An atheist going by the moniker “Counter Apologist” wrote an interesting post which goal was to undermine the Christian claim that man can have no meaning or purpose if he is not created by God. It can be read in its entirety here:
http://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2013/02/big-questions-02-meaning-purpose.html
While I felt that much of this post read as fairly visceral, there was one point made that read like a true argument, and I thought it was worth thinking about and responding to:
“[If] only things that are designed can have a purpose, even if they’re sentient beings – then on Christianity clearly god has no purpose since he wasn’t designed. If god can have a purpose for himself, then he would have to give it to himself. Why then is god the only being that can give a purpose to himself? And if god has no purpose, then why is having a purpose important in the first place? The entire assumption [William Lane] Craig makes here relies on special pleading.”
Let’s syllogize this thing!
1. According to Christians, only things that are created can have a purpose.
2. God wasn’t created.
3. Therefore God doesn’t have a purpose.
If you look at this argument for a moment, you’ll notice that the word “purpose” in the conclusion seems to mean something different than the word “purpose” in the first premise. In other words, our atheist has committed the fallacy of equivocation– using the same word in two different ways. In the premise, a purpose means something like, a reason for existing. In the conclusion, it means something more like, a goal one has made for oneself. No Christian denies that an atheist may make a goal for himself, but he would question whether this goal can be meaningful transcendentally speaking if atheism is true. Also, no Christian would say that God can’t have goals, but they would claim that He doesn’t have a reason for existing, which is to say some cause or purpose that transcends Him and for which He was brought into existence.
To provide a parallel from human experience, when a creator makes a work of art, one might ask that creator what his art means. The creator gets to determine this– not the art itself or the audience. When someone mischaracterizes what an artist or speaker is saying, he is not creating a meaning equally valid to how the speaker understood his words– he is simply wrong. Unless Counter Apologist has been heavily influenced by post-structuralists like Derrida, I suspect that he would probably agree on this point.
So who gets to determine what the meaning of human life or the universe is? Well, clearly its creator. If there is no creator, there is no meaning. As Kevin Vanhoozer wrote, “there is meaning only where someone means, or meant, something” (Is There a Meaning in This Text? p. 233). We can, as Derrida does, engage in the “play” of inventing our own meanings if the creation, lacking a real author, doesn’t have any objective meaning, but we can’t claim that any one interpretation is true or valid. The will to power, the pleasure principle, glorifying God forever– all are equally valid purposes for one’s life (which is to say that they are all invalid objectively speaking). This line of reasoning can also be applied to purpose. If you want to know what the purpose of a vacuum cleaner is, you’ll have to read the manual that its creators provided.
So, does God have a purpose in the same sense that a created thing has a purpose? No. As A Creator, he has purposes, but no purpose or meaning that has been bestowed upon Him from the outside. This is simply to say that God is not created, which Christians were already happy to admit.
As humans, we may be creators as well as creatures. As creators, we can purpose to do something. As creatures, we have been made with a purpose. God, as only Creator and not creation, was not made with a purpose, though He does purpose to do things. These definitions must be kept distinct, or else we commit fallacies of equivocation that do not hold up to scrutiny, as the Counter Apologist has done.