Editor’s word: Over the three months of February, March and April 2025, we have invited guest writer Terence Ho to share with us his philosophical and theological musings and contemplations on the bigger questions and topics of life. Terence will share on his thoughts on the ideas of perfection (February), permanence (March), and existence, life and consciousness (April) in an easily readable and accessible manner. Enjoy!
Credo Special
3 March 2025
“… and they lived happily ever after.” The classic conclusion to a fairy tale connotes a state of enduring happiness. Perfection, after all, requires permanence. A happy state that will end is not a perfect state.
Even children are aware that nothing is forever, but we human beings seem wired to desire permanence and lasting significance. We don’t just live for the present, but always have an eye to the future.
Prolonging Life and Legacy
The most ambitious of the human race have tried to extend their physical lives, indefinitely even. Kings and rulers of yesteryear sought in vain the elixir of life, in the hope of gaining immortality. The first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shih Huang, sent an alchemist across the seas to search for the elixir, while several subsequent Chinese emperors lost their lives or their minds from ingesting poisonous chemicals in purported elixirs.[i]
Since its development in the 1960s, cryonics – the low-temperature freezing of dead human bodies or brains in the hope of future resuscitation – has spawned businesses in the United States, with people willing to fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars to have themselves or their loved ones preserved. American technology billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison, have funded research on the more modest aims of human longevity and delayed ageing.[ii]
For the less well-endowed majority, the desire for permanence is about leaving a legacy. We leave bequests for loved ones; we strive to build a better world and create a better future for our children. Governments, companies and people around the world, cognisant of the threat of climate change, are seeking ways to protect the earth for future generations.
Throughout history, men and women have given up wealth and comfort for ideals and aims that are larger than themselves; there have even been martyrs for political and social causes. The pursuit of ideals over hedonic pleasures and survival may quite possibly make homo sapiens unique among life forms on Earth.
Human beings are evaluative by nature. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, suggests that people have both an “experiencing self” and a “remembering self”. The experiencing self reports pain or pleasure in the moment, while the remembering self evaluates past experiences and uses this as a basis for decision-making. The two selves, according to Kahneman, are often in conflict.[iii]
A body of research on empirical happiness suggests that having children exacts a toll on the self-reported happiness of parents. [iv] This is unsurprising. There are the constraints of child-rearing on personal time and freedom, the tedium of feeding and diaper-changing, and the stress experienced when the kids throw tantrums or fall sick. And yet many parents, in evaluating their lives, do not regret having children, and would do it all over again if given the choice. The subjective evaluation of our lives weighs significance against the hedonic experience of pleasure and pain.
Offspring, societal contributions and achievements are various channels through which human beings may leave a legacy– they help us to live on in the memory of others, and give us the satisfaction of contributing towards something larger than ourselves that will live on after we are gone.
The Futility of Human Endeavour
Unfortunately, lasting significance of any sort is illusive. Few have recollections of their great-grandparents or generations that have come before. Achievements are celebrated today and forgotten tomorrow. Even the central issues and personalities of the day may be relegated to the footnotes of history as time goes by, before fading entirely from memory. The poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley expresses this well:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. [v]
A similar sentiment is found in the Bible: “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall”. (1 Peter 1:24)
With the advent of the Internet and the digital age, it has become much easier to preserve records of our lives than it was in times past where history was etched in stone tablets and monuments. Still, with the daily profusion of data and information, once-significant events will gradually be crowded out of the collective memory, and will become of diminishing relevance to successive generations.
In any case, scientists project that within an estimated 4 billion years, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide and merge with the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy.[vi] Even before this happens, in about 3.5 billion years’ time, the increasing luminosity of our sun will boil off the oceans.[vii] The result will be the near-certain demise of planetary life as we know it. What then will become of human civilisation and all that we have learnt and acquired? Perhaps 3.5 billion years is too distant for most of us to contemplate; perhaps humanity would have found means to bioengineer Earth or traverse galaxies by then, but we can only postpone the end of all things.
For those inclined towards strict naturalism, none of this matters. Human beings are just an assembly of carbon molecules, chemical compounds and proteins, after all. There is nothing beyond the grave. Even when human civilisation winks out of existence, the unfeeling universe will still go on. Humanity may be just a brief, isolated flicker of sentience in the long history of the universe.
This question remains: why do human beings – or at least a large proportion of our species – long for permanence?
The Relationship Instinct
According to a Bible passage, God has “set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). One of the reasons religion has appealed to people through the ages is because it speaks to eternity or the afterlife. Human conceptions of the universe and time have generally fallen into two categories – one where the universe moves in cycles from birth to death and rebirth, and the other where the arrow of time is linear. In the latter model, all of creation finally winds up and dies, or else transits to a state of permanence, often thought to be permanent bliss or perfection.
For our lives to have any significance, there must be a translation from the temporal to the eternal. In the movie Gladiator, Russell Crowe’s titular character exhorts his men before battle, “Brothers, what we do in life… echoes in eternity.” This belief, common in religion, imparts significance to our present lives. For many, it strengthens the resolve to endure hardship and suffering.
In Christianity, the choice made in this life – whether or not to accept Jesus as Saviour – determines one’s eternal state. Jesus himself is said to have entered human history at a moment in time to win deliverance for his people and eternal glory for himself.
Among those who profess a faith, a key draw of eternity and the afterlife is to enjoy relationships with loved ones. Many look forward to reuniting with their deceased family members in the hereafter. It is not just about the continuing to feel, enjoy and to be – but also to be with loved ones. Conversely, death is sorrowful not just because of the loss of individual existence and autonomy, but also because of the severance of relationships death impels. Living forever without anyone to relate to would be a long, lonely existence. But eternity spent with others may be hell unless everyone is truly selfless.
Thus, we circle back to relationships. In Christian belief, the principal relationship that humanity is created for is the relationship with God the Creator. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states, in answer to its very first question, that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
In C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (part of The Chronicles of Narnia), the children Edmund and Lucy are devastated when Aslan (who is the Christ figure in the story) tells them that they will never again return to the land of Narnia.
“‘It isn’t Narnia you know,’ sobbed Lucy. ‘It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?’”[viii]
The reason proffered by Christianity for the human desire for permanence is the intrinsic desire for humanity to be in a relationship with God – it is for this reason man was created, and this is what man longs for in the deep recesses of the soul.
Some describe this as a “God-shaped hole in the heart”, meaning that only God ultimately satisfies. Hedonic pleasures are fleeting, while the glow of achievements fades with the passage of time. Instead, human beings seem wired to glimpse the transcendental in the beauty of music and nature, and the longing for permanence and significance. Beauty, hope and the innate desire for a better place may suggest that there is something beyond the present world. C.S. Lewis wrote:
“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[ix]
[i] Joseph Needham, Ho Ping-Yu Ho and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V, Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
[ii] Megan Miller, “Why Silicon Valley Execs Are Investing Billions to Stay Young,” Robb Report, 9 August 2020, https://robbreport.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/silicon-valleys-tech-elite-is-investing-billions-to-live-longer-2936782/.
[iii] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Ch. 35-37.
[iv] See, for example, Alberto Alesina, Rafael di Tella and Robert MacCulloch, “Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?” Journal of Public Economics 88 (2004): 2009-2042.
[v] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, (London, 1819), 92.
[vi] Ron Cowen, “Andromeda on collision course with the Milky Way,” Nature (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2012.10765
[vii] Matt Williams, “Will Earth Survive When Sun Becomes a Red Giant?” Universe Today, 9 May 2016, https://www.universetoday.com/12648/will-earth-survive-when-the-sun-becomes-a-red-giant/.
[viii] Clive Staples Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Diamond Books, 1996), 188.
[ix] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: MacMillan, 1952)
Terence Ho is an academic who has written books on public policy and governance in Singapore.