Aim

Where do our aims come from, and what are we aiming for? Were we made to aim for something, or do we ultimately aim for nothing? Have you ever tried not to aim?

If we try, we aim, and trying not to aim is like trying not to believe what you know to be true or trying not to see with your eyes open wide. The only way to stop aiming is to stop living, but we have aims, and we aim in everything we do. If we don’t at least aim to feed our bodies, our bodies cease to continue working. Even those who struggle with eating disorders are still aiming – aiming to restrain themselves from eating too much and not enough.

Interestingly, animals aim for what they need, but only we humans consciously neglect or indulge, because we can distinguish between can and ought and aim with good or bad intent. We have knowledge beyond what feels and tastes good – we wonder what is good. We perceive goods higher than our tastes, and we are free to set ourselves under or over them.    

We can subordinate our aim to our wants – and live to please ourselves or to be praised by men – or we can and subordinate our wants to a higher aim than hedonism, epicureanism, or approvalism.

If someone sees something higher than the wills of men, which he calls honor, and commits himself to it, he aims for something higher than the natural world. Perhaps his conception of honor has no face or name, and yet, he still aims to glorify it. Perhaps the highest place one can reach is knowing and loving another person who has a name and face, but wherever love is on the hierarchy of aims, the one who freely serves another for good reason is aiming for something too high for men to fully grasp.  

But every human experience, whether to please oneself, to be praised by others, to reach another world or to lay down one’s life, involves aiming.

Yet, even though the act of aiming is ubiquitous and profound in human nature, there are some “experts” who claim that the human experience is ultimately driven by that which is aimless. Indeed, our aimful ends arise from an aimless beginning, and the latter explains the former, say metaphysical naturalist scientists. Scientists who espouse naturalism aim to keep naturalism alive, and they say naturalism, though aimless, aims to keep them alive.

It’s easy to get distracted and intimidated by technical jargon that comes from one who knows many facts about the natural world, who is respected and praised by men, but knowledge of physics doesn’t make one a good metaphysician (philosopher), and nonsense is nonsense even if it comes out of the mouth of a scientist (1).

Unfortunately, scientists who are also naturalists are necessarily committed to explaining all phenomenon by an unintelligent cause, even if the cause has never been observed and contradicts the phenomenon it attempts to explain (2). However, one who limits his scientific inquiry to unintelligent causes doesn’t prove there aren’t intelligent causes in existence – he has just ensured he will never detect one no matter how much evidence there is for it. If I limit my investigation of determining the quantity of animals on earth by only counting dogs, I haven’t proven there aren’t animals other than dogs on earth – I’ve just prevented myself from noticing animals that aren’t dogs, no matter how many monkeys, cats, and birds there really are. Of course, scientists who are committed to methodological naturalism and believe their limited scientific method accounts for all there is to know, find themselves in the awkward and undesirable position of insinuating that anthropologists, sociologists, and forensic scientists are pseudo-scientists (since they study intelligent causes), and even worse, reducing their own intellectual aims to unintellectual, aimless causes. After all, if there aren’t intelligent causes, not only are anthropologists unable to determine that primitive homo sapiens were religious, but there can be no intelligence in scientists' explanations.

In any case, whether a scientist’s investigation is open to any cause or only unintelligent causes, if he claims that only science delivers knowledge, he does philosophy and not science. Thus, scientism unwittingly validates philosophy as a legitimate branch of knowledge while invalidating the philosophy of scientism – it’s ruled out by its own rules. A scientist who claims that unintelligence governs the entire universe steps beyond the explanatory scope of science and enters the realm of philosophy. One could never test and calculate that there is nothing beyond what one can test and calculate for the same reason methodological naturalism could never prove there aren’t intelligent causes – an inquiry confined within a system can’t answer questions that lie outside the system. But in any case, science is the child of theological philosophy (and children should honor their parents). Indeed, the scientific enterprise emerged from certain philosophical commitments, such as the contingency, intelligibility, and teleology of the natural world (3). Men could never learn anything from testing and calculating the natural world until they first believed there is good reason to test and calculate it. Hypotheses precede experiments. Metaphysics precede physics. Theological motives preceded the scientific revolution. As C.S. Lewis poetically stated in summarizing the emergence of modern science, “men became scientific because they expected laws in nature, and men expected laws in nature because they believed in a Legislature”(4).  

But just as there are unchanging laws of nature that make the natural world intelligible, which are legible to the scientist, there are also unchanging laws of language that make words intelligible, which are germane to the scientist’s explanations. It is impossible to do science without laws of nature, but it is also impossible to understand and explain science without laws of logic. So, notwithstanding what scientific investigation may reveal about the operations of the natural world, the claim “X = non-X” and the conjunction of the claims “X cannot do Y” and “X does Y” violate the law of non-contradiction and are therefore unintelligible, even if they proceed from an intelligent man with scientific pedigree. Either there are aims in nature or nature is aimless, but to say our aims are produced by aimless forces or that evolution is both aimless and yet aims at survival are logical contradictions caused by a philosophical commitment to naturalism, not scientific statements that are logically inscrutable (5). “Avoid idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge … Hold fast the pattern of sound words … “ (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:13).

Naturally, the scientist who holds to naturalism contradicts himself because he’s committed to bottom-up, ateleological explanations when his explanations depend on top-down, cohesive thinking. Rather than retrospectively inferring the onset (cause) from the outcome (effect), he’s predetermined the sum total of existence from a blind starting and blinded himself to the product before him (or within him).

The true ultimate explanation of humanity must account for our thinking and willing (aiming) – it will, necessarily, make sense of us. Therefore, instead of ignoring the sight by which we can consider the past, we should allow our insight into the present (our first-hand experience) guide and test our metaphysics.

But whatever our philosophical views about the nature of knowledge or the natural world – whether we are naturalists or theists – what should be clear to everyone is that no creature lives without aiming, and humans can’t live well without a meaningful aim. If creatures fail to aim for food, they run out of fuel to live, but if we wake up one morning with no one to love or virtue in mind, we won’t live long or well. Animals must aim to live or they lose their lives, but we must live for something worth living for or we lose the will to live – we give up (6). Animals can aim low, but we must aim high.

“Aiming to survive” may suffice for non-rational creatures but isn’t sufficient for reason-speaking and meaning-seeking beings, which is precisely why some people have sufficient food and water and still lose the will to live, and why only those who lay down their lives for something beyond survival can motivate those who feel hopeless to hang on. We are unsatisfied with surviving for the sake of surviving, for we can see the vanity and futility – indeed the absurdity – of trying to survive if we weren’t made to survive and can’t survive forever. Rational creatures can’t live well by living to simply survive.

Should we live for our desires, whatever they may be? Living for whatever we want is synonymous with living for ourselves, but we didn’t bring ourselves into existence, which means we aren’t the greatest things in existence. We ought to live for what is greatest, which is that which grounds all else and ultimately allows us to exist (and can fulfill us). But even if we disregard the duty to treat things according to their nature, and we choose to elevate ourselves above what made us, we can’t avoid the law of cause-and-effect and therefore the consequences of self-centeredness and self-idolization. But who thinks we were made to aim for that which depresses and deforms us? Our whims and wishes contain some wisdom within them, in that they reveal our insufficiencies and point to something higher themselves, but our desires must not be thought to be gods, or else they turn us into devils. We must aim higher than pleasing ourselves.

What about honor? While honor is higher than selfish desires, it is temporal, conceptual, and incidental if not embodied in something higher than us (7). We may sense that the essence of honor is more beautiful and lasting than epicureanism, hedonism, or ingratiation, but if honor isn’t ultimately grounded in something purer and more permanent and powerful than the egoisms of men, then why live for honor when it requires great sacrifice and has no lasting impact? We may feel the highest goods emerge from honorable and loving acts, but if honor and love are reduced to mental abstractions with no permanent instantiation, does this provide intellectual satisfaction, or do we think that rational inquiry keeps us from heaven? Do the merits of the mind distract us from aiming at what’s best for us, or should we aim for what’s coherent and caring?  

Just as no honorable man would be convinced that he ought to live for self-centered means, no reasonable man would conclude he ought to quit wondering and thinking about what he should aim for. If we think the mind wasn’t made to help us aim for what is best, why trust the thought that led us to that conclusion? If our mind would have us ask big questions and seek after satisfying answers only to be ultimately disappointed – in order to spite our own good – then why would we listen to any thought that issues from our mind? Why would we listen to untrustworthy thoughts? A thought that undermines its own trustworthiness should be rejected.

But if we can’t be fulfilled by selfishness, by concepts limited to our mind, or by shutting off our brain, what can we live for that does not compromise our heath, honesty, or hope?

What is the reasonable inference to draw from the pervasive need to aim that exists within every living organism, and the unique need within the human person to aim towards a divinely instituted duty? If we find ourselves always aiming for this or that, and our survival depends upon us aiming for goals, and our well-being depends on aiming for certain goals, how could we ever conclude that we come from something aimless, incapable of setting and reaching goals? If we find within ourselves a basic need to live for something, how can there be nothing for which we were made to live? If we know we should aim to be good, how could we say that we weren’t made to be good?

Perhaps the one who gave us an irresistible instinct to aim, and the moral duty to aim as high as we can, made us for something up above. If we are unfulfilled by the futility of finite and forgotten aims, perhaps that which is infinite and unforgettable made us to live forever. Perhaps that which lets us aim and speak isn’t aimless and speechless, for God spoke us into being by his love before we wandered from his voice, and the Word became flesh to find and forgive all who fled and forgot the Faither, to call us home.

If some force in nature aims for our survival, then our existence is preserved by something conscious, since aim presupposes conscious effort. And if something conscious preserves us to have dominion over the natural world, so we might aim for something supernatural, then why not believe that “of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of His creatures”? (James 1:18). If the implications of having no Maker contradict our first-hand experience and deepest intuitions, why not concede God is God and live for “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Ph. 3:14)? Might we find reason to hope in the aim of a sinless Carpenter who said he came to lay down his life so we can survive beyond our death? Might we sinners aim to be saints because the Saint made a way for us sinners? Might we aim for ends with no ending because we were made to aim for eternity?

It makes sense that we have a compulsion to aim, a conviction to aim higher than we can reach, and hope in confessing that we fall short … if God made us to be higher than we are, and after our fall, he descended to earth to lift us up.   

Footnotes and References

1. Paraphrasing John Lennox.

2. Insofar as the rules of science require every effect in the world be explained by natural (unintelligent) causes – that is, as long as methodological naturalism determines the rules of science – scientific investigation isn’t a search for the truth with the evidence leading the way, but a tool to protect philosophical naturalism as the operative worldview within science.

3. To be sure, scientific discoveries can strengthen or weaken certain philosophical conclusions, which means there is, in some ways, an interdependency between science and philosophy, but the point being made here is that philosophy is necessary to get science off the ground in the first place. So, if one rejects philosophy and only accepts science as a legitimate branch of knowledge, one must reject the philosophical ideas that legitimatized science, which delegitimatizes science.  

4. C.S. Lewis, Miracles, p. 169

5. Naturalistic evolution, by definition, has no aim or end in mind, and scientific naturalists claim that natural selection (evolution) accounts for the behavior of living organizations. Every scientific naturalist also thinks he aims to express what he concludes, or rather evolution “gives” him these conclusions to help him survive (either he or evolution aims). However, if men are the products of an aimless process, then men can’t aim towards conclusions, nor can these conclusions be the result of evolutionary aims. Aim cannot equal aimlessness.

6. I have in mind psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s comments in Personality isn’t Permanent, “you cannot have motivation without a goal … research shows you cannot have hope without a goal” (p. 92).

7. If one replaces honor with love, the logic still applies and the point still stands. Love may feel superior to all other aims (and Christianity says it is), but if there is nothing superior to the aims of men, and the purest loves of men cease with men (and therefore Christianity is wrong), the ultimate cause and end of love is synonymous with every other human aim.