Is It Silly To Seek Purpose In The Natural World?
Is It Silly To Seek Purpose In The Natural World?
Science and religion alike grapple with some of our deepest questions: What is the purpose of life? Why is the natural world just so? Why does the biological world strike us as so exquisitely designed?
But do all questions deserve an answer? In a 2008 lecture, Richard Dawkins argued that they don’t (you can hear his lecture on “The Purpose of Purpose” here). In particular, we can’t always answer purpose-seeking “why” questions. Sure, science can explain why birds have wings in evolutionary terms, or how mountains form by appeal to geological processes. But can science answer a question like, “What is the purpose of a mountain?” According to Dawkins, this is a silly question that doesn’t deserve an answer.
But not everyone finds questions about the purpose of mountains so silly. In a 1999 paper, developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen asked 4- and 5-year-old children a variety of questions about the living and nonliving natural world, including “What’s the mountain [in this picture] for?” Over half the children provided purpose-based answers, suggesting, for example, that the mountain was “to climb” or “to drive around.” When asked to agree with a character who claimed that “mountains are made for something,” or another who claimed, like Dawkins, that “this is silly,” the majority of children judged the call for purpose sensible, not silly.
