When I finished reading the Rev. David Hegg’s column, “Life Meaning and Purpose” (July 11), which was very well thought out and written, it suddenly occurred to me that what drives people to have faith and believe in and worship the God Hegg speaks of is the underlying fear that Charles Darwin and his evolutionary crowd just might be right.
Faith is nothing more than “hope” disguised as “knowledge.” People who have faith and believe in a God hope that folks like Darwin are wrong, and folks like atheist Richard Dawkins have faith and hope that there is no God, but neither of the two actually know or can prove that something like a God (or some great, divine “Plan”) either exists or doesn’t exist (“sacred scriptures” notwithstanding).
So, in that sense, I put folks like Dawkins and Hegg in the same bucket of what I call “preachers,” each with their own doctrine and faithful following, their differences in doctrine being merely incidental — both are still “believers.” This is elementary.
But as for the notion that life has to have some sense of overarching or divine meaning and purpose in order to be worth living, I see that as a logical absurdity, which is in fact what all belief systems are. The late French existential philosopher Albert Camus, in his book “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1955), postulated the following:
“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”
The ad for Nike sportwear sums it up another way.
Nike’s ad says, “Just do it.”
Arthur Saginian
Santa Clarita
