What is the Purpose of Life?
John Macquarrie

Fifty or 60 years ago, many scientists believed the world had come about not by design but through a "chance collocation of atoms," and that is has no purpose. But today many scientists think differently. Stephen Hawking, for instance, writes: "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and electron. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the emergence of life."

I am not suggesting that we should go back to the kind of theology expounded by Archdeacon Paley. His famous argument, it will be remembered, was that if you examine the intricate mechanism of a watch, you cannot fail to believe that it has been produced by a purposeful agent, namely, a watchmaker; and, by analogy, when you reflect on the world with all its wealth of natural contrivances, you will arrive at the conclusion that there must be a world-maker, a creator God.

The main defect in Paley's argument, I believe, is that he conceived God in purely transcendent terms, as having only an external relation to the world, just as the watchmaker is only externally related to the watch. But long before Paley, David Hume had pointed out that the world is not really like an artifact, but is more like an organism, having principles of structure and development in itself. To say this need not lead us (as it did Hume) into agnosticism, but it is a sharp reminder that the Christian God is not merely transcendent but is also immanent in the world, sharing with God's creatures in the struggles, the hopes and the risks of the created order. God is not only over the creation, God is in it, and Christianity strongly affirms as much, for it tells us that in Christ the incarnate Word entered history and suffered in history, and that the Holy Spirit still groans in travail with the world, seeking to bring to birth the children of God. The purpose of God for the world is not realized by some effortless decree issuing from the heavenly places, but demands "God's presence and [God's] very self" (Cardinal Newman) in the midst of the world. If that purpose seems to move along slowly, it is not because God is slack about God's business, but because God too has to strive and suffer and pay the price in blood--blood "drawn from Emmanuel's veins," and Emmanuel is just "God with us."

All of us have purposes. Day by day, we are working at these purposes, and we may also have an "ultimate concern," as Tillich called it, which embraces and coordinates all the little purposes. But what would it all add up to, if there were not some vaster purpose undergirding human aspirations? Can we believe that God has a purpose for the whole creation, a purpose that gathers up, purifies and deepens all our finite purposes? Jesus Christ believed that there is such a purpose--he called it the "Kingdom of God." We cannot grasp this idea in anything like its full meaning, and only when it is realized will we understand the many detours, delays, setbacks that had to be overcome on the way. But there are some things we can begin to understand now.

If the creator was no more than a "pure mathematician," as Sir James Jeans once described God, then God might have been content with a universe of galaxies and stars and planets, of physics and chemistry intricately ordered, and that would certainly be a universe to fill our minds with awe. But God, Christians believe, is more than a pure mathematician, the universe is more than a machine, more than an overwhelming esthetic creation. God is a God of love, whose purpose in creation was not to bring into being a fascinatingly beautiful universe, but to be confronted with an "other" who could respond to love with love, who could live in communion. So life emerges in creation, and eventually in spiritual beings who can indeed become the children of God. Such a creation is God's risk. In letting be this "other" and granting to the "other" freedom and intelligence (for only so could love and communion be possible) God has given up absolute transcendence and omnipotence. God's creation is a sharing, a self-giving. Its purpose is to realize through as much travail as it takes that Kingdom in which we may evermore dwell in God and God in us.

John Macquarrie has taught theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. His books include Christian Hope, Seabury Press.