Ultimate Meaning of Life - Essay Example

Mathews (2004, p.58) writes, “If you choose to exist by God’s command, then you were sent here at an appropriated time, to a designated place, to employ your unique abilities to accomplish God’s will.

” This is the actual meaning of life; that is, to attain God’s will by making the best use of the competencies that He has blessed you with. Secondly, as Johnson (1990, p.17) asserts, I would also like the world to believe that we find true happiness in worldly possessions, positions, wealth, and status if only we can relate the acquiring of these to God’s will. For me, true happiness, which is the essence of life, comes not from worldly possessions but from obedience to God.

Thirdly, my last lesson is that one should limit one’s lust for the world. One should start living according to ethical boundaries set by God, because only then will God intrude in one’s matters to shower His blessings. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, contradicts this viewpoint with his idea of nihilism, in which he argues that human existence does not have any meaning. According to him (as cited in Keiji, 1990, p.29), the idea of an afterlife is so strong that worldly life becomes meaningless.

This idea denies the importance or the ultimate meaning of life. Still, I believe that it is important to spend this life wholeheartedly while remaining within ethical boundaries. Sharpe and Bryant (2005, p.130) raise the concern in their book: Does the success of science mean that we must abandon the Divine like a plaything we once loved but have now outgrown? Such and other concerns raised by the authors make us ponder upon the relationship between science and religion. This course has, thus, impacted my understanding of science and religion to a great extent because I have been able to understand how science has proven what religious scriptures mentioned many hundred years ago.

I have understood that science and religion do not stand far apart; instead, they strengthen each other’s claims and findings. I have understood that Diving power can never be put in the background or can never be forgotten, because it is the Divine that is in full control, and science is only proving what the Divine allows it to.