IMAGINE WALKING INTO your house after work and finding a pie on the counter. It’s warm, but not too hot to eat. You cut a slice of it, and discover that it’s a blueberry pie, one of your favorites. The crust is perfect—not too flaky, not too dense. The filling is equally masterful—not too runny, not too solid. It’s one incredible blueberry pie.
How did this pie come about? Did it just happen to appear on the counter of your kitchen? And if it did, what accounts for its singularly excellent quality? For it being, in fact, the best pie you ever tasted? If it had been baked just a little longer, the crust, now just right, would be burned. A little less, and it would be too doughy. On top of that, someone took it out of the oven just in time for it to be the perfect temperature for eating when you arrived home.
This, in essence, was the point Bernie was making to me now about the universe. It was a point I had had a little experience with already. During my nine years of work at Guideposts magazine, I’d had a chance to interview Lee Strobel, the former Chicago Tribune reporter who started out as a vigorous nonbeliever but who, after following his wife into Christianity, produced a score of books giving the case in favor of such things as Christ, faith, and—my favorite—his 2004 book, The Case for a Creator.
Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, and the interview I ended up conducting with him for the magazine after reading it, gave me my introduction to what Bernie was now talking to me about—to the fact that in the course of the last few decades, our universe has revealed itself to be a whole lot more like that blueberry pie than anyone had ever before imagined. Our universe isn’t just nicely put together. It is very nicely put together. So much so that it has become extremely difficult for scientists—or anyone else—to argue that it just happened to come into existence in the way it has without any design or purpose acting on its behalf. In short, it has become very hard to argue that there wasn’t something—or some One—behind it.
Our universe, as Bernie argues at length in The Purpose-Guided Universe, is Purposeful with a capital “P.” Nature is brimming with things that function awfully, awfully well. We are so used to seeing purpose at work in the world around us, so used to seeing things just where they’re supposed to be, and so used to being told that there is nothing remarkable about this, that we take this purposefulness we encounter in the world around us all but completely for granted, despite the deep damage that this attitude does to us on the inside. For on the inside, we quite simply know it is wrong.
The awesome efficiency of the natural world is a kind of given in the modern world, and the explanation for its marvelous beauty and efficiency is simple. Life, we are told, evolved randomly, and over time the organisms that were best at surviving were the most likely to breed, and so to transfer their marvelously, but meaninglessly, efficient genes on to their young. There’s no real reason for it, other than that once life evolved, it was somehow blindly but relentlessly “driven” to keep evolving. Simple, really.
Thirty years or so ago, scientists discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to exist. The coincidences are far too significant to attribute this to mere chance or to claim that it needs no explanation. The dials are set too precisely to have been a random accident. Most scientists refuse to acknowledge that there is anything strange about these extraordinarily precise settings. And the reason they do so is clear: These fantastically precise settings suggest the two ideas materialist science is most set on denying: that God exists, and that He built the universe with a purpose in mind.
As I discovered that day on the football field back in my elementary school days, humans are creatures of purpose. It’s just built into us. We are creatures who are not comfortable unless we feel like we are going somewhere. Telos means “purpose” in Greek, and in the ancient world, particularly with the Greeks (and among those Greeks, particularly with Aristotle), it was assumed that everything in life had its telos or (another Greek word) its entelechy, its reason for being.
“Purpose” can have two different senses. Its deeper meaning is the philosophical one: the one that we conjure up when we ask, “Does life have any purpose?”
The more boring one is, obviously, what we mean when we ask, say, “What’s the purpose of a toothbrush?” In this case, “purpose” is essentially another word for “function.”
Yet though they differ, these two senses of the word are closely connected. For only in a world where purpose with a capital “P” is possible can there be objects possessing purpose with a small “p.”