challenge for modern individuals, according to Sartre, is to face all the consequences of the discovery of the absence of God. He argues that people must learn to create for themselves meaning and purpose.
The well-known philosopher Paul Kurtz argued for a new approach that he calls eupraxsophy. He uses the term, which literally means “good practice and wisdom,” to describe a specifically secular and non-religious approach to life. In the tradition of Dewey, he argued for a pragmatic, naturalistic, and empirically validated approach to human values and big life questions, including meaning and purpose in life. Kurtz specifically emphasized the important role of placing humanity within its context of the natural world while also orienting toward hope and optimism about the future (Kurtz).
A more recent prominent thinker is Greg Epstein. In his 2010 Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, he advocates striving for dignity as a means of finding “meaning to life beyond God.” According to Epstein, “we are not wicked, debased, helpless creatures waiting for a heavenly king or queen to bless us with strength, wisdom, and love. We have the potential for strength, wisdom, and love inside ourselves. But by ourselves we are not enough. We need to reach out beyond ourselves – to the world that surrounds us and sustains us, and most especially to other people. This is dignity” (93).
Sam Harris, in his book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), states that “Separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is riven by dangerous religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit” (6).
Likewise, in his 2015 books Atheist Meditation Atheist Spirituality and Exploring Your Life: Mindfulness Meditation and Secular Spirituality, Mark W. Gura agrees with Harris that atheists and humanists can use meditation as a means to access secular forms of spirituality, to attain stress-release and self-actualization without beliefs, or faith in God(s), pseudoscience or the supernatural, but he goes a step further. Gura argues that secular meditation can also produce a psychological state of mind that is, in-and-of-itself, a source of meaning and purpose, if meditation is used as the source of contentment in one's life. Gura's point is that sources of meaning and purpose that are external to ourselves change, expire, and are likely to disappoint us, while secular forms of meditation can provide an internal equilibrium that is under our own control.
Are they correct? Can we have meaning and purpose, which fall within the sphere that Harris and Gura refer to as spirituality and Epstein terms dignity, without belonging to a religious community?
Set aside 5 to 10 minutes to complete the following
Take a few minutes to think about which of the perspectives described above speaks most strongly to your personal beliefs and worldview, and why. How does your particular worldview bear upon your sense of meaning and purpose in life?
Write down your thoughts and then proceed onward.