The Purpose Driven
Life is an advice book written by Christian author Rick
Warren and published by Zondervan. As of May 2006, the book
had been on the New York Times Bestseller list for advice
books for over three straight years. As of November 2005,
it had been translated into fifty-six languages. The book
offers readers a forty-day personal spiritual journey, and
presents what Warren says are God's five purposes for human
life on Earth. The idea is that you're supposed to read each
of the forty short chapters on forty consecutive days. Each
chapter contains a personal application section at the end
with a 'point to ponder', a Bible verse to remember, and a
question to consider over the course of that day. Rick Warren
described his book as an "anti-self-help book."
(Compare to Walker
Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.)
Rick Warren does want to help you. He just doesn't believe
in doing so via the concept of the self, and much to his credit.
The first sentence of TPDL is: "It's not about you."
If Rick Warren's book ended here, it would be fine. Ego
dissolution is an admirable goal. But Warren is a Christian,
not a Buddhist. The remainder of the first chapter goes on
to explain how the quest for personal fulfillment, satisfaction,
and meaning can only be found in understanding and doing what
God placed you on Earth to do.
The book has six major sections:
What on Earth Am I Here For?
Purpose #1: You Were Planned for God's Pleasure
Purpose #2: You Were Formed for God's Family
Purpose #3: You Were Created to Become Like Christ
Purpose #4: You Were Shaped for Serving God
Purpose #5: You Were Made for a Mission
Despite his book sales, Rick Warren isn't universally beloved
by Christians. Some find his humanistic worldview, references
to Eastern philosophy and New Age mysticism particularly alarming.
The book includes such non-Christian-seeming activities as
'walking the prayer labyrinth', 'breath prayers' (ie mantras),
chants, and a splendid practice called 'Hula
Praise Dancing'. Christians have complained that Warren
fails to present the evangelical gospel accurately, neglecting
for example to accurately represent the nature of sin, repentance
and hell, and the blood sacrifice of God's son Jesus as the
means to be forgiven by God for sins. Critics likewise contend
that when citing Scripture, Warren cherry-picks whichever
paraphrase or translation supports the point he's making.
To this nonbeliever, the selective-reading charge is particularly
ironic. God, for
example, hates shrimp at least as much as he ostensibly
hates gays.
Warren is smart to cherry-pick. His reading of the Bible
is flattering to our wish-fulfillment fantasies, in direct
contrast to Darwin's portrayal
of humanity as nothing special in the grand scheme of things.
For Christians, evolutionary theory has been the cause for
much anxiety, since it casts grave doubts on the validity
of the texts supposedly underpinning Western civilization.
The Bible tells a story of our self-importance, and that inflated
sense of ourselves has suffered many blows in the past few
hundred years. Humans are odd, no doubt about it, but it's
hard to regard us as special once you have a ninth-grade grasp
of evolutionary biology. Also, the news of other planets,
then other solar systems, then other galaxies, then many hundreds
of billions of galaxies, makes us look tinier and tinier.
I'm living proof that you can be happy without believing that
you matter in the universe, but it's been a long and bumpy
road for me to get here.
Wouldn't it be nice if TPDL were true? Wouldn't it be cool
if there really was an ultimate instruction manual for living,
and if it wasn't full of internal contradictions and so on?
Our president is one of many Americans to continue to insist
that the Bible is this book, somehow, in the face of everything.
I find this conviction baffling, but Christianity must be
adaptive, or there wouldn't be so many Christians. I'll bet
you that President Bush leads a highly purpose-driven life.
He credits his finding Jesus to turning his entire life around,
and I see no reason to doubt his sincerity. The problem is
that GWB's personal gratification is costing the rest of us
terribly. I agree with Sam
Harris: faith impenetrable to evidence, like GWB's, is
an expense our increasingly crowded world can ill afford.
Cell biology can be unnerving. See, for instance, Nick
Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning Of
Life. The bottom line of this book, like every other reputable
book on the subject, is: Life's only purpose is to make copies
of itself. The growing mainstream consensus in biology is
that organisms are DNA's way of making more DNA. Furthermore,
there's no more teleology or intelligence to DNA than there
is to the weather. We organisms might experience a sense of
purpose, but our sense of ourselves as selves collapses at
the cellular level. Dr Lane asks what the most meaningful
sense of the word 'self' is, in terms of natural selection.
Is it the gene, as per Dawkins? Or is it the cell, as per
Lynn
Margulis? In single-celled organisms, there's no conflict
- the genes only travel within cells, so it's academic to
draw a distinction between them. The question becomes important
when we talk about big complex multicellular beings like ourselves.
Here's a startling piece of news from the microbiologists:
ten billion cells in your body die every day, day in, day
out. Some of those deaths are accidental wear and tear, but
most of them are planned, as your cells dutifully obey chemical
instructions to kill themselves. These regular mass suicides
are absolutely necessary for your continued well-being. When
a person's cells become unwilling to self-destruct as ordered,
we call it cancer.
I have a strong personal interest in cancer, since it's
what killed my father and stepmother and only narrowly spared
my stepfather. From Dr Lane:
In cancer, the word 'selfish' rings hollow. There is no
sense in which a malignant tumor is making a bid for freedom
- it is simply a ghost in the machine, a pointless reversion
to an earlier type, which ruled before the evolution of
the 'individual' - that of cells doing their own thing.
[C]ancer gives a dull and empty sense of the sheer meaninglessness
of evolution. Cells replicate, and the cells that replicate
best leave the most descendants. That's it. It's hard to
think of any deeper meaning for cancer: it is mindless mechanics
and no more.
My question is: why so dour, evolutionary biologists? If
life has no meaning, then we're all off the hook, right? The
Buddhists offer another way out. Why not smile in the face
of all the absurdity and randomness? Nothing is really anybody's
fault, so what is there to be so angry about? No purpose means
no judgments, and that frees up a whole lot of mental energy
for more constructive uses. I leave you with some dialogue
from I
Heart Huckabees: