Author's Introduction
- If you don’t believe in the God of the Bible or the Quran, then you must think we live in a meaningless universe, right? People get stuck in dichotomies of thought. If you don’t like Soviet communism, then you must be in favour of US-style capitalism. Well, not if there are political opinions other than those two (which of course there are). Another dichotomy is between traditional religion and secular atheism. Whose team are you on, Richard Dawkins’s or the Pope’s? Over a long period of time, I’ve come to think that both these worldviews are inadequate, that both have things about reality that they can’t explain. In my book "Goff (Philip) - Why? The Purpose of the Universe" (2023), I explore the much-neglected middle ground between God and atheism.
I was raised religiously, although the Catholicism of my parents was more about getting the community together than accepting dogmas. From an early age, the secular world all around me was much more of an influence than Sunday school, and by the age of 14 I self-identified as an atheist. It never occurred to me that there was a credible option between these identities: the religious and the secular. Of course, I was aware of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ category, but I was socialised to think this option was unserious and essentially ‘fluffy thinking’. And thus I remained a happy atheist for the next 25 years.
- 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.
Author's Conclusion
- The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has argued that, if the universe has no purpose, then life is meaningless. Along similar lines, the atheist philosopher David Benatar proposes that, in the absence of cosmic purpose, life is so meaningless that we are morally required to stop reproducing so that the human race dies out. At the other extreme, it is common for humanists to argue that cosmic purpose would be irrelevant to the meaning of human existence.
- I take a middle way between these two extremes. I think human life can be very meaningful even if there is no cosmic purpose, so long as we engage in meaningful activities, such as kindness, creativity and the pursuit of knowledge. But, if there is cosmic purpose, then life is potentially more meaningful. We want our lives to make a difference. If we can contribute, even in some tiny way, to the good purposes of the whole of reality, this is about as big a difference as we can imagine making.
- There are no certain answers to these big questions of meaning and existence. It’s possible the abundant evidence for cosmic purpose in our current theories will not be present in future theories. 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.
Author Narrative
- Philip Goff is professor in philosophy at Durham University, UK. He blogs at Conscience and Consciousness, and his work has been published in The Guardian and Philosophy Now, among others. He is the author of Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2017), Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019) and Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023), and the co-editor of Is Consciousness Everywhere? Essays on Panpsychism (2022).
Notes
- This is a plug for the author's latest book - "Goff (Philip) - Why? The Purpose of the Universe" - which I've just purchased.
- There are a great many Comments made on Aeon - and some of them sensible, though I've not read them in detail.
- My own comments to this paper await reading these.
- Then I'll read the book!
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two"
- For the full text see Aeon: Goff - Purposeful universe.
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