why are we here?

Answers to why are we here

Why Are We Here? A Question for All Generations
Why are we here? This question has both plagued and challenged mankind for generations. Is there an ultimate answer, or is it all about mission statements and self-determination? If we are willing to accept the Bible as truth, then we know the answer to "where did we come from?" According to Scripture, we were created by God. So the next question is…why? After all, He is God, and as such, He certainly doesn't need us for anything -- so why did He create us?

Why Are We Here? What the Bible Says
"Why are we here?" is a question that can best be answered by looking at how the Bible explains it. Beginning in Genesis Chapter 1, we read that after each phase of creation, God "saw that it was good." According to Scripture, once He completed creating the heavens and the earth, the plant life and all the animals, He created man:

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them (Genesis 1:27).

This tells us what God did, but still doesn't explain exactly why He did it. We read on and discover that He spoke well of the male and female and showed His pleasure by entrusting them with His creation:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,
As part of His blessing, He gave us stewardship over the earth and its other life forms:

and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so (Genesis 1:28-30).

At the end of Genesis Chapter 1, we read how He felt about his completed creation:
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day (Genesis 1:31).

Why Are We Here? The Logical Conclusion
Why are we here? God created us because it pleased Him to do so. This message is consistent throughout the pages of Scripture, and nowhere said more succinctly than by the Apostle John in Revelation 4:11, where he has a vision of Heaven and witnesses the four elders prostrate before the Lord of all Creation, saying:

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

We are created for His pleasure. From the first page of Scripture to the last, that message is clear. We are created for His pleasure. Further, the Apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 1:16: For by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers: all things were created by Him and for Him.

If we accept that all this is true, and that any other answer is both illogical and devoid of hope, then the next question to ask is - what do we do about it? Or more to the point, what do you and I do about it?

Why Am I Here? Making it Personal
Having concluded that mankind exists to please God, the challenge becomes personal. What do I do about it? How can I, me, one person - possibly please such a big, huge, infinite God? The Bible gives us those answers too. For now, we can rest in this truth - none of us is here by accident. We were planned and wanted by our Heavenly Father from before the beginning of time (Psalm 139).

A Quiz on Why we are here
A) We are here to get make money and spend it on a bunch of stuff.

B) We are here to become as well-liked, respected, famous, powerful, or as high on the ladder of social status as possible.

C) We are here to kind of float through and enjoy the trip, and have as much "fun" as possible (a.k.a. "The Universe As Our Personal Disneyland" perspective).

D) "The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us." - Quentin Crisp

E) We are here to find the perfect guy or girl, make them fall madly in love with us, and live happily ever after. ( - or, live happily ever after at least until it's time to go...).

F) We are here to have sex. Maybe as much as possible. (See Option C).

G) We are here to be a success at . . . something.

H) We are here to work like dogs, pay taxes, get old, get sick, and die, without ever knowing why.

I) We are here to save the planet ( . . . and why is the planet here?)

J) "Don't ask." (Translation: We are here for some purpose or reason, and we don't know what that is, and will never know - except for the fact that somehow we think we know that this "purpose" or "reason" involves it being very important to not ask ourselves why we are here).

K) We are here to have children (. . . and . . . why are they here?)

L) We are here to pass on our genes ( . . . and why are they, our genes, here?)

M) We are here for reasons we don't understand and never will, so we're supposed to just blindly stumble through life trying to do the best we can anyways.

N) We are here to set goals and achieve them . . . and then set more and achieve them, and so on, ad infinitum or until we die.

O) We're here to evolve. (Evolve into what? )

P) Behaviorism: we are here to seek pleasure and avoid pain (and why is pain and pleasure here?)

Q) Freud: to be torn between our instincts and societal expectations - hopefully reaching some sort of compromise - until we die.

P) We are here to love others. (. . . and why are others here?)

R) We are here to face and overcome whatever challenges life throws at us.

S) We are here to try to live a secure and comfortable life, typically in spite of not knowing why we're tasked with this burden of always trying to find comfort and security, and rarely actually finding it.

T) The "Economy of Happiness": We are here to squeeze the maximum amount of fun and happiness possible into our lives before we die (a.k.a. maximum hedonism)

U) We are here to distract ourselves from asking why we are here.

V) We are here to prepare ourselves for the moment of death.

W) We don't know why we're here, we'll never know why we're here - and we absolutely know that for sure.

X) We are here to breed.

Y) We are here because of "the Plan" (and what is "the Plan"?)

Z) We are here to survive - meaning, keep our bodies alive - for as long as possible, even though we're going to die anyway.

AA) We are here for no reason or purpose at all. It's all meaningless (nihilism).

BB) We are here for "a reason" (and either ask "what exactly is that reason?" or just leave it at that)

CC) We are here to screw around and try to have a few good times before we hit the grave.

DD) Psychological: We are here to work on ourselves, overcome our neurosis, understand our childhood, become a self-individualized human, release our "inner children," unleash our repressed emotions, and free up our impulses.

EE) We are here to find a game worth playing, and playing it to the absolute best of our ability.

FF) We are here because we have a duty and mission to carry out.

GG) We are here for reasons we do not understand, but we can understand if we decide to figure them out and do the work necessary to do so.

HH) We are here to overcome the world.

II) We are here to overcome ourselves.

JJ) We are here to promote health instead of disease, wealth instead of poverty, wisdom instead of ignorance, love instead of indifference, justice instead of injustice, peace instead of conflict, etc.

KK) All we need to worry about is not doing what we're not here for; then what we are here for will take care of itself.

LL) We are here to find certain people who really did know why they were here (such as perhaps Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, and others) - and follow their lead.

MM) We are here for something nobody else can tell us, but we can find for ourselves, like a secret code inside ourselves that only we can crack.

NN) We are here to change the world, or bring about "heaven on earth."

OO) Erich Fromm: "Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself."

PP) The Matrix: We are for food, or so that our vitality or life-force can be drained to feed parasites we can't see and know nothing about.

QQ) We are here to perfect ourselves.

RR) We are here to attain total spiritual enlightenment.

SS) We are here to survive/find immortality (Editor's Note: Isn't this a circular argument? Say we do find a way to scientifically make us capable of surviving forever, or even much longer than we do now . . . so what? As the quote goes . . . "Many folks long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon...") - and if the purpose of this life is to find a way to live another one . . . what's the purpose of that one?)

TT) We are here to try to find the key to immortal life before our time here runs out.

UU) Shakespeare: "All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity." - Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2 (We are here to pass through nature to eternity)

VV) We are here to find the "Holy Grail", the "Philosopher's Stone", to become enlightened or to find ultimate knowledge.

WW) We are here to do battle, either to fight evil on the side of good, or to fight good on the side of evil.

XX) We are here to to learn how to love each another. (and what is "love"?); "We are all born for love; it is the principle of existence and its only end." - Benjamin Disraeli

YY) We are here to find God (and what is "God"?)

ZZ) We are here to be heroes, to fight the dragon and save the beautiful princess. (and the "dragon" is our own "ego," the princess is our own "soul").

AAA) We are here to find real happiness.

BBB) Man is here to learn how to love woman properly.

CCC) Woman is here to learn how to love man properly.

DDD) In some huge way, we are asleep; we are here to wake up.

EEE) We are here because God is playing hide-and-seek with himself.

FFF) The world is a prison where we have been given a life sentence; we are here either to 1) try to make ourselves more comfortable or enjoy our stay in the prison, or 2) try to escape.

GGG) We are here to put up cool web sites about finding "IT".

HHH) We are here to spend our lives for some form of noble cause, pursuit, or mission, as in, we are here to be soldiers of God.

III) We are here to develop our character.

JJJ) We are here to overcome suffering

KKK) Martin Luther King: "If a man hasn't discovered something he's willing to die for, he isn't fit to live."

LLL) Groundhog Day: We are here to basically live the same day, over and over again, until we get it right. (See also Buddhism/Hinduism: We are here to be reincarnated, over and over and over again, until we become "enlightened.")

MMM) Christianity: We are here to find and experience some form of "salvation," or to get to heaven, which is somewhere close to or with God; we are here to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might," and "love thy neighbor as thyself;" we are here to work to establish "The Kingdom of Heaven" on Earth.

NNN) Yoga: "The sole object of life is the attainment of Self-realization or Absolute Freedom. Devote every minute of your life for this grand attainment." - Swami Sivananda

OOO) Barry Long: "Is it intelligent to ignore the possibility that the sweetest natural physical sensation two human beings can produce together on earth (sex) signifies a reality?"

PPP) We are here to figure out, or remember, who we really are.

QQQ). We are here to find "IT".

RRR) George Bernard Shaw: "This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you consistent."

SSS) Peter Deunov: "We have come to earth to learn to love God who has created and loves us. When we learn how to love Him we shall understand the meaning of our life, and our relationships with others will become clear."

TTT) We are here to find out why we're here.

UUU) Tagore: "The infinite seeks the intimate presence of the finite, the finite to disappear in the infinite. I do not know whose scheme this is . . . that the bound should be on a search after freedom - freedom asking to be housed in the bound."

VVV) Albert Einstein: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
(- sounds great . . . but how?)

WWW) Léon Bloy: "Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God."

XXX) Charles K. Bellinger: "Human beings fall into traps on the right side or on the left side when they live in the finite to the exclusion of the infinite, or when they seek freedom to the exclusion of necessity, or when they live in the temporal while ignoring the eternal. The goal of human life, then, is the difficult task of holding together these paradoxical elements in a creative synthesis. The highest and truest pathway in life can be compared to walking along a narrow mountain ridge. It is always possible to fall off the ridge to the right or to the left, but the successful walker continues forward maintaining a balance."

YYY) None of the Above
ZZZ) All of the Above
A4) Some of the above _______________________
B4) Other __________________________
Your Answer: ________.

Please note:
This is a quiz that, whether you know it or not, you're kind of already taking;
and you will probably be graded, but may not be;
we're not sure when or even if you'll ever find out what your grade is,
and we might know who will or won't be grading your papers,
- but then again, we may be wrong.

Okay, so why ARE we here?
So, there's this idea - an idea that the purpose of life as a human being here on earth can be known, and that "mission" can be "accomplished.".

Umm . . . so how, exactly?

Well, we are not in the business of giving answers, even if we could. We're more in the business of all of us, individually and collectively, seeking out our own answers.

At any rate, whenever we do eventually dig into this sort of question deliberately, the typical scenario runs something like this: we look at the question, wrestle with it for a few seconds, pick an answer more or less at random (a.k.a. "out of our arse") - usually whatever is most comfortable to believe in at the moment (such as "to have fun" if we're young, "to love" if we're horny, "to get rich" if we're greedy, and so on) - assume that it's correct (or at least the best we can do for now), and then live out our lives based on that answer. Then we repeat this same process many times as life goes on, slightly amending our answer to fit in a little better with whatever experiences we bump into along the way.

But this is also a question that has been asked by many people for a long time.

So, have any of them found an answer? Is there a "right" answer? Have we made any progress is this endeavor? Or does this kind of question simply get asked, over and over again, with each person starting all over again from scratch? Or is there such a thing as "progress" in this area, the same way there is "progress" in physics, chemistry, or math?

At any rate, regardless of what other people have found, we all still have no choice but to answer this one - even if it resonates with what others have said - for ourselves.

And how do we do that? Well . . . of course, that's the hard part.

But if we are here for a reason or purpose, then it means that we probably have some sense that we ought to act a certain way, or live our lives in such a way that we're singing in tune or living in harmony with that purpose. Or if we decide that that purpose involves something like "love" or "God" or solving the problem of life or attaining spiritual enlightenment or even just trying to ease a little bit of suffering here and there, then there may be some new realms to explore in those areas as well.

And we also suggest some look-for-yourself Practical Experiments you can do on your own, or perhaps checking out Modern Spiritual Giants: A User's Guide, digging through some of the LiveReal Products, and if you want to talk with others about it, the LiveReal Discussion Board is a good place to start.

Digging deeper
The emergence of humans in the universe might not tell us anything concerning the fundamental constants of nature as scientists have speculated, new theoretical findings argue.

The idea known as the anthropic principle states that human existence is possible only if fundamental constants such as the speed of light or the strength of gravity are not higher or lower than what is observed.

Scientists who support anthropic reasoning suggest they can understand fundamental properties of the universe by determining what conditions intelligent beings such as humans need to exist. For instance, if gravity was too strong, black holes would form too often and suck up all matter before humans could evolve on Earth, but if gravity was too weak, it could not attract matter to form stars or planets.

Dark forces
According to advocates of anthropic reasoning, in 1987 Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg used the logic to calculate the cosmological constant-the strength of the mysterious force driving the universe apart-with surprising accuracy, well before astronomical observations turned up similar findings. What astronomers have since observed is that the universe's expansion is accelerating, driven by a sort of mysterious force dubbed either dark energy or vacuum energy.

Quantum physics predicts the cosmological constant should be far larger than what is actually seen: roughly 10120 times larger, a number representing 1 with 120 zeroes behind it.

In comparison, Weinberg's original estimate was off just by roughly a hundredfold, and refined versions of this argument claim greater accuracy, suggesting anthropic reasoning could provide answers quantum physics currently cannot.

However, theoretical physicist Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and cosmologist Roberto Trotta at Oxford University in Englandtake issue with how anthropic reasoning predicts the cosmological constant.

Anthropic reasoning calculates the cosmological constant by first assuming that humanity needs a galaxy to exist. Galaxies form when gravity pulls matter together. This continues to happen until dark energy or vacuum energy, begins a tug of war against gravity that gravity inevitably loses. Some current predictions hold that the universe will eventually come apart so completely that planets will explode and even molecules will be ripped apart.

The number of galaxies seen in the universe can exist only if vacuum energy is weak enough to allow gravity to win for a time. Scientists know the strength of gravity, so by measuring the number of galaxies, anthropic reasoning can tell us the maximum size of the cosmological constant-that is, the maximum strength of vacuum energy.

Other approaches
In the Nov. 17 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, Starkman and Trotta argue there are many other equally valid anthropic approaches to calculating the cosmological constant that lead to wrong answers.

For instance, Starkman and Trotta note that in order to live and thus view the universe, humans need to collect and expend energy. Using this rationale, humans should prefer a universe that is flying apart as slowly as possible, making it easier to go out and collect energy to expend. In such a universe, the cosmological constant should be as low as possible, even lower than the value seen now.

"The specifications used to allow life are rather arbitrary and can lead to very different expected values for fundamental constants," Starkman told SPACE.com.

Anthropic advocates are not swayed.

"The observed value of the cosmological constant, which has been predicted from anthropic considerations, has so far no other plausible explanation," said theoretical physicist Alexander Vilenkin, director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University.

"The best way to make progress is to continue to try to understand the nature of dark energy by observations and experiments," said senior astrophysicist Mario Livio at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Those, in turn, will allow for theoretical progress as well."

Another view
We are here because, more than ten billion years ago, the universe borrowed energy from the vacuum to create vast amounts of matter and antimatter in nearly equal numbers. Most of it annihilated and filled the universe with photons. Less than one part per billion survived to form protons and neutrons, and then the hydrogen and helium that makes up most everything there is. Some of this hydrogen and helium collapsed to make the first generation of massive stars, which produced the first batch of heavy elements in their central nuclear fires. These stars exploded and enriched the interstellar clouds that would form the next generation of stars. Finally, about five billion years ago, one particular cloud in one partcular galaxy collapsed to form our Sun and its planetary system. Life arose on the third planet, based on the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other elements found in the protostellar cloud. The development of life transformed Earth's atmosphere and allowed small furry mammals to take center stage. Primative men and women evolved and moved out of Africa to conquer the world with their new knowledge of tools, language, and agriculture. After raising food on the land, your ancestors, your parents, and then you consumed this food and breathed the air. Your own body is a collection of the atoms that were created billions of years earlier in the interior of stars, the fraction of a fraction of a percent of normal matter that escaped annihilation in the first microsecond of the universe. Your life and everything in the world around you is intimately tied to countless aspects of modern astrophysics.

Disclaimer - Answers to the questions are researched using various sources and are meant to increase the knowledge of our visitors. We cannot gurantee the accuracy of answers to questions.

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