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Reflections on the Purpose of Life
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11072 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
4,480 Words |
| Author
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Hudson Hoagland
Hudson Hoagland (1899-1982) pioneered studies on the
electrical and chemical activity of the brain and their
relation to behavior. His career included posts at Harvard,
Cambridge, and Boston Universities. Hoagland also took an
active lead in the explorations of the relationship between
scientific knowledge, human values, and religious concerns. |
The question of the purpose of life is a meaningless one to some, since no acceptable operational procedure has so far been devised for answering it. A variety of answers have been proposed over the ages by philosophers and theologians, but these answers are satisfying only to those with faith in certain metaphysical or religious doctrines. As the doctrines change and wane, many answers, once satisfying, lose their significance. Thus, the widespread Christian belief held for centuries that the purpose of life on earth is to prepare for a life hereafter has ceased to have much meaning for most professing Christians.
The following views are inevitably colored by my work as a biologist, and I make no claim for their originality. We all find ourselves struggling with great amorphous questions of this kind as we go through life, and there often seem to be as many answers as there are questions since, unlike the simpler questions and answers of science, there are no operational procedures for coming to grips with them. It seems to me, however, that certain emergent ideas stemming from scientific investigations may be helpful in our considerations.
The concept of purpose collides head-on with the ancient unresolved problem of free will and determinism, and I would like first to consider certain aspects of this problem before discussing some personal reflections on the purpose of life.
Freedom, Determinism, And Purpose
A scientist operates under the tacit assumptions that there is order underlying the phenomena he is studying; otherwise his work would be pointless. He hopes to find the nature of this order. He also assumes that all forms of order, both static and functional, have determinants, and his job is to find these out and make sense of them. If he is studying behavior of either animate or inanimate systems, he seeks the mechanisms of the behavior of the systems. Since all natural phenomena, including living organisms and their behavior, are subjects of successful scientific investigation, the assumption that events are determined by antecedent conditions and by environmental factors has been empirically justified by the success of science over the last three centuries. This tacit assumption that events have causes, no matter how complex and obscure, is thus essentially a hypothesis that science has repeatedly confirmed. I know of no scientists who work today outside of a deterministic framework. But the meaning of mechanisms, of determinism, and of freedom have undergone some changes since the traditional materialistic
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