Tom Facchine – The Comment Section #01 – Why Does Life Have To Have a Purpose

			Somebody might wonder why does life have to have a purpose? Right? They could say, okay, the animals
they don't have. They don't think about these things. They don't ask these questions.
		

			But there's a sort of there's a sort of circular reasoning that's going on here. Because isn't it
the very fact that we have a unique ability to consider these questions in the first place that
makes us ask the question, if there were no purpose, to creation to life, than we would expect that
we would be on the same level of animals, and it would never occur to us, the fact that it occurs to
us to ask, is reasonable enough to ask the question, we have been given a unique intelligence, we
have been given unique gifts to the exception and exclusion of all other creatures, right? It's not
like there's another sort of, and there's a kind of an interesting fascination that human beings
		

			have with the possibility that other creatures out there aliens or whatever, you know, have sort of
parallel intellectual abilities. There's something I haven't quite articulated it yet. But there's
something theological going on there. There's something theological about
		

			this question. Are we the only ones? Right? We could maybe, perhaps, if we believe in the kind of
strict evolutionist account that you know, it's just this random chance based on unfolding from one
species to another, right, the pinnacle of which perhaps, is the human being who can think and ask
these questions, but we could say, well, why aren't there more creatures like us that can ask these
questions that are different from us? Why is there only one? And so this sort of uniqueness is one
of the reasons that propels us to ask this question in the first place. We are the only ones that
we're aware of why, right, it's not just Why do we exist? But why do we exist as we are, right?
		

			There's something there. And there's other things also that simply aren't accounted for in the kind
of purposeless random account of creation or existence or why we're here, right? And two of those,
and we can talk a long time about these, but I guess two of them, just very briefly would be bounty
first of all, and the second would be beauty. Okay, beauty and bounty propel us to ask what the
purpose of everything is bounty, because if we are, again, to believe the kind of worldview, that
it's just about procreation, it's just about survival of the fittest, it's just about competition.
It's just about, you know, these sorts of concerns material, pure material, that doesn't explain the
		

			degree of bounty that we find, right? You could you take an ear of corn, an ear of corn has about I
think, 700 kernels on it. Every corn plant has about three years, it's 2100 kernels, each of those
kernels becomes a new corn plant, just a single plant, a single a single year of corn holds within
it a whole field of corn.
		

			That does not that cannot be accounted for, with random mutation and you know, survival of the
fittest and natural selection, these sorts of things. There's too much, you could say, why did it
expend so much energy? Right? If we're only going to believe in materialist causes and cause and
effect and these sorts of things, it could have conserved energy, and produced fewer kernels, and
would have still succeeded and reproduced and spread. But that's not what we find, we find that it
produces so many kernels, that there's enough for the people, there's enough for the birds, there's
enough for the squirrels, there's enough for the crop next year, and there is more extra beyond that
		

			there's more to share. There is enough for corn boils and corn on the cob and grilling and
everything. There's so much corn, how do we account for that? Is it just chance? Is it just random?
		

			I have a hard time believing that to me that's superstitious.
		

			Now, the other thing is, is beauty in order to survive, okay? We're just saying just materialist
causes. It's only everybody the scarcity, mindset, everything only has a certain amount of calories
and energy. And it's going to expend only what the end of that most efficient or the optimal amount
in order to reproduce and find the mate and you know, like, carry on the generations. There's so
much beauty in the world that defies that explanation of things, right? And some people could
instrumentalize it and they could say, well, the beauty is just to attract mates, and therefore
indicate or indicate indicate fitness. And therefore something that's more beautiful is more fit,
		

			and therefore it's more likely to reproduce and there's a but there's too much beauty we find in
nature, beauty that seems to have no purpose. Like it could have been accomplished with less beauty,
and yet we find a degree of beauty which is just beyond what is that optimal level, quote unquote.
We find gratuitous beauty. Let's call it gratuitous beauty.
		

			Be in the creation, all the colors, all the songs of the birds, all of the textures, this, not every
single thing. First of all, not all of it just has a functionalist sort of purpose. Second of all
things might have multiple purposes just because it does serve one instrumental purpose doesn't mean
that that's the only purpose that it exists for. So with all of this beauty, are we going to say
that it's only here just to prove fitness to demonstrate fitness and to secure a mate and to, you
know, secure the next generation that also to me seems very superstitious.