There may or may not be some ultimate reason why you were born on this Earth. There are three assumptions that can be seen underlying this question: that we do have a mission in the world; and that it is the sort of thing that we can discover. If there is no such reason, if you are merely the result of evolution, there may yet be an answer to the moral question why were we born. A biologist will say that I was born because a particular sperm fertilized a particular egg. That unique event in the history of the universe explains why there came to be SC, this SC, - you may substitute your own initials - but it does not explain why SC; why you are here rather than not anywhere; why there is I rather than no I; why there is this for me. Firstly, it can be argued that we do not have a mission in the world. Some may argue that the world is ultimately meaningless, pointless and a chance of occurrence, and that we are also creatures of chance, with no mission what so ever. The idea of a mission seems to imply that somebody or something has set the mission for us. If there is no such somebody (e.g. God) then there will be no mission. But there is another, metaphysical question, which we can ask: Why am I here? Why do I exist? Each of us, at some time in our lives, is brought face to face with the contingency of our own unique existence. If your parents had not met, you would not have existed. Neither of them would have existed if their parents had not met, and so on. You are a fluke, and so am I. Your existence is a gigantic improbability and so is mine. If you believe in God, then here's a way to make sense of the fact that Samantha Cruz exists. God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. In creating the universe, God knew the precise date that Samantha would be born, and, being all-good, his decision to create a universe in which Samantha would exist was motivated by the thought that, taking everything into account, a universe containing Samantha was better than a universe without Samantha. The trouble is, that doesn't answer the question. The question that still grips me, and the question that ought to grip you is, Why did I have to be in the universe? One can say the same thing about Mr. K as I have said about Samantha. God saw the possibilities that each of these two individuals represented and approved. Yet still I am gripped by the question, Why did I have to be Samantha? And similarly, you ought to be gripped by the question, Why did I have to be Mr. K? I cannot ask your question and you cannot ask mine. It is a question that each human being can only ask about themselves and no-one else. The existence is indeed doubly absurd, because it cannot be distilled from the contingent facts. And the contingent facts are themselves absurd in relation to all the ways the world might have been; the worlds that might have been instead of this world. This brings me to the third point. For a mission to be discovered, it would seem that it has to be there already, waiting for us to find it. But there is an alternative. We can set our own mission for ourselves. We invent it, not discover it. It's not that we just make it up out of nothing. It arises out of our desires and aims, all in the community(ies) in which we live. Social institutions, our upbringing, our chosen circles of friends and so on all come into play. Within this, however, we can make choices about what is most important to us and those we care about, and this leads to us setting up our mission to why we were born. "Why was I born?" is a question which cannot be answered by citing an kind of reason or cause. If we persist in asking the philosopher to answer this question, then we have indeed made nonsense of philosophy. It is not as if it would make any sense to imagine that I might have been someone else other than Samantha. So what we are left with is a mystery, the mystery of I. There is no answer from science. There is no answer from theology. The only contribution that philosophy has to make is to point out that the real problem is prior to the question 'Why...?'. For no philosophical theory has yet succeeded in explaining how there can be such a thing as the sheer fact that I exist. We are born with a unique potential, in fact many potentialities. It is perfectly consistent for the me to say, "This question is important, but I accept that it cannot be answered." There is no law that every philosophical question must have an answer. To hold on to the absurd question, "Why were you born?", to refuse to give up that question no matter what, is one of the ways of keeping the sense of philosophical wonder alive.
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