Trees exist. Animals exist. Habitat is a construct that means something perhaps only to humans.
This is the perfect ideology. I’ve always searched for some greater truth (yes, in my long, long life so far). But this is it, and funnily enough it even applies to religious ideologies. Living for the sake of others and finding real happiness there, nothing too complicated about that.
We have what purpose we choose to give ourselves. That’s what we do; we define meanings, we give purposes. Other things have a purpose; we give purpose. I prefer to have no purpose save what I give to myself, and I find the idea of a purposeless universe more pleasant that one where we are all the toys of supernatural tyrant.
I don’t want a whole theological debate, but why is God always portrayed as a megalomaniac and a tormentor? Maybe we were just intended to reciprocate His love and live in harmony, until we discovered Satan. Who then is the real tyrant, God or ourselves?
Since God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient, God. Everything is his responsibility because he planned it that way beforehand.
And even if you don’t buy the whole omni- thing, humans are poorly designed in many ways, including psychologically. We aren’t built as utopian creatures. And the world in general isn’t consistent with an even moderately benevolent creator.
Why is Satan such a foreign concept when we’re pretending God exists? Satan would have the capabilities of manipulating ignorant man’s free will. Man was vulnerable in the growth stage, before individual perfection, thereby allowing Lucifer to easily fall from his position as archangel to malefactor and take man down with him.
I think a benevolent God would offer free will, fully aware of the possible consequences. A tyrannical God would give us the function of a lobotomy patient, receiving love and not even being able to recognize it. Could we blame God for our own failure?
If God is omniscient, Satan too is just another of his puppets. It’s not logically consistent for an entity to have at once complete knowledge of all possibilities and the power to change or choose among them freely and yet somehow not be the arbiter of everything, “free” will included. The only consistent solution is that either A) God is not all-powerful and all-knowing, or B) God is a prick. Or there’s that classic standby: C) God’s motives are inscrutable to mortals, which basically boils down to “God is indistinguishable from an undirected universe.” Which, strictly speaking, I think is rationally preferable to the assumptions underlying the first two options, since even the premise that God is a prick requires a heavy dose of anthropocentric thinking.
Of course, I prefer option D) there are no gods except those we create to amuse ourselves in our infinite folly. 
As for purpose? It’s one of those things that exists only in our heads. That doesn’t make it any less a real or valuable thing, but it’s important that we not forget where it really comes from.
So why would this God create a being (Lucifer) that would eventually deceive the majority of Mankind (whom He proclaims to love wholeheartedly) and drag us into eternal hell? He knew this before ever creating any of it.
On top of this, He makes the universe in such a way as to appear He doesn’t exist. Why?
If Satan is some part of His ingenious plan, that we are blind to, the least he could do, if we are deceived by Satan, is to wink us out of existence – Not suffer an eternity of misery. Doesn’t get any crueler than that.
None of that adds up, no matter which way you slice it.
Purpose, meaning, fate, all these sorts of words applied to your life — your existence — are meaningless. There’s no grand plan. No guarantees. You will one day be forgotten, immaculately.
The only true mystery is, will your consciousness somehow resurface in this universe (or the next, if there is one) someday, somehow. Highly unlikely, but hey… you became aware in this body, in this time, in this place… why might it not happen again? Has it happened before?
But even if, as unlikely as it is, it does happen, it can’t continue forever, can it? Eventually the lights will go out for good.
Pet rocks.
Dood, Pet Rocks have purpose. To make their inventor rich as all fuck.
Purpose presupposes value, and value presupposes a valuer. In the OP’s example of a tree, the tree can have many different purposes to a human (wood, shade, esthetics, etc.), which are different than its purposes to a bird or monkey or parasite. But if there’s nobody/nothing around to value the tree, consciously or not, what is its purpose?
In fact, the tree simply is.
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around, does it have a purpose?
Well maybe because he created a world and set up a rule that he knew people could not follow, then killed off almost the entire population with a giant flood, then gave rules to Moses that includes “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me”. Maybe it was just a bad day.
Nothing inherently has meaning or purpose, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They exist, as far as we know, in about 6 billion blobs of grey matter on a tiny little rock floating in space. We don’t look outwards and find meaning, we are the very source of meaning and purpose for the entire universe.
And that means something pretty special, I think. (But then I would think that…)
I think we can’t answer this question. Maybe some things have a pupose but we don’t know which. I would say everthing has a kind of purpose, some things more and some less but they’re here for a certain reason. But the question is good, I think you could talk about it for hours and wouldn’t come to a result.
Yes we can, and it has been answered.
The OP is a bit messed up about what constitutes a purpose.
The tree does not have a purpose to provide habitat for animals.
The tree exists. Simple as that. That animals use it as a habitat does not give the tree purpose. It has not grown big, with foliage and all, in order that animals can live there. It has grown because that is what trees do * in order* to get more sunlight.
You have to differentiate between use and purpose. Surely a tree can have many uses, but “purpose” implies a consciousness . . . either its own or something external. If I deliberately plant a tree, obviously I have a purpose in mind. But if a tree is growing in an uninhabited location, it still might have uses (to various critters), but it still lacks purpose.
After the first comma it’s pretty straightforward, but the first part irks me. For one thing, people seem to misunderstand what omniscience really is. With both inherent and total omniscience, knowledge is limited by what CAN BE known. God cannot see the future, because the future does not exist. It is a human concept. He may be able to predict possible outcomes and determine the most likely, but even we can do that. Why would he deliberately condemn his children to inescapable suffering? If a mother sees her son go down the unfortunate path of hard drug use, she can intervene to some extent, but in reality the choice is entirely up to the son. The only way for good to exist is for a man to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, and that doesn’t mean we would inevitably sacrifice others for the sake of ourselves, it’s just the way things turned out. It just seems that man blames his own weakness on God’s “failure”. Whether or not you believe in God, this comes across as a perfect example of our selfishness. Am I right or wrong?
I’ve managed to for some forty years.
There is no need for something to have a purpose in order to exist. Existence just is. As for needing there to be a purpose in order to feel good, well that’s just kinda too bad. “Remember to be here now”, is all I would have to say.