Tag: purpose

What we need

What do humans need to find fulfilment?

The basics are food and drink, shelter and warmth and caring companionship. 

Beyond that, however, there are existential needs that must be met. There are at least three: our minds need understanding; our hearts need love; and our wills need purpose. That summarises the needs of our personal nature, whose three components are our intellect, emotion, and will. To that we may add our conscience which has complex needs of its own as we shall see.

Let’s begin with our minds: we need understanding of the basics of our human existence, and if we are misled, if we think something is true when it is wrong, we are in trouble. So we need education, and that education needs to be correct. This is already a serious difficulty, since fake news and unsound philosophies seem to be everywhere; even our own personal ideas are not necessarily wise and true. It would be great if we had an all-wise teacher to guide us.

Then our hearts need to feel loved. Some are blessed with loving parents or partners; but many are those who suffer from neglect, rejection, even hatred from those who ought to give them loving care. A lot of psychological pain is due to lack of love, and it is not at all easy to find the love that we all need. It would be great if there was someone who always really loved us. 

Thirdly, we need to have something to do which will give us stimulation and satisfaction – some purpose to which we can give ourselves and spend our energies. Boredom is a killer; it brings its own lot of psychological hang-ups. We need to know that what we do is not only something we like, but something of value. Our talents vary, but something worth living for is what our soul really needs. All the better if it fits into some overarching great purpose. It would be great if we knew what that purpose was.

Faced with imperfect solutions to our deep personal needs, we suffer – some more than others. If we fall short in any of these areas, or if we fail in some way, our conscience multiplies feelings of shame or guilt which compound our psychological disarray. Is there a way forward? 

Do we have to yield to the despair of a meaningless and frustrating existence? Is this what God has made us for? Isn’t there anything better? Could God provide what our soul needs and longs for?

What did Jesus say? “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14.6); “I have come that people may have life abundant”. “The one who believes in me”, he says, will as it were experience “streams of living water” flowing through him (John 7.37-38). Let’s consider this.

Our understanding needs essential truth: truth about who we are, where we come from, why we are here and where we are going. Our Creator God alone can give us that essential truth, and it comes through the One who said, “I am the truth”! God renders us this extraordinary and vital service! We do well to study Jesus’ teaching and commit to following him.

He is not only “the truth”, but he is “the way” to God: he leads us to know God, coming into relationship with him, discovering his purpose for us. Our Creator’s purpose essentially comes down to knowing that he loves us and forgives all our sins and failures; he will help us to live what is true “abundant life” (John 10.10).

The next blog post will develop that.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Atheism’s hollow response

Following on from the eight areas where Genesis 1.26-28 lays a positive basis for understanding various aspects of our human situation, it is interesting to see how the scientific materialist worldview compares. While it seems that the biblical worldview corresponds very well with our aspiration for human flourishing, what can be the result of taking an atheistic position as our starting point? Let’s take up the same eight points again.

  1. Does atheistic materialism honour our human capacity for rationality? C.S. Lewis saw with his clear rational thinking that you cannot value human reason on the basis of materialistic evolution. “Something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason”, he wrote. “When you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason, you must cry ‘Halt!’, for if you don’t, all thought is discredited.” Rational thought cannot come from mindless, material, godless evolution.
  2. The question of man’s meaning has no answer if the haphazard evolutionary process is all that brought us into being. If we are here by the fortuitous activity of various chemicals, there can be no ultimate meaning for our existence.
  3. Our human value is also reduced to nothing if we are merely a conglomerate of various chemicals. C.E.M. Joad famously listed the chemicals composing our bodies and worked out the modest value of the phosphorus, potash, lime, magnesium, fat, iron, sugar and sulphur! Jesus taught that our value comes from our soul, though our bodies are also valued in Christian thought.
  4. If there is no divine mind behind the creation of humans, there can be no purpose to our existence. We are people who formulate purposes for our daily activity; how could such purposeful persons come forth from purposeless primeval slime? Forming a purpose is the activity of a person. If there is no personal creator, there is no purpose to our existence.
  5. The question of sexual mores, in the absence of revealed Divine wisdom, easily becomes a simple question of personal choice. There may be social pressures ordering our sexual decisions, but ultimately there is no reason why hedonism would not prevail, bringing with it its lot of sexually transmitted diseases and undecipherable feelings of guilt. Louise Perry brings wisdom to this question in her book, “The Case against the Sexual Revolution”.
  6. Our moral judgments can also have no absolute grounding if there is no Creator God. Again C.S. Lewis has some wisdom to share: “If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and we shall) we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of Nature.” Moral judgment “can only be valid,” he affirms, “if it is an off-shoot of some absolute moral wisdom…which…is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature”.
  7. What place to give to God? The atheist, by definition, has no place for God. We are left to our own devices (or vices). All religion is then groundless nonsense. 
  8. What of the essence of religion, if it is not to be in relationship with God? In a godless universe, religious practice is a waste of time and effort, even if 90% of humans practice some kind of religion.

Let me pose two questions as I close. Which of the two worldviews appears the most fulfilling, the most fitting to our human reality? There is a choice to make here.

Then why do people choose atheism? The answer to that question is both simple and vital. “God is light”, says the Bible. Light symbolises truth and holiness. Human people, suffering the effects of man’s fall into sin, do not want to approach a holy God who may well be their judge. They don’t want to be bothered with commandments that limit their freedom to act according to their sinful propensities. Hence the real reason, though admittedly unconscious, why atheists reject God, is that they prefer to go their selfish way without being bothered by the divine requirements. Jesus – who said, “I am the light of the world” – unmasks their hidden motivation: “Light has come into the world,” he said, “and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3.19-20).

Clive Every-Clayton

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Am I a good person?

What is a good person? How to define what goodness is for a human being? In his ground-breaking, thoroughly reasoned, brilliantly insightful book “After Virtue”, Alasdair MacIntyre clarifies the question with luminous simplicity. Taking as examples how we would assess whether a watch is a good watch or a farmer is a good farmer, he says “we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are typically expected to serve.” A knife or a pen is similarly “good” if they fit the purpose for which they were conceived.

Reflecting on this, I realised that Jesus had taught this principle when he referred to salt. “Salt is good” is one of his words, (Luke 14.34). Its purpose is clearly to provide flavour to food. In the Sermon on the Mount, however, he adds, “but if salt has lost its taste… it is no longer good”; it can’t fulfil its purpose (Matthew 5.13).

Why is our generation so confused about goodness and morality? Why do ethical debates, instead of helpfully defining goodness, end rather in a good mess? Alasdair MacIntyre puts his finger on the deep reason: what’s missing is an understanding of man’s purpose (telos is the word he uses). If a thing is considered good because it fulfils its objective or purpose, the key question is what is the purpose of human beings? If there is no clear answer to that question, it is impossible to judge whether a person is good.

Now if everything in the universe, including our human species, resulted from a powerful explosion without any guiding intelligence and wisdom to provide the purpose of it all, there can be nothing but confusion both as to our meaning and purpose. And lacking understanding of our purpose, there is no means of assessing the goodness or badness of people.

So the secular West’s evacuating the Biblical wisdom of the divine Creator who had in mind a purpose for his creation, and specifically for human beings made “in his image”, is the real cause of our profound confusion. If we do not know what a person if “for”, we cannot say whether or not he is good in accomplishing that purpose. 

So both the meaning and purpose of our human existence, and the criteria of good and bad, depend on knowing why we exist – what is our telos. Back in the 17th century, some serious biblical scholars, reflecting on the essence of Christian truth, posed in the Westminster Shorter Catechism the question, “What is the chief end (telos) of man?” They furnished Christianity with the most brilliant summary answer, unsurpassed in four centuries: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever”. Vital wisdom in 14 words!

The same essential answer was expressed by Stephen Meyer, erudite scientist, biblical Christian, and author of “The Return of the God Hypothesis”. Interviewed by Piers Morgan and asked point blank: “What is the meaning of life?” he responded wonderfully: “To come into a relationship with the Creator”. If that is the purpose of our existence, and we are not in harmonious relationship with God, we are not truly “good”, for we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. Today the Creator calls us out of that problematic situation: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened”, says Jesus, “and I will give you rest… learn from me” (Matthew 11.28). We will find that rest, through Jesus, as we commit to fulfilling His purpose for our lives.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Three human needs

Humans have numerous needs – physical, social, emotional… and I want to highlight three.

First we desire, and need, some kind of purpose or aim in life. We are so constituted that we are purposeful: all the time we envisage what we want to accomplish and set out to achieve it. To have no aim in life is the gateway to despair. Now it is odd that on atheistic assumptions, where the universe is supposedly just the result of chance and therefore purposeless, that it should have given birth to persons whose very fibre is to seek to fulfil their purposes. We must be clear: if there is no God, there is no purpose to anything. The fact that we do live by purposes, however, fits in well with the biblical vision that we are made in the likeness of a Creator who has a purpose for us, his creatures.

Secondly, human beings, from the cradle to the grave, need love. A purely materialist origin of the universe and mankind cannot account for this personal need we all have. But if “God is love” (1 John 4.8) one can easily see that persons made in his image are capable of loving and are in need of love. “God loved the world”, Jesus tells us (John, 3.16): he loves us all. Here our need for love can be uniquely satisfied. If we are loved by God, we must love him in return – and this is the most important commandment of Scripture, according to Jesus. Blaise Pascal wrote: “The sign of the true religion must be that it obliges men to love God… No other religion than ours has done so” (Pensée §214/491). You cannot really oblige or force people to love God; love must be won. But God can be loved when we first receive strong evidence that he loves us. This evidence is supremely provided by Jesus: “God proved his love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5.8). That verse is so full of rich truth I will come back to it another time to explain it more fully, for it speaks of divine love that alone fully satisfies our needy heart. The apostle who wrote it also said: “the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2.20). To grasp what that means will deliver you forever from despair and aimlessness.

Our third need is for intellectually satisfying answers – in other words, we need truth we can rely on. We are rational beings and our reason requires true answers to our basic vital questions. There can be no satisfaction to this need except through the infinite wisdom of God’s mind; he alone can answer our dilemma. The atheistic materialist has problems here: “on his assumptions,” said Cornelius Van Til, “his own rationality is a product of chance.” If our brains resulted from chance movement of atoms and molecules, there is no real intelligence, only an illusion of personality. Without a rational creator on whom we can ground the validity of our rationality, we are for ever lost in confusion, for the very value of our mental processes would be undermined. God’s rationality alone can justify the value of human rationality. “Unless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything” (Van Til). 

All three of these needs are met by our Creator God. His wisdom specialises in revealing truth to satisfy our minds. His loves is like none other, to satisfy our hearts. His purposes are the best for us as the true way to find fulfilment.

Clive Every-Clayton

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