Article  Purposeful universe?

Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-our-universe-...ithout-god

EXCERPTS (Philip Goff): This all changed a mere five years ago when I arrived as a faculty member at Durham University, where I was asked to teach philosophy of religion. It was a standard undergraduate course: you teach the arguments against God, and you teach the arguments for God, and then the students are invited to decide which case was stronger and write an essay accordingly.

So I taught the arguments against God, based on the difficulty of reconciling the existence of a loving and all-powerful God with the terrible suffering we find in the world. As previously, I found them incredibly compelling and was reconfirmed in my conviction that there is almost certainly no God.

Then I taught the arguments for God’s existence. To my surprise, I found them incredibly compelling too! In particular, the argument from the fine-tuning of physics for life couldn’t be responded to as easily as I had previously thought (more on this below).

This left me in quite a pickle. For me, philosophy isn’t just an abstract exercise. I live out my worldview, and so I find it unsettling when I don’t know what my worldview is. Fundamentally, I want the truth, and so I don’t mind changing my mind if the evidence changes. But here I was with seemingly compelling evidence pointed in two opposing directions! I lost a lot of sleep during this time.

[...] One of the most fascinating developments in modern science is the surprising discovery of recent decades that the laws of physics are fine tuned for life.

[...] The most common response online to fine-tuning worries is known as ‘the anthropic response’: if the universe hadn’t had the right numbers for life, we wouldn’t be around to worry about it, and so we shouldn’t be surprised to find fine-tuning...

[...] I often find, when I discuss the fine-tuning on Twitter, people express a sentiment that it’s brave to boldly accept something so improbable, like you’re not scared to take it on. But it’s not brave to believe highly improbable things, it’s irrational. In my view, a commitment to cosmic purpose is the only rational response to the evidence of current science.

[...] God provides an explanation of fine-tuning, but a very poor one...

[...] Fortunately, there are other possibilities. Thomas Nagel has defended the idea of teleological laws: laws of nature with goals built into them. Rather than grounding cosmic purpose in the desires of a creator, perhaps there just is a natural tendency towards life inherent in the universe, one that interacts with the more familiar laws of physics in ways we don’t yet understand...

[...] For some, the idea of purpose without a mind directing it makes no sense. An alternative possibility is a non-standard designer, one that lacks the ‘omni’ qualities – all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good – of the traditional God...

[...] A supernatural designer comes with a parsimony cost. As scientists and philosophers, we aspire to find not just any old theory that can account for the data but the simplest such theory. All things being equal, it’d be better not to have to believe in both a physical universe and a non-physical supernatural designer.

For these reasons, I think overall the best theory of cosmic purpose is cosmopsychism, the view that the universe is itself a conscious mind with its own goals. In fact, this is a view I first entertained in Aeon back in 2017, before deciding that the multiverse, the topic of the next section, was a better option. Having been finally persuaded that the multiverse is a no-go (more on this imminently), I was prompted to explore a more developed cosmopsychist explanation of fine-tuning in my book Why?, and this now seems to me the most likely source of cosmic purpose... (MORE - missing details)

Of course the universe is just right for life as we know it to exist. It’s also just right for earthquakes, tsunamis, all kinds of natural phenomena up to and including asteroids smashing into planets and stars exploding.

How can anyone know if life of a type we’ve never encountered actually put the universe together? Or it’s just one of many of unknown origin? I would think that God by the way we describe him is a different kind of life that can still get around this universe, so was it built for divine life too?

Is it out of the realm of possibilities that there’s a multiverse out there and our universe has conditions where life could be placed & preserved by some entity unknown to us? Just trying to give universe another purpose, house life instead of create it. Maybe we’re in the best available universe, which isn’t saying much when one considers how violent & dangerous a place it is.

I guess I’ll never understand how an argument for God trumps scientific evidence. Said it before, if you’re a theist then you should at least be curious as to how God did it. IMO science could easily take that route, gearing towards proving only a god could have done it.

(Nov 18, 2023 11:28 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Of course the universe is just right for life as we know it to exist. It’s also just right for earthquakes, tsunamis, all kinds of natural phenomena up to and including asteroids smashing into planets and stars exploding.

How can anyone know if life of a type we’ve never encountered actually put the universe together? Or it’s just one of many of unknown origin? I would think that God by the way we describe him is a different kind of life that can still get around this universe, so was it built for divine life too?

Is it out of the realm of possibilities that there’s a multiverse out there and our universe has conditions where life could be placed & preserved by some entity unknown to us? Just trying to give universe another purpose, house life instead of create it. Maybe we’re in the best available universe, which isn’t saying much when one considers how violent & dangerous a place it is.

I guess I’ll never understand how an argument for God trumps scientific evidence. Said it before, if you’re a theist then you should at least be curious as to how God did it. IMO science could easily take that route, gearing towards proving only a god could have done it.

100 strands of twine, do not necessarily have to make 100 ropes. They can all be woven together to create one decent strength rope that is less likely to break than making a countless number of inferior ones. (Thats how I percieve multiworlds theory and parallels, as opposed to infinite numbers of universes that all do things differently which would be absurd.)

As for conditions of the universe (due to the Clockmaker paradigm) a God would be as much a mechanism as the clock would be (Think of it as more a Mechanical Turk)

Namely a god is a machination where it's combined inner unseen workings are actually all the magical thinking fluff mankind likes to fill it with. As a hypothetical unbuilt engine, it's superfluous, capable of anything and everything, however to actually build one... well thats when it all starts to fall apart. There's too many pieces, put together by too many people, all stuck together with pipedreams and fairy dust.

So science has to make do with the small parts of that machination that it understands; a cog here, a spring there.

Quote: Namely a god is a machination where it's combined inner unseen workings are actually all the magical thinking fluff mankind likes to fill it with. As a hypothetical unbuilt engine, it's superfluous, capable of anything and everything, however to actually build one... well thats when it all starts to fall apart. There's too many pieces, put together by too many people, all stuck together with pipedreams and fairy dust.

Agree with you on that. I thought the whole article was leaning more towards there being a god. Maybe the author is closing in on the average life span number, idk.

When someone spins the ‘universe must have a purpose’ thought then I can’t see it being nature’s idea unless as this guy concludes, the universe/nature is alive. Throw God into the mix and were up to 3 living things that can exist as a life-form, a universe, a god, and ordinary cellular life as we know it. I figure that could make us and god parasites. Ghosts, demons, angels, souls, spirits, fairies and whatever else may also be classified as life being able to survive this universe. Some folks aren’t even sure if we are real or if anything is. Maybe life science is completely off the rails.

Quote:Even if there is a fundamental drive towards the good, without an omnipotent God, we have no guarantee that cosmic purpose will ultimately overcome the arbitrary suffering of the world. But it can be rational, to an extent, to hope beyond the evidence. I don’t know whether human beings will be able to deal with climate change; in fact, a dispassionate assessment of the evidence makes it more likely perhaps that we won’t. Still, it’s rational to live in hope that humans will rise to the challenge, and to find meaning and motivation in that hope. Likewise, I believe it’s rational to live in hope that a better universe is possible.

We are loners stranded on a rock in a vastly chaotic and indifferent universe. What little we can do will not have much effect on the outcome of all the events that are transpiring here. But we hold in our breasts a miraculous flame--of consciousness and creativity that can leave things better than before. That might be the only foothold we have on the prospect of some cosmic purpose. Live in hope for a better tomorrow. Make of your life a triumph of meant-to-beness over blind arbitrary randomness.

Is this apropos?

In an interview in Rolling Stone magazine from April 9, 1987, Allen said: "Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of people, and I said I would prefer to live on in my apartment."

The idea of chaos and randomness can lead to the belief that we are the targets of a cruel cosmic joke which is in actuality part of the illusion of materialism.

According to Langan, the events in our world can instead be determined by non-local dependencies. Such that communication between quantum objects called syntactors and identifiers occurs across time from remote locations.

There is no doubt in my mind that the theological God is real. For I have proven it using logic. As many of you already know.

(Nov 19, 2023 12:38 AM)Magical Realist Wrote:

Quote:Even if there is a fundamental drive towards the good, without an omnipotent God, we have no guarantee that cosmic purpose will ultimately overcome the arbitrary suffering of the world. But it can be rational, to an extent, to hope beyond the evidence. I don’t know whether human beings will be able to deal with climate change; in fact, a dispassionate assessment of the evidence makes it more likely perhaps that we won’t. Still, it’s rational to live in hope that humans will rise to the challenge, and to find meaning and motivation in that hope. Likewise, I believe it’s rational to live in hope that a better universe is possible.

We are loners stranded on a rock in a vastly chaotic and indifferent universe. What little we can do will not have much effect on the outcome of all the events that are transpiring here. But we hold in our breasts a miraculous flame--of consciousness and creativity that can leave things better than before. That might be the only foothold we have on the prospect of some cosmic purpose. Live in hope for a better tomorrow. Make of your life a triumph of meant-to-beness over blind arbitrary randomness.

This grim outlook is far from correct. As it is only a superficial view of reality. Reality can and does behave in a non-random and intelligent way. You need not simply surrender to your own ignorance. Might I recommend the reality self-simulation principle by Christopher Langan to change your false perspective? Such an extreme view can be quite detrimental.

I guess that I'm less moved by the "fine tuning" argument than Philip Goff is.

The complaint that I have is this: Suppose we choose a broad functional definition of "life": namely replicators able to exploit their environment to make more of themselves and subject to natural selection. Conceived of that way, there might be any number of very different forms of systems able to perform those functions and satisfy that kind of functional definition.

So sure, our universe will seem to be well "tuned" for our sort of life, because our sort of life originated in this universe under these conditions.

I can imagine other hypothetical possible-universes with other conditions playing host to very different forms of "life". And those exceedingly alien beings might be talking (however they do that, wiggling their antennae, emitting meaningful smells, producing diffraction patterns in their crystal bodies or whatever) about how well "tuned" their universe seems to them to be to host their form of "life".

I can also imagine sterile universes where systems of suitable complexity to perform life's functions can't form. Obviously nobody in those universes will be speculating about fine-tuning.

The universe is also fine tuned for destroying life. Universe enjoys the kill so much that one day it said to itself ‘ I think I’ll create life just for something to destroy’. In this way life has a purpose. It’s difficult to accept, your home trying to murder you, but that’s how the universe gets it’s kicks. The universe’s purpose then is to act on its psychotic tendencies. It has no feelings, is withdrawn and all alone while enduring unimaginable boredom. So much so that destroying life is good therapy.

65 mya the universe got bored with the Reptiles and we all know what happened then, as if life is part of a giant Squid Game. It’s almost proof of life being everywhere in the universe because that keeps it busy hunting elsewhere until next time Earth gets reviewed.

Too easy to cook up a universal purpose idea.