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

The two arguments I was finding compelling – the fine-tuning argument for ‘God’, and the argument from evil and suffering against ‘God’ – were not actually opposed to each other. The argument from evil and suffering targets a very specific kind of God, namely the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of the universe. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument supports something much more generic, some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness towards life that might not be attached to a supernatural designer. So if you go for cosmic purpose but not one rooted in the desires of an Omni-God, then you can have your cake and eat it by accepting both arguments.

BK-ic GR MIND OF NATR GD

The former option is wildly improbable; on a conservative estimate, the odds of getting finely tuned constants by chance is less than 1 in 10-136. The latter option amounts to a belief that something at the fundamental level of reality is directed towards the emergence of life. I call this kind of fundamental goal-directedness ‘cosmic purpose’.

COSMIC ARROW

Fine-tuning being a fluke is massively more improbable than bank thieves getting a combination right by chance

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. The philosopher John Leslie devised a vivid thought experiment (here presented in a slightly modified version) to show where the anthropic response goes wrong. Suppose you’re about to be executed by five expert marksmen at close range. They load up, take aim, fire… but they all miss. Again, they load up, take aim, fire… again, they all miss. This happens time and time again for more than an hour. Now, you could think: ‘Well, if they had hit me, I wouldn’t be around to worry about it, and so I shouldn’t be surprised that they all missed.’ But nobody would think this. It clearly needs explanation why these expert shooters repeatedly missed at close range. Maybe the guns have been tampered with, or maybe it’s a mock execution. Likewise, while it’s of course trivially true that, if the universe wasn’t compatible with life, we wouldn’t be around to reflect on the matter, it still needs explaining why, of all the numbers in physics that might have come up, a universe ended up with one in the narrow range compatible with life.

COSMIC POINTER

But aren’t there many incredibly improbable things we accept as just chance? My existence depends on an incredibly finely tuned set of circumstances: my parents having met, and their parents having met, and so on back to the start of humanity. Indeed, if a different sperm had fertilised the egg that produced me, I would not be here. It can induce a sense of vertigo to reflect on how unlikely it is that one should ever have existed. And yet, while I believe there is a cosmic directedness towards life, my ego is not (yet!) inflated enough to suppose that there was a cosmic directedness towards PG coming into being. What’s the difference?

The difference is that life has objective value, and hence is an outcome of significance independently of it being the outcome that happened to occur. A universe in which there are plants and animals, and people who can fall in love and contemplate their own existence, is much greater than a universe in which there is only hydrogen. In this sense, the numbers consistent with such valuable happenings are special in a way that other possible values of the constants are not. In contrast, there’s nothing particularly special about PG existing, as opposed to whoever would have been here if, say, my father had married someone else.

To make the point clearer with an analogy, contrast the case in which some random person, Jo Bloggs, wins the lottery, with the case in which Mr Rich, the partner of the lottery boss, wins the lottery. Jo Bloggs is noteworthy only as a result of winning the lottery, and hence we can accept that her win was a fluke. This is a bit like the case of me being born as opposed to some other random individual. But there is a significance to Mr Rich independently of the fact that he won: he’s the partner of the lottery boss. And so, when, of all the people who might have won, Mr Rich wins, we suspect foul play. Likewise, when, of all the possible numbers that might have turned up in physics, we have a rare combination that allows for objective value to emerge, we rightfully suspect that this is more than just fluke.

Why? focus on the work of the great philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne in responding to the problem of evil. Swinburne argues that there are goods that exist in our universe that would not exist in one with less suffering. If we just lived in some kind of Disneyland-esque world with no danger or risk, then there would be no opportunities to show real courage in the face of adversity, or to feel deep compassion for those who suffer. The absence of such serious moral choices would be a great cost, according to Swinburne.

DSNEY MRLOW SCENE

Maybe our limited designer feels awful about how messy such a process inevitably is, but it was that or nothing

Likewise, even if Gd has some good purpose in mind for allowing natural disasters, it would infringe the rights to health and security of the individuals impacted by such disasters.

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

TELEOLOGICAL COSMOS OR LON

LTD DESIGNER

OR KRMA

LTD GD

better option is a limited designer who has made the best universe they are able to make. Perhaps the designer of our universe would have loved to create intelligent life in an instant, avoiding all the misery of natural selection, but their only option was to create a universe from a singularity, with the right physics, so that it will eventually evolve intelligent life. Maybe our limited designer feels awful about how messy such a process inevitably is, but it was that or nothing.

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.

overall the best theory of cosmic purpose is cosmopsychism, the view that the universe is itself a conscious mind with its own goals.

respecting the total evidence requirement renders the inference to a multiverse invalid

zibu symbol inner peace