Writer Says Universe Can Have a Purpose Even with No God

There seem to be two kinds of people in the world – those who feel strongly that there must be a higher purpose to our existence, and those of us who are perfectly content to make our own purpose.

In an unusual piece that ran in the Scientific American Blogs last week, guest writer Clay Farris Naff suggested that you could have a purpose to the universe without having to invoke any supernatural beings. In A Secular Case for Intentional Creation, he wrote that he would like to see middle ground between the religious view that God created the universe, and the atheist view that the universe came into existence with no purpose.

He suggests someone look the possbility that our universe was intentionally created by aliens. Perhaps entropy was destroying their cosmic neighborhood and in an act of reverence for life, they set off our big bang. He says too little effort has gone into investigating such possibilities:

"Until some evidence arrives, the pursuit of truth through science obliges us to entertain multiple hypotheses. When it comes to cosmic origins, that must surely include consideration of the idea that our Universe was deliberately created with a purpose in mind. Yet little authentically secular effort has gone into it."

A rebuttal soon ran on the same blog here.

Clay Farris Naff is a frequent contributor to the comments section of Planet-of-the-Apes. Still, I would like to respectfully disagree with him about the lack of secular effort. Buckets of money have gone into the search for purpose, thanks to the very deep pockets of the Radnor-based Templeton Foundation. If you're a scientist and you're willing to talk about purpose, there's money to be had. Today the foundation is known for being pro-Christian, but it was looser back in the 1990s and early part of the last decade, before the death of Sir John Templeton.

As I discovered, most of the scientists who took money from them were not religious, and their research projects were genuinely secular.

In 2002, I wrote about million dollar grants given out to scientists willing to say their projects were related to the search for a purpose to the universe. There was no clause saying it had to be a religious purpose. Scientists taking the money were free to seek any evidence for any kind of purpose:

….the money gives the opportunity to focus on the question that intrigues Templeton, as it has philosophers and astronomers for centuries: Is the universe the product of design or accident?

Templeton, 88, two years ago faxed his request for the meaning of it all from his home in the Bahamas to Radnor, home of his Templeton Foundation. The devout Christian sold his mutual fund empire in 1992 for $913 million and now devotes himself to philanthropy and to his quest for common ground between science and religion.

The foundation's executive director, Charles Harper, who is trained in physics and theology, crafted the grant program based on the question, "Is there a fundamental purpose in the cosmos? "

What does "purpose" mean? Harper said his faith - Christianity - holds that God created the universe for a purpose, which is connected to the notion of goodness.

In the years that the program has been running, science has not found any evidence for such a purpose.

In the rest of the piece, I questioned scientists about why they took Templeton's money, and whether they found any insights into the purpose of the universe. One, Stanford's Andre Linde, said he thought his own cosmological ideas were more consistent with Eastern religion than the Western kind. He saw the universe as a patchwork with different laws in different neighborhoods rather than a single entity that could possibly be ruled by one divine being.

Since then, much more Templeton money has been used by scientists to look for purposes – or at least to do research that appears to touch on this question. So far, no one has found credible evidence for design, purpose or intent.

Expanding the notion of a purpose to include non-supernatural aliens sounds very similar to arguments made by proponents of the so-called Intelligent Design movement. There, they were trying to show that this brand of creationism is not necessarily religious. The idea of aliens-as-designers was never taken seriously, however. It came across as a desperate attempt to make creationism sound like science.

Farris Naff calls the atheists' view of the universe, "accidental, purposeless, and doomed."  In my experience, cosmologists find the universe fascinating and mysterious, with or without a purpose. In his writings, Darwin expressed a similar sense of awe in the natural world, even as his own intellectual leap removed the need for a designer.

For an alternative view of the origin of the universe, I liked physicist Lee Smolin's book The Life of the Cosmos. In his vision, universes might reproduce and become subject to a form of natural selection. There is no intent or purpose, divine or otherwise, but there is still plenty of room for wonder.