What led you to God?

A car has an objective, formal purpose.Humans have subjective purposes. All subjective purposes are in the long run arbitrary. One might say, my purpose in life is to help poor people. Another might say, my purpose in life is to turn all corners into curves, because curves are more beautiful than corners.
These two purposes are both equally subjective in the long run.

It's another subjective purpose. Take your pick.

This makes no sense to me. It seems obvious to me that the formal purpose of a car is to propel people around from place to place.
As I said before, one might devise all sorts of other purposes for a car, but none of these are the formal purpose. You could use it as a decorative item. Young boys could use it as a place to hide out and smoke. You could use it as a music-maker and never drive the thing at all. You could use it as research project on toxic emissions. You could use it as the subject of a poem--"Ode on a Chevy." These are all personal purposes, not formal.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-18-2006 10:03 AM

Well, that's perfectly sensible. I'm telling you what seems to me the fact about the nature of human life. Our lives are ephemeral, of no more significance than the howling wolves, or for that matter, the fly we just swatted.I'll tell you in what sense this fact matters to me: I'm not interested in maintaining a view of human life that is laced with sentimentality.

That's right. It's not a matter of what I want. I'm just stating what seems to be the nature of human life. We have no objective purpose in living. We have purposes that we make up--that's all.

I'm not talking about "not caring." Of course one cares about other people and about one's activities. A sentimental view of human life is one in which one adopts a certain belief because it makes one feel good (or bad, for that matter), or one slurs over what human life is really like with vague, pleasant-sounding comments, or one ignores what human life is really like completely. By "human life," I mean human life as a whole, not the life of this or that person.

That's exactly it, Faith.

Formal purpose is inherent--and objective.

The Martian has got nothing to do with the formal purpose. The maker of the device determines the purpose. The formal purpose of a wrench is to turn bolts. The formal purpose of a hammer is to hammer nails. It doesn't matter whether a Martian or anyone can figure out what the formal purpose is. But if a made item has a formal purpose, most likely it can be determined by an outsider. But if it can't the formal purpose remains exactly the same.A Martian might decide that the formal purpose of a human being is to do arithmetic. That's plausible, since humans are good at doing arithmetic. But it's wrong if the maker of the human being is nature. If God made man, then he can possibly have a formal purpose. He cannot possibly have a formal purpose if he was made by mindless accident.

I'm not looking for anything. I am explaining the nature of human life. It lacks a formal, objective purpose.

You could put it that way. You would need to add, however, that the subjective purposes that humans do have are ultimately arbitrary.