The End and the Beginning - the Purpose
Jack Seay
Nov. 5, 2001
Isaac Asimov writes in one of his short stories about the finiteness of life "without God". It doesn't matter if the end is 200 or 2,000 or 2 trillion years away. It's coming at you at a fixed rate that cannot be slowed or stopped. You are tied to the tracks and the train is coming and will eventually run you over, and cut you in half. There's nothing you can do to stop it. This is life "without God". Eventually all life ending in the heat death or collapse of the Universe. At that time, everything that happened before will have been meaningless, for nothing, por nada. If that's true, and you know it's true, what meaning is there to life now? Each day is one day closer, each year one year closer to that end. If you try to block that out of your mind, you are hiding the truth. If everything in the Universe has a cause, why not the Universe itself? We call that cause "God". Why would God create a Universe that has no meaning? If all life eventually ends, than at that point, everything that happened before has no meaning. Would it be reasonable for an intelligent God to create such a Universe? I intuitively understood all this when I was 15. Why don't our greatest minds?In your thinking, always push beyond the limit, the endpoints of time. What was before? What will be after? How could it be nothing, absolutely nothing, before the beginning? It's not just a mystery, it's an impossibility. And if all our lives have a final end, with nothing after, what meaning, what purpose can there be for life now (tied to the tracks)? If time has a beginning and an end, there is a "before time" and "after time". In order for everything to come into existence (the Universe), there must have been a cause (God) before the beginning of the Universe. And after the end of the Universe, that God will still exist. But would God create the Universe for there to be no purpose to it, no life not tied to the tracks? These are the inescapable questions of reality, that sane people must ask themselves.