The value of purpose in Christian belief
The tenth in the series on the reformation of Christianity. The first part of this series focuses on the benefits of Christian belief and does not argue for whether the belief system is credible or true. I refer those interested in those questions to review my previous posts.
The proposition to defend today is that
it is better to believe that humans have been given a sacred purpose than to believe there is no possible purpose to our lives other than what we choose to create.
This proposition seems at first glance to need no defense. Of course it is better to have a purpose for living than not to have one. But the secular-physicalist mindset has become so ingrained in our culture that we either proceed as if we have purpose without understanding we have no rational foundation for it, or we accept the idea that creating our own purpose satisfies the need.
Having no purpose
The term “deaths of despair” was introduced by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate for economics, in 2015. In their study, the most striking change in statistics was among non-hispanic whites without a college education. The prevalence of this occurrence is so great that the steady lengthening of lifespan in the US has reversed.
