Tag Archives: Scientism

A Guide to Reality, Part 10

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Chapters 5 and 6 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality are all about morality. In chapter 5, he lays out what he calls the “bad news”: there is no “cosmic value” to human life and moral questions have no correct answers. Rosenberg explicitly endorses ethical nihilism:

Real moral disputes can be ended in lots of ways. by voting, by decree, by fatigue of the disputants, by the force of examples that changes social mores. But they can never really be resolved by finding the correct answers. There are none….All anyone can really find are the answers that they like [96].

To be completely consistent, Rosenberg would probably have to admit that there is no “bad” anything, not even news. Since, on his view, “physics fixes all the facts” and there is nothing truly good or bad in the world at all. After all, one quark is just the same as another.

Rosenberg explains that nihilism isn’t the same as relativism or skepticism. It’s not the case that ethical views can be correct at some times and not at others, or that we can never know for sure which ethical views are right or wrong. Nihilism doesn’t even mean that “everything is permitted”, since nothing is morally “permitted” or “forbidden”:

[All moral judgments] are based on false, groundless presuppositions. Nihilism says that the whole idea of “morally permissible” is untenable nonsense. [Nihilism] can hardly be accused of holding that “everything is morally permissible”. That, too, is untenable nonsense [97].

Nothing at all is morally valuable in itself  (“intrinsically”) or even as a means to something that is.

Notice, however, that Rosenberg isn’t a nihilist about everything. At least, he gives the strong impression that he believes some ideas are true and some are false, and some beliefs are justified and some aren’t. But it’s generally accepted that truth and justification are “normative” concepts just as much as “right” and “wrong”, i.e., they are value-laden. True statements are those which “correctly” describe some state of affairs, while justified beliefs are those that have “good” reasons for believing them. But physics has nothing to say about correct descriptions or good reasons.

In the rest of chapter 5, Rosenberg offers an argument for the truth of ethical nihilism. He begins with a version of the famous question Plato asked in his Euthyphro dialogue: If our favorite moral rule (whatever it happens to be) is both morally correct and favored by God, is it correct because God favors it or does God favor it because it’s correct? Some Christian theologians have tried to deal with the question by invoking the Trinity or by claiming that the question presupposes a misunderstanding of God’s nature, but most people would probably agree that God favors moral rules because they are correct, not the other way around.

Rosenberg, of course, isn’t really interested in a theological version of the question. He brings it up because he thinks it presents an important challenge to his own scientistic position.

He next argues that there is a core set of moral principles common to all cultures. These principles are so common and so obvious, in fact, that they are rarely discussed. For example, we all agree that parents should protect their children; self-interest is acceptable until it becomes selfishness; and it’s wrong to punish people at random. Rosenberg thinks this core morality is the product of millions of years of human evolution (which sounds right to me, too).

He then asks a Euthyphro-like question: did evolution result in our core morality because it’s the correct morality, or is it the correct morality because it resulted from evolution?

Is natural selection so smart that it was able to filter out all the wrong, incorrect, false core moralities and end up with the only one that just happens to be true? Or is it the other way around: Natural selection filtered out all but one core morality, and winning the race is what made the last surviving core morality the right, correct, true one [109].

This question seems more difficult to answer than the theological version. Rosenberg, in fact, argues that the question has no answer. On one hand, evolution is blind, so there was no way for evolution to “know” which morality is correct. Furthermore, evolution has resulted in common views and practices that don’t seem ethical at all, like patriarchy and xenophobia. For that matter, the fact that religion is so common implies that evolution is good at generating false (but useful) beliefs.

On the other hand, just because our core morality resulted from evolution doesn’t make it right. Lots of things have evolved that we’d be better off without (like using the same anatomical feature to eat and breathe). More fundamentally, Rosenberg suggests that there is nothing morally right about having children who tend to survive and have other children, which is the principal thing natural selection makes happen.

But if our core morality isn’t correct because it evolved, and it didn’t evolve because it’s correct, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that our morality isn’t correct at all. In other words, morality isn’t true. It’s merely useful:

Scientism cannot explain the fact that when it comes to the moral core, fitness and correctness seem to go together. But neither can it tolerate the unexplained coincidence. There is only one alternative. We have to give up correctness…

Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts – the facts about us, our psychology and our morality…The biological facts can’t guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true or correct one. If the biological facts can’t do it, then nothing can. No moral core is right, correct, true. That’s nihilism. And we have to accept it [113].

We might immediately object that the biological facts might not justify morality, but the social facts do. Rosenberg claims that lower-level facts, like the biological, determine higher-level facts, like the psychological. That may indeed be true (I think it is anyway), but isn’t it likewise the case that psychological facts determine social facts, which in turn determine ethical facts? If there are ethical facts (if ethical evaluations can have truth values – which is, by the way, a controversial view among philosophers), aren’t those facts determined by lower-level facts as well?

Those who think ethical statements can be true or false would probably argue that evolution has generated morality, but moral disagreement occurs because we simply haven’t figured out what all the ethical facts are. We know some ethical facts (it’s wrong to hurt people at random and other elements of Rosenberg’s core morality) but not others (is paternalism good in some cases? how about euthanasia?). 

I’ll end for now with the comment that philosophical arguments, even interesting ones like Rosenberg’s, hardly ever destroy the opposition. They almost always lead to more arguments. 

In our next installment, we’ll proceed to chapter 6, in which Rosenberg argues that nihilism is nothing to worry about, since nihilism can be nice. 

A Guide to Reality, Part 9

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Alex Rosenberg begins chapter 4 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by pointing out how wasteful biological processes are. For example, a frog or fish may lay thousands or even millions of eggs and only produce a few offspring. Many organisms go through an entire life cycle without having any offspring at all. In addition, 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, partly as the result of various prehistoric cataclysms (like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Rosenberg says this is what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “a lot of order relentlessly turned into entropy” [75]: 

Can any process produce entropy as fast as natural selection?… Build a lot of complicated devices out of simpler things and then destroy all of them except the few you need to build more such devices… [Adaptations] persistently get more complicated and so use even more energy to build and maintain themselves…. Any process competing with natural selection as the source of adaptations has to produce adaptations from non-adaptations and every one of the adaptations it produces will have to be rare, expensive and wasteful [77].

However, Rosenberg’s main thesis in this chapter is that it’s logically impossible to reconcile God and Darwin (although many have tried). He begins with the traditional idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent (aside from being unable to perform impossible tasks like creating a rock so heavy He or She can’t lift it). Rosenberg also assumes for the sake of argument that God intended to create us or something like us “in His image”.

So, assuming that God knows everything, can do anything, and wanted us to exist, how can we harmonize God and evolution? The common approach is to suggest that God used evolution to make us, either by kicking off the process long ago, knowing it would eventually lead to us, or by manipulating evolution at key points, with the same result. In other words, evolution is part of God’s plan.

A problem with this idea, as Rosenberg explains, is that natural selection is a matter of probabilities. That’s what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Mutations just happen. Organisms that might do very well never get the chance because of some random event (like being eaten while still in the nest). There is no guarantee that particular species will evolve. That’s what science tells us.

If God cooked the evolutionary books, therefore, interfering with the randomness of evolution, Darwin got it wrong. We didn’t evolve in the way the theory predicts. On the other hand, if God let evolution take its random course, He or She didn’t know what the result would be. Our evolution wasn’t planned. Either evolution is a random, probabilistic process or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

My guess is that a proponent of intelligent design or creationism would say “so much for evolution”. It doesn’t work exactly like the biologists say. So what? Or that God in His infinite wisdom can arrange things any way He wants. It’s all way beyond our understanding.

Personally, I don’t have any religious faith that needs to be reconciled with Darwinism. But what if you’re serious about reconciling your faith and your scientific views? Is there a good response to Rosenberg’s argument?

I think there is. My first reaction to Rosenberg’s argument in chapter 4 is that he seems to be ignoring something he discussed in chapter 2, namely, the “multiverse”. As Rosenberg pointed out, many theoretical physicists, perhaps most of them, think that our universe is just one among many, where “many” could be a truly vast number, even an infinite number. But if there really is a multiverse, it seems beyond question that people like us were certain to evolve in universes here or there, given enough time and randomness. God, being omniscient, could have initiated the multiverse knowing full well that people just like us would eventually exist in some of its parts. If anyone would, God would understand that if you roll the dice often enough, you’ll eventually get all the combinations.

Along with Rosenberg, we can accept the fact that evolution is a truly random process in our universe. It might even be a random process in every universe. But if there are enough universes around, pretty much everything will end up evolving somewhere or other many, many times. If that’s God’s plan, there is no conflict with the Second Law or the theory of evolution. God and Darwin can be reconciled.

My other reaction to Rosenberg’s argument is that he should take into account what physicists and many philosophers say about the nature of time. I have trouble with the idea, but the current scientific view of time is that all moments are equally real. Ours is a “block” universe in which there is no past, present or future; there is merely earlier and later. It isn’t clear to me at all how the universe can be probabilistic and physical events truly random if what’s going to happen is just as real as what did happen, but that’s what physicists believe. I guess it just means the past doesn’t fully determine the future at the quantum level, even though future events are just as real as past events. 

Anyway, if anyone can reconcile quantum indeterminacy and a block universe, it’s God. After all, according to the theologians, God is outside of time (whatever that means). God isn’t sitting around, waiting to see what happens. As Rosenberg says, God is “omnipresent”, which means there is nothing in space or time that is off-limits to God. Being omniscient as well, God knows the whole story. That should be especially easy for God if earlier and later events in the story are equally real.

For that reason, even if evolution is random and inherently unpredictable, God is fully informed. Every event, earlier or later, is right there in the history of the universe for God to know about. If what physics tells us is true, it’s a perfect setup for someone like God, being outside of time, to know how evolution eventually leads to people like us. Randomness prevails, Darwinism is correct and God knows the whole story anyway. If indeterminacy and the supposed nature of time are in harmony, so are physics, Darwin and God. 

Rosenberg ends chapter 4 with some remarks on purpose:

Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well….There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the universe. It’s just one damn thing after another. Real purpose has been ruled out by physics [92].

I don’t think he’s right about that, but to avoid repeating myself, we’re going to move on. In our next installment, we’ll consider chapter 5. It’s called “Morality: the Bad News” (the good news supposedly comes later).

A Guide to Reality, Part 8

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Chapter 3 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is called “How Physics Fakes Design”, although Professor Rosenberg would be the first to object that physics isn’t the kind of thing that can fake anything. His point, of course, is that everything that looks like it’s been designed in the natural world (the human eye, for example) is merely the result of activity at the atomic and molecular level, which itself results from subatomic particles doing what they normally do.

In fact, Professor Rosenberg holds that things that really were designed (like your computer) are the result of the very same natural laws. Design, wherever it appears to occur, whether the result of evolution or conscious effort, is just another illusion. 

In this chapter, however, Rosenberg is focused on evolutionary adaptation:

If the physical facts fix all the facts, then the emergence and persistence of adaptations had better result from the laws of physics alone. In fact, they had better be the result of the operation of thermodynamics. Otherwise we will have to admit that there is more going on in the universe than physics tells us there is. Some physicists may be okay with this, but scientism has to reject it. We need to show that the process Darwin discovered starts with zero adaptations and builds them all as the result of the laws of physics alone. (51-52).

Rosenberg begins by offering a statement of the three essential features of the theory of natural selection, as stated by the biologist Richard Lewontin:

  1. There is always variation in the traits of organisms, genes, hives, groups or whatever it is that replicates or reproduces;
  2. The variant traits differ in fitness;
  3. The fitness differences among some of the traits are inherited.

As Rosenberg explains, the replication or reproduction that occurs in nature doesn’t always result in an exact copy being made (mutations occur, for example). He prefers calling this “blind variation” instead of “random variation” to emphasize the point that nature doesn’t cause these variations on purpose. Most such variations yield no benefit. Occasionally, one does. A “beneficial” variation is one that tends to be passed on to the next generation. Given enough time, such variations can result in complex structures like the eye. Evolution occurs.  

Getting back to physics, Rosenberg argues that the second law of thermodynamics (closed systems tend toward disorder) makes natural selection “inevitable” (although at the end of the chapter he says that the second law only makes it “possible”). He admits that the relationship between the second law and natural selection is puzzling, since natural selection seems to increase the amount of order or organization in the world. But he quickly disposes of this objection by pointing out that the second law only requires a “net increase” in disorder over time. Organization will occasionally increase, but almost always at the cost of more disorganization elsewhere (as when organisms grow by digesting food).

Next, in the space of 11 interesting pages, Rosenberg shows how molecular activity, all subject to the second law, results in what he calls “molecular evolution” (69). As he explains it, there is a lot of “thermodynamic noise” in the universe. Molecules are constantly copying themselves, sometimes imperfectly, and forming bonds with each other. These processes result in new molecular forms. Some molecules are more stable than others, meaning that they will tend to last longer in particular chemical environments. As environments change, however, certain molecules become less stable and break apart, while others come together, just as organisms adapt or fail to adapt to changes in their environments. These various processes satisfy the criteria for evolution described above:

Natural selection requires … reproduction, variation and inheritance. It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations. Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction. Any kind of replication is enough (59).

The same goes for variation and inheritance. I would add that these processes must occur in an environment filled with enough matter and energy to keep things moving along. Then, through the course of countless such chemical interactions over immense periods of time, complex organic molecules can develop:

Thermodynamic noise constantly makes more and more different environments – different temperatures, different pH, different concentrations of chemicals, different amounts of water or oxygen or nitrogen, or more complicated acids and bases, magnetic fields and radiation. As a result, there will be a corresponding selection for more and more different molecules (69).

And here we are today, each of us a collection of atoms and molecules, each doing its individual thing:

And so on up the ladder of complexity and diversity that produces assemblies of molecules so big they become recognizable as genes, viruses, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms … and us (69).

Not being a scientist myself, I can’t vouch for Rosenberg’s account of how all this works. However, it all sounds plausible to me. If you read the chapter, you will probably feel the same way.

One closing comment: people who don’t accept the fact that natural selection could eventually lead to a particular complex entity usually argue that such a thing couldn’t possibly happen. It’s inconceivable, they might say, that the human eye, which needs a bunch of parts that work together in order to work at all, could have resulted from a long series of evolutionary steps. It was Charles Darwin himself who offered the human eye as the biggest challenge to his theory. Rosenberg mentions this issue near the beginning of this chapter but doesn’t return to it. His goal in chapter 3 is to show how adaptation gets started, not how far it can go. I think, however, that it’s unwise to bet against science in its pursuit of explanations for mysterious things like the human eye or consciousness. Too many phenomena that used to be mysterious have already been explained.

In our next installment (assuming I stay sufficiently motivated): Good design isn’t just an illusion, it’s also rare, expensive and accidental.

A Guide to Reality, Part 7

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In the final pages of chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg turns to some big, persistent questions he believes are now answered by physics.

– Where did the universe come from, how long ago, and where is it going?

Rosenberg accepts the standard view that the universe began with a “big bang” about 13.75 billion years ago (13.80 according to the latest Wikipedia update). The universe started out extremely hot and extremely dense and has been expanding ever since, creating spacetime, subatomic particles, the elements, stars and galaxies along the way. The expansion seems to be speeding up, but it’s not clear why.

Rosenberg gives the impression that the universe began as a tiny sphere, reaching the size of an orange in much less than a second. The physicist who answers questions at the “Ask a Physicist” website, however, says that the universe didn’t really explode from a tiny point, despite what every documentary and planetarium show implies. He says we should think of the early universe as being like an infinite, very hot, very dense rubber sheet that suddenly began to stretch (although he admits that it’s hard to picture something infinite becoming larger without doing the math). 

One aspect of the big bang that’s always bothered me is its location. Physicists often imply that it didn’t have a location, since spacetime didn’t exist before the big bang occurred. Rosenberg, however, says there is a small region of space where the cosmic background radiation is more intense than anywhere else. He refers to this as “the source of the big bang”. The “Ask a Physicist” physicist says that the oldest light we can detect came from somewhere 46 billion light-years away, much further away than the 14 light-years we would expect from the age of the universe (the difference is the effect of cosmic expansion). So if there is a region of space some 46 billion light-years away that appears to have been the location of the big bang, I have dibs on running the first snack bar and gift shop.

– Where did the big bang come from?

Rosenberg favors one of the leading theories:

The best current theory suggests that our universe is just one universe in a “multiverse” – a vast number of universes, each bubbling up randomly out of the foam on the surface of the multiverse, like so many bubbles in the bathwater, each one the result of some totally random event.

Of course, I have no idea whether the multiverse theory is correct, but it doesn’t seem right to assume that whatever happens in the multiverse is totally random. Most physicists believe that events at the quantum level in our universe are random, but others think that there might be non-random causes underlying the quantum level. Even if quantum events in our universe are random, why assume randomness to be the rule in other universes or in the larger multiverse? Maybe randomness or apparent randomness is simply a feature of the universe we live in.

Rosenberg is certain that everything that happens at the quantum level in our universe, everything that happened in the pre-big bang universe, everything that happened before that in the multiverse, and even everything that is happening in the multiverse right now is fundamentally random. But this seems like conjecture on his part, especially since nobody knows what physical laws were in effect before the big bang or are in effect in the multiverse (if such a thing even exists). 

– Why is there something rather than nothing?

Some philosophers, scientists and theologians consider this to be the deepest question of all. According to Rosenberg, the answer is:

No reason at all. It’s just another quantum event. What science and scientism tell those who hanker for more is “Get over it!”

If Rosenberg is simply telling us what today’s best science has to say about the origin of all existence, he’s probably right. Either there has always been something (there never was a first cause or a prime mover) or one day something simply happened to pop into existence. Rosenberg’s project, however, is both to explain what science tells us and to convince us that scientism provides the answers we need to live without illusions (“the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything” and “science provides all the significant truths about reality”). I think it would be more rational to confess that we don’t know and may never know why there is something rather than nothing. Science might be the most reliable way to secure knowledge, but it hasn’t given us knowledge of everything.

– What is the purpose of the universe?

As should be expected by now, Rosenberg’s answer is short and to the point. There isn’t any purpose to the universe at all. He points out that physicists have been tremendously successful at explaining natural phenomena without resorting to purposes (what philosophers call “teleological” explanations). Smoke doesn’t rise because its purpose is to get higher. Rosenberg is sure that the universe wasn’t created as someone’s science experiment and we aren’t all living in some kind of enormous virtual reality contraption. He’s probably right, but it seems to me that he’s going beyond science here. The best that can be said in support of his position is that, according to the best science we have, the universe functions without purpose. Contemporary physicists don’t need to invoke purpose or purposes to explain what happens in the universe. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that future physicists will need to invoke purpose to explain why there is a universe, assuming that they are ever able to come up with an explanation at all.

– Why does the universe have the laws of nature and the physical parameters that make intelligent life possible?

It’s often pointed out that if the laws of nature or the basic physical parameters (like the charge on an electron) were slightly different, the stuff we’re made of couldn’t exist, so neither would we. Physicists have come up with different explanations for this fact of life (the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin offered a theory called “cosmological natural selection” in his book The Life of the Cosmos). Of course, some thinkers have concluded that God must have designed things this way to make a nice home for people like you and me. Having accepted the multiverse theory as the best theory we have, however, Rosenberg concludes that we’re just lucky. Given that a multitude of universes have arisen from the multiverse, it stands to reason that some of them are like ours. We won the cosmic lottery. 

Maybe he’s right (although some days I don’t feel like a winner). Personally, I’m reserving judgment.

Coming up in part 8: “How Physics Fakes Design”.

A Guide to Reality, Part 6

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In the rest of chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg explains the second law of thermodynamics and briefly addresses some of humanity’s “persistent questions” (such as “does the universe have a purpose?”). His account of the second law is much less controversial than his answers to those big, long-standing questions.

The second law of thermodynamics is usually summed up, somewhat inaccurately, as “entropy or disorder always increases”. Rosenberg, however, begins with this description:

The second law tells us that in any region of space left to itself, differences in the amount of energy will very, very, very probably even out until the whole region is uniform in energy, in temperature, in disorder…. In our universe, the arrangement of everything goes from more improbable distributions (with more useful energy) to less improbable ones (with less useful energy). And the same goes for any self-contained part of the universe (28-31).

In other words, everything that somehow became organized will eventually fall apart (which is one reason why long-abandoned houses invariably look worse than occupied ones). An organized system is unlikely. Energy must be applied to create it and, without further energy being added to the system, it will sooner or later revert to the much more likely state of being disorganized.

Consider, for example, the atoms and molecules that make up the Eiffel Tower. It’s much less likely that they ended up being arranged in that shape than if they were randomly spread around here and there:

The most probable distribution of energy and disorder in the universe is the completely even distribution of everything….[That] is the state toward which, according to the second law, everything is moving, some places slower, some places faster, but almost inexorably. This evening-out of things – from molecules to galaxies – from less probable to more probable distributions is the rule of the universe (31).

Increasing disorder isn’t completely guaranteed, however, which is why Rosenberg says “almost inexorably”. As he explains, the second law merely means that the tendency toward disorder is extremely, extremely probable. For example, when you pour cream in your coffee, the two liquids quickly mix together. But there is nothing in the laws of physics that prohibits the cream from spelling “Good Morning” when you drop it in.

So why are there so many unlikely, highly-organized clumps of matter around (like us)? Despite what some evolution-deniers think, these clumps aren’t counterexamples to the second law. Nor are they bizarre but permissible, random bits of organization:

These are regions of the universe in which the maintenance of order is being paid for by using much more energy to produce [and maintain] the orderly things than the amount of order they produce or store. Each region of local order is part of a bigger region in which there is almost always a net increase in entropy…. Most biological order is preserved for long periods, but at the cost of vast increases in disorder elsewhere (32).

Physicists believe that the universe began in a state of incredibly extreme heat and density. Rosenberg says that this primordial state was both highly unlikely and highly organized, although “organized” might not be the best word.

If everything in the pre-Big Bang universe was evenly distributed (unlike all the molecules in the neighborhood of, for example, the Eiffel Tower), it seems odd to say that it was organized at all. It’s not as if there was some cold, thinly-populated, disorganized space different from the hot, dense stuff, waiting to be filled up. The dense stuff that existed at that point was All There Was. Unless it had some internal structure, we might as well say it wasn’t organized at all. At any rate, the universe as a whole has been falling apart (moving toward perfect equilibrium) ever since the Big Bang, despite the fact that here and there stars and galaxies eventually came to be.

Somewhat controversially, Rosenberg suggests that the second law also explains why time appears to have a “direction”:

Hard to believe, but the second law is where the direction of time, its asymmetry, comes from. It cannot come from anywhere else in physics. By process of elimination, the time order of events from earlier to later is a consequence of the second law…. None of the basic laws of physics [allow us to tell which way is past and which way is future] except for one: the second law of thermodynamics. It makes a difference between earlier times and later times: the later it gets, the more disorder, or entropy, there is (33-35).

On the other hand, another philosopher, Adrian Bardon, argues in A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time that the second law can’t explain the apparent direction of time. The second law is merely probabilistic, as Rosenberg admits. Increasing entropy is extremely, extremely likely, but not absolutely guaranteed, even for the universe as a whole. But the direction of time, if it’s real, is supposed to be unchanging, not probabilistic. Bardon concludes that the direction of time can’t be the same as the one-way, thermodynamic “direction” suggested by the second law. He thinks the fact that these two “directions” appear to go the same way is just a striking coincidence.

This brings us to Rosenberg’s brief answers to a few of those big, persistent questions. This post being so long already, however, I’ll end for now with a brief summary of his conclusions:

Where did the Big Bang come from? We don’t know, but the best current theory is that it randomly emerged from the “multiverse”. Our universe is just one of many.

Well, why is there a “multiverse” then? There’s no reason for it to exist. It just does. Get over it already!

But isn’t there some purpose to the universe? No, there isn’t any purpose to it at all.

But why then does the universe have the physical laws and parameters that allow intelligent life to exist? Given the vast number of universes popping into existence, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of them end up being like this one. Somebody had to get a winning ticket in the cosmic lottery. It happened to be us.

In our next installment: Oh, really?