Q&A: The Reason for Existence
The Reason for Existence
Question
Who said that the world was created for human beings—and that animals and everything else serve him? Maybe the opposite: perhaps man was created for some particular animal, or for some star. (The common explanation for the existence of the universe is that it exists to serve man—Maimonides and others…)
Answer
Who indeed said so?
By reasoning alone, it would seem that way to me, because man has free choice, and therefore the only thing that is not the handiwork of the Holy One, blessed be He, is human action. But that is only a conjecture.
Discussion on Answer
According to Harari, only monkeys have free choice, because in his view human beings do not. But the fact you mentioned does not indicate free choice in any way. After all, even regarding human beings who behave this way in real life, without any experiments, opinions are divided as to whether they have free choice.
That’s not really an answer to the point.
I mentioned that Yuval Noah Harari said this in one of his university lectures in order to support the factual claim itself and show that this experiment really happened. (I didn’t check the original source, so I’m relying on our friend Yuval, since I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, but I think the data he presents can be relied on.)
The question still stands—according to your view, that free choice does indeed exist, there is no reason not to argue that monkeys also have it. And for the rest, go and see in the body of my first question here.
Not only humans. Monkeys also have free choice. There is an experiment in which they took different monkeys and divided them into pairs. One monkey in the pair gets a banana, and if he eats it, the second monkey next to him gets an electric shock and cries out in pain. Some monkeys ate freely, but there were others that abstained from the bananas. One monkey didn’t eat for 12 days! In the end the experimenters fed him so that he wouldn’t die. (This information is from the lectures of Yuval Noah Harari.) And theoretically, there could be other creatures with greater free choice than ours, or abilities that we cannot even imagine. So what is the reason to think that the world was created for human beings?