A Hammer's Purpose

I have a purpose for designing a tool; the tool has no intrinsic purpose. A chairs purpose, for example, depends on the intention of the person in the presence of a chair. Chairs in a museum lobby probably exist for people to sit in but the chairs on display in the museum restrict the purposes of the museum visitors who want to exploit a chairs purpose.

The purpose of marriage is procreation. No. Each married pair have purposes and the institution of marriage promotes or restricts those purposes. Marriages, like hammers and chairs promote a vast number of useful and interesting behaviors in humans and their pets.

Well, that is only for pagans who ignore the creator's purpose and sit on a hammer or drive a nail with a chair. But even with an artifact like the Antikythera Mechanism which took archeologists decades to reverse engineer, the multiple purposes of multiple users vary. For a merchant selling the device to navigators or other merchants, the mechanism is an item of commerce. To the craftsman making the mechanism, the purpose of the mechanism is wages. Although I am interested in the purpose of the artificer; the mechanism loose in the world attaches to many, many human purposes.

But you were put on earth for a reason. God wanted your parents to have higher grocery bills.

"How will I pay for all this damn Captain Crunch?"