Happy? Why or why not? Could the answer be rooted in your acceptance or rejection of purpose, either cosmic purpose or personal? Allow me another route. Could an atheist or nihilist find happiness in a meaningless world?
You know, if you ask either, you might get a “Yes,” but would that affirmation be the product of pride? “I’m not a happy person” might be tough to admit in public. Your response could be, “Geez, there’e no pleasing some people,” “Don’t be a stick in the mud,” or “Who cares? That’s your problem, and I don’t need to waste my time on your pessimism and self pity.”
Now, if you’re a happy nihilist, don’t take offense that I suggest happiness does not lie in your life path. And if you believe in unbelief or disbelief, likewise (Oxymoronic, I know).
Atheists, and nihilists—and some existentialists and one or two agnostics, too—aside, most people probably see a role for cause and purpose in their lives. Surely you know, if you have not done so yourself, people who frequently both “discover” meaning in events and actively seek meaning in their lives. Others just willy nilly ascribe it on assumption. The questions “Why did this have to happen?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” stem from this attachment to meaning and to a penchant to see the future’s impact on the present. As a corollary in recent decades, politicians have talked about their legacies, not historical legacies, but distant future legacies (“Generations will look back on what I’ve done for them”). The ultimate forms of this teleological approach to life lie in statements you have heard others make: “It was meant to be,” “It was a match made in heaven,”“If my time is up, well, my time is up,” and the cosmological “The universe is fine-tuned for life.” To go back to those I put aside at the beginning, I believe irony lies in nihilists making plans of any kind. Why bother if all will come to naught? Oh! I get it; there’s that comfort and pleasure fixed to the eternal present, or, “Hey, if this is all there is, I intend to make the most of it.”
With both cause and purpose in mind, we make plans. We envision our futures and set up Great Expectations that only rarely become the realities we initially envisioned because intervening accidents and the cross purposes imposed by others thwart the perfect fulfillment of just about all we plan. In the circumstances when cross purposes others impose intervene, we might argue that they occur during accidental conjunctions of people on a planet with eight billion people. Someone sometime will buck heads with another and alter the course of a man with a plan.
Guess Whom I Bumped into Today?
I think those chance meetings people have that changed their lives. “We dated briefly in high school and hadn’t seen each other in years, but c'est la vie, even though we both thought we were happily married…Well, here we are years later living in Florida, our first marriages distant memories.” Did chance bring them together? After all, in a time of great mobility that breeds the expression “small world,” chance meetings are not uncommon. Maybe you, like me, have walked through an airport and encountered a friend you haven’t seen for years. But was some Cosmic Destiny at work? One might think that for those who believe in a universe imbued with purpose, that such an accidental meetup isn’t as accidental as it might seem.
Randomness bugs the most teleologically minded among us though all of us are driven to accept its inevitable, if infrequent, occurrence. For example, that fender bender that cost you your deductible seems to have been “accidental,” a misfortune that befell you through the physics of the Pauli Exclusion Principle that forbids two objects occupying the same space at the same time. Although Earth’s 148.3 million square kilometers of land surface seem to be space enough to accommodate all of us, it is still finite enough that a car accident is not particularly odd. You aren’t the only one misfortune befell in an accident.
“Befell” is the appropriate word here because the word accidental derives from the Latin and before that the PIE root for “fall” (cadere, “to fall” in L. and kad, the PIE root for “fall”). With 298 million vehicles on the roads of the US, accidents occur daily, and though we can ascribe their cause to carelessness, inattention, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and mechanical failure, they all conjure up the “forces” of randomness, chaos, and probability to which everyone is subject. “Had I left home just seconds earlier, I would not have been at that intersection where the person ran the red light.” In a random world, uninterrupted bliss in one’s life is only temporarily attainable as exemplified by 69-year-old Harry H. Bliss himself. The real estate dealer stepped off a trolley at West 74th St. and Central Park West on September 13, 1899—and before you ask, no, it was not Friday the Thirteenth, though that might have added a special meaning to this story—where he was hit and killed by an electric taxicab whose driver was exonerated because he had no malice aforethought. In 1899 the entire complement of vehicles in New York was just 8,000. What are the chances? Well, in the instance of Harry Bliss, pretty good. Was it just “his time to go”?
Is the Universe Random?
You know the two sides of the argument: The universe either sprung—and still springs—from random fluctuations in “the vacuum” or it was “fine tuned” by intelligent design ascribed to a Creator whose methodology was a simple fiat or the unfolding of a singularity too small and too hot to imagine. If it is the product of a Creator, the universe is destined and you, the “universe conscious of itself,” are destined, hopefully for bliss, not in the same manner as Harry, but definitely to the same exhaustion of personal finite time and possibly the beginning for you of the Unending.
If you accept life as a purposeless biochemical coalition of cells, bacteria, and viruses, then a personal end is merely a return to nothingness in an uncoupling of all those entities entropy plays havoc with your remains. In contrast, if you see life as teleological, then its ending is a transition to a “beyond” in a future made perfect (perfect in its meaning as “complete,” “accomplished,” “finished”). “My work is done here. Keep my legacy going.”
Are the Teleological also the Foolish?
It’s easy for us to scoff at or dismiss the assumptions and faiths of others. The motivation for doing so probably has something to do with both hubris and insecurity, the former driven by the Ego and the latter by the same Id that provides us with nightmares. Certainly, people have a tendency to hold onto their beliefs, most of which were attained through enculturation. Any contrary belief can appear as a threat to the Ego. With regard to security, each of us can shield the Ego by categorizing conflicting beliefs as nonsense.
That which we can categorize is that which lends us a sense of personal security. When everything “out there” fits neatly into a framework, the world offers order and not confusion. Relegating others’ beliefs to superstition and anti-intellectualism could also be the product of history as members of any belief have shown themselves to be cruel, corrupt, or just downright evil in perpetrating harm to others. I think of those terrorists who cry out the name of their deity in suicidal attacks. Acts like the massacre of the 120 members of the Baker–Fancher wagon train in Utah by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints do justify for some a condemnation of Mormons and their faith for any hypocrisy overlying a sense of righteousness. But what religion houses perfect practitioners? Certainly, there’s reason to question the faith of clergy who ran tribunals during the Medieval Inquisition period in Europe.
To borrow from comedian Nate Bargatze, I might in paraphrase ask, “Sorry for my smirk, but did you just say you are a Big Foot expert? Have you also spent time looking for the Lock Ness Monster?” Or to put the questions in the context of religion, “What’s that you say? Some guy named Smith found golden tablets buried near Manchester, NY, after which his followers led by Brigham Young gathered a group and traveled to Utah, to found a church that has a great tabernacle choir composed of women living in bigamists’ families, and…Bang! A nineteenth century massacre in Utah.”
In the context of any logic, belief is easy to mock. But strangely, even logic presupposes, or rather, has underlying assumptions just as math can’t prove itself—as that famous Incompleteness Theorem of Kurt Gödel indicates. So, all of us, nihilists, atheists, believers, logicians, and mathematicians all rely on some belief. In the instance of smirking at Brigham Young and his entourage, the naysayer believes in a superior point of view characterized by suspicion and doubt toward other perspectives. All religions are subject to criticism by outsiders, just as by today’s scientific perspectives, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are subject to doubt or at least alternative views because both those ancients incorporated telos in their thought. Telos is the “end” to which an acorn of necessity strives to fulfill its destiny as an oak tree. Telos implies “purpose,” “goal.” It includes the notion of cause.
So, I suppose anyone could smirk at another who thinks he is acorn-like, destined to fulfill a purpose in a universe of so much order we can look at the Periodic Table of Elements or the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature and say, “So, the universe DOES make sense!” Both believers and nonbelievers can be happy in that knowledge.
A Fine-Tuned Universe Fine-Tuned Just for You
The assumption called the Anthropic Principle underlies a purposeful universe. The Cosmos was fine-tuned for you because the probability, regardless to Hawking’s arguments against it, is mind-bogglingly low. John Leslie points out in his Universes (1989) that even the slightest change in the strength of the four fundamental forces would make both the stars and life impossible. So, if you take the stars out of the cosmic equation, you also eliminate elements #4 through #92, meaning that with regard to the six elements (H,O,C,N,S,P) essential for life as we know it, the only remaining life element is hydrogen, not bad if you want all life-forms to look like the Hindenburg.
With regard to those fundamental force strengths, Leslie notes that gravity is 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. “Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster” (5). This is how he summarizes:
“The force strengths and particle masses are distributed across enormous ranges. The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn then thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity” (6). *
Mind-boggling, right? All those numbers coincidentally arising either by chance or design just to provide a venue for you as you decide which foot goes in which shoe or whether you really need that cafe mocha with extra whip at a cost increasingly edging toward $6.00 for a Venti. Change those relative force strengths by only a little and you eliminate the universe you know (the one with the Venti). If you accept them as a “perfect balance for life,” do you think the equilibrium is purposeful, or do you believe the balance is accidental and only in retrospect do we from the human necessity of or affinity for finding patterns ascribe the balance to God? What’s your take? Ask yourself, also, whether the Natural Laws have produced the physics of the cosmos or were simply imposed as our brains sought security in recognizable patterns.**
A Universe without Purpose
Again, one might ask “What’s the counterargument to suggest a mechanism for achieving without an intelligent agent the requisite balance of forces?” Well, an atheist could argue that if any one of those four forces came into existence before the others, its strength would determine the relative strengths of the other forces. And that is a reasonable argument given what we know. Of course, if things were different…They would be different. The argument depends, of course, on how that current balance of forces couldn’t be otherwise in this universe, which, of course, is a bit of a circular argument. And then there’s the “turtles all the way down explanation” I mentioned in a recent blog. After a talk on the universe, Bertrand Russell was approached by a woman who refuted his statements by telling him the world rested on a giant turtle. When Russell asked what the turtle stood on, she replied, “Why it’s turtles all the way down.” In that vein of reasoning, an atheist might argue for an eternal universe, or rather, for an eternal set of universes, each preceding the other in the manner of a Big Bang followed by a Big Crunch followed by a Big Bang followed by…”You get the thing,” as President Biden might say. So regressively, “It’s universes all the way down.” ***
In fact, Leslie’s argument for a universe with a purposeful start derives not on the absolute force strengths but rather on the ranges of those strengths: “Possibilities not straightforwardly countable can still be compared with respect to their ranges…an inexpert dart thrower gets little hope from the reflection that the infinite number of points inside a bulls-eye is no smaller than the infinite number outside…A Cicero who, flinging a great many letters in the air, then actually finds they have fallen so as to form the Annals of Ennius, cannot reasonably exclaim, ‘There’s nothing remarkable here since there were countless slightly different ways in which this could have happened’” (199).
Is it possible for those letters Cicero tossed to fall as a meaningful document, both grammar and syntax incorporated with correctness in paragraphs with unity, coherence, and emphasis sufficient to earn an A in Composition 101?
So, if the atheist says, “Well, if there are 1010^1115 possible universes, then the chances that one—the One we are in—is as it is for us, that is, fine-tuned for life as we know it. There’s also a chance letters tossed by Cicero fall to make a meaningful document in one of those other universes.There’s also a chance that an indefinite number of chimpanzees sitting each in front of a keyboard will in some duration have typed all of Shakespeare’s plays. There’s no need for purpose. No need for Telos, and no need for a teleological perspective. Yes, on Earth acorns do grow into oak trees if they are not by some squirrel interrupted in fulfilling their role, but in an alternative universe acorns might grow into babies or cars. Acorns do what they do on Earth because this universe randomly evolved that way. You do what you do…
And in 1010^1115 universes it is likely that everything about your life could be duplicated, meaning that even what you find meaningful is just a product of a randomness beyond your imagining. Your doppelgänger is out there somewhere right now wondering if you exist and think the same way. Your doppelgänger in another universe envisions a purpose you share. At least two universes in the multi-universe were fine-tuned for both of you.
Happy in a Purposeful World, Happy in a Random World
Back to the top, here: Are you happy? I guess you could reiterate what the Buddha said, “There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.” Obviously, even in this universe, there are many paths, so whether or not you are on a path toward nowhere or somewhere is irrelevant if you want it to be irrelevant. If you contend the universe has order and meaning, then you have another question to answer: Does the order impose predestination. “Sure, you’re happy (or unhappy), but you don’t have a choice.” If you contend the universe is random, you might still hear the same statement because the balance of forces require the universe to be what it is. Your happiness originated in the Big Bang, in the collision of neighboring universes, or in the unfolding of a universe obeying certain laws and constants. Wow! Did I just accidentally make an argument for predestination? Well, if I did, it was for predestination WITHIN this universe, and not beyond this universe. Hakuna matata.
*Leslie, John. 1989. Universes.
**As a corollary: Is math derived or imposed. Is the Cosmos a mathematical construct? The “constants,” and numbers like 1/137, the “Planck length,” π, and the speed of light demand an answer to “Did we constants and laws exist before the universe?” “Did we cause the universe to be as it is?”
***The WMAP image of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) suggests to some that our universe might have had a Harry H. Bliss-taxicab moment as it collided with another universe or was entangled in the fender of another universe in a wreck called the CMB or WMAP Cold Spot. From Wikipedia: A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it [the Cold Spot] could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[3] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "... the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own." If true, this provides the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe (though theoretical models of parallel universes existed previously).
You know, if you ask either, you might get a “Yes,” but would that affirmation be the product of pride? “I’m not a happy person” might be tough to admit in public. Your response could be, “Geez, there’e no pleasing some people,” “Don’t be a stick in the mud,” or “Who cares? That’s your problem, and I don’t need to waste my time on your pessimism and self pity.”
Now, if you’re a happy nihilist, don’t take offense that I suggest happiness does not lie in your life path. And if you believe in unbelief or disbelief, likewise (Oxymoronic, I know).
Atheists, and nihilists—and some existentialists and one or two agnostics, too—aside, most people probably see a role for cause and purpose in their lives. Surely you know, if you have not done so yourself, people who frequently both “discover” meaning in events and actively seek meaning in their lives. Others just willy nilly ascribe it on assumption. The questions “Why did this have to happen?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” stem from this attachment to meaning and to a penchant to see the future’s impact on the present. As a corollary in recent decades, politicians have talked about their legacies, not historical legacies, but distant future legacies (“Generations will look back on what I’ve done for them”). The ultimate forms of this teleological approach to life lie in statements you have heard others make: “It was meant to be,” “It was a match made in heaven,”“If my time is up, well, my time is up,” and the cosmological “The universe is fine-tuned for life.” To go back to those I put aside at the beginning, I believe irony lies in nihilists making plans of any kind. Why bother if all will come to naught? Oh! I get it; there’s that comfort and pleasure fixed to the eternal present, or, “Hey, if this is all there is, I intend to make the most of it.”
With both cause and purpose in mind, we make plans. We envision our futures and set up Great Expectations that only rarely become the realities we initially envisioned because intervening accidents and the cross purposes imposed by others thwart the perfect fulfillment of just about all we plan. In the circumstances when cross purposes others impose intervene, we might argue that they occur during accidental conjunctions of people on a planet with eight billion people. Someone sometime will buck heads with another and alter the course of a man with a plan.
Guess Whom I Bumped into Today?
I think those chance meetings people have that changed their lives. “We dated briefly in high school and hadn’t seen each other in years, but c'est la vie, even though we both thought we were happily married…Well, here we are years later living in Florida, our first marriages distant memories.” Did chance bring them together? After all, in a time of great mobility that breeds the expression “small world,” chance meetings are not uncommon. Maybe you, like me, have walked through an airport and encountered a friend you haven’t seen for years. But was some Cosmic Destiny at work? One might think that for those who believe in a universe imbued with purpose, that such an accidental meetup isn’t as accidental as it might seem.
Randomness bugs the most teleologically minded among us though all of us are driven to accept its inevitable, if infrequent, occurrence. For example, that fender bender that cost you your deductible seems to have been “accidental,” a misfortune that befell you through the physics of the Pauli Exclusion Principle that forbids two objects occupying the same space at the same time. Although Earth’s 148.3 million square kilometers of land surface seem to be space enough to accommodate all of us, it is still finite enough that a car accident is not particularly odd. You aren’t the only one misfortune befell in an accident.
“Befell” is the appropriate word here because the word accidental derives from the Latin and before that the PIE root for “fall” (cadere, “to fall” in L. and kad, the PIE root for “fall”). With 298 million vehicles on the roads of the US, accidents occur daily, and though we can ascribe their cause to carelessness, inattention, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and mechanical failure, they all conjure up the “forces” of randomness, chaos, and probability to which everyone is subject. “Had I left home just seconds earlier, I would not have been at that intersection where the person ran the red light.” In a random world, uninterrupted bliss in one’s life is only temporarily attainable as exemplified by 69-year-old Harry H. Bliss himself. The real estate dealer stepped off a trolley at West 74th St. and Central Park West on September 13, 1899—and before you ask, no, it was not Friday the Thirteenth, though that might have added a special meaning to this story—where he was hit and killed by an electric taxicab whose driver was exonerated because he had no malice aforethought. In 1899 the entire complement of vehicles in New York was just 8,000. What are the chances? Well, in the instance of Harry Bliss, pretty good. Was it just “his time to go”?
Is the Universe Random?
You know the two sides of the argument: The universe either sprung—and still springs—from random fluctuations in “the vacuum” or it was “fine tuned” by intelligent design ascribed to a Creator whose methodology was a simple fiat or the unfolding of a singularity too small and too hot to imagine. If it is the product of a Creator, the universe is destined and you, the “universe conscious of itself,” are destined, hopefully for bliss, not in the same manner as Harry, but definitely to the same exhaustion of personal finite time and possibly the beginning for you of the Unending.
If you accept life as a purposeless biochemical coalition of cells, bacteria, and viruses, then a personal end is merely a return to nothingness in an uncoupling of all those entities entropy plays havoc with your remains. In contrast, if you see life as teleological, then its ending is a transition to a “beyond” in a future made perfect (perfect in its meaning as “complete,” “accomplished,” “finished”). “My work is done here. Keep my legacy going.”
Are the Teleological also the Foolish?
It’s easy for us to scoff at or dismiss the assumptions and faiths of others. The motivation for doing so probably has something to do with both hubris and insecurity, the former driven by the Ego and the latter by the same Id that provides us with nightmares. Certainly, people have a tendency to hold onto their beliefs, most of which were attained through enculturation. Any contrary belief can appear as a threat to the Ego. With regard to security, each of us can shield the Ego by categorizing conflicting beliefs as nonsense.
That which we can categorize is that which lends us a sense of personal security. When everything “out there” fits neatly into a framework, the world offers order and not confusion. Relegating others’ beliefs to superstition and anti-intellectualism could also be the product of history as members of any belief have shown themselves to be cruel, corrupt, or just downright evil in perpetrating harm to others. I think of those terrorists who cry out the name of their deity in suicidal attacks. Acts like the massacre of the 120 members of the Baker–Fancher wagon train in Utah by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints do justify for some a condemnation of Mormons and their faith for any hypocrisy overlying a sense of righteousness. But what religion houses perfect practitioners? Certainly, there’s reason to question the faith of clergy who ran tribunals during the Medieval Inquisition period in Europe.
To borrow from comedian Nate Bargatze, I might in paraphrase ask, “Sorry for my smirk, but did you just say you are a Big Foot expert? Have you also spent time looking for the Lock Ness Monster?” Or to put the questions in the context of religion, “What’s that you say? Some guy named Smith found golden tablets buried near Manchester, NY, after which his followers led by Brigham Young gathered a group and traveled to Utah, to found a church that has a great tabernacle choir composed of women living in bigamists’ families, and…Bang! A nineteenth century massacre in Utah.”
In the context of any logic, belief is easy to mock. But strangely, even logic presupposes, or rather, has underlying assumptions just as math can’t prove itself—as that famous Incompleteness Theorem of Kurt Gödel indicates. So, all of us, nihilists, atheists, believers, logicians, and mathematicians all rely on some belief. In the instance of smirking at Brigham Young and his entourage, the naysayer believes in a superior point of view characterized by suspicion and doubt toward other perspectives. All religions are subject to criticism by outsiders, just as by today’s scientific perspectives, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are subject to doubt or at least alternative views because both those ancients incorporated telos in their thought. Telos is the “end” to which an acorn of necessity strives to fulfill its destiny as an oak tree. Telos implies “purpose,” “goal.” It includes the notion of cause.
So, I suppose anyone could smirk at another who thinks he is acorn-like, destined to fulfill a purpose in a universe of so much order we can look at the Periodic Table of Elements or the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature and say, “So, the universe DOES make sense!” Both believers and nonbelievers can be happy in that knowledge.
A Fine-Tuned Universe Fine-Tuned Just for You
The assumption called the Anthropic Principle underlies a purposeful universe. The Cosmos was fine-tuned for you because the probability, regardless to Hawking’s arguments against it, is mind-bogglingly low. John Leslie points out in his Universes (1989) that even the slightest change in the strength of the four fundamental forces would make both the stars and life impossible. So, if you take the stars out of the cosmic equation, you also eliminate elements #4 through #92, meaning that with regard to the six elements (H,O,C,N,S,P) essential for life as we know it, the only remaining life element is hydrogen, not bad if you want all life-forms to look like the Hindenburg.
With regard to those fundamental force strengths, Leslie notes that gravity is 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. “Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster” (5). This is how he summarizes:
“The force strengths and particle masses are distributed across enormous ranges. The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn then thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity” (6). *
Mind-boggling, right? All those numbers coincidentally arising either by chance or design just to provide a venue for you as you decide which foot goes in which shoe or whether you really need that cafe mocha with extra whip at a cost increasingly edging toward $6.00 for a Venti. Change those relative force strengths by only a little and you eliminate the universe you know (the one with the Venti). If you accept them as a “perfect balance for life,” do you think the equilibrium is purposeful, or do you believe the balance is accidental and only in retrospect do we from the human necessity of or affinity for finding patterns ascribe the balance to God? What’s your take? Ask yourself, also, whether the Natural Laws have produced the physics of the cosmos or were simply imposed as our brains sought security in recognizable patterns.**
A Universe without Purpose
Again, one might ask “What’s the counterargument to suggest a mechanism for achieving without an intelligent agent the requisite balance of forces?” Well, an atheist could argue that if any one of those four forces came into existence before the others, its strength would determine the relative strengths of the other forces. And that is a reasonable argument given what we know. Of course, if things were different…They would be different. The argument depends, of course, on how that current balance of forces couldn’t be otherwise in this universe, which, of course, is a bit of a circular argument. And then there’s the “turtles all the way down explanation” I mentioned in a recent blog. After a talk on the universe, Bertrand Russell was approached by a woman who refuted his statements by telling him the world rested on a giant turtle. When Russell asked what the turtle stood on, she replied, “Why it’s turtles all the way down.” In that vein of reasoning, an atheist might argue for an eternal universe, or rather, for an eternal set of universes, each preceding the other in the manner of a Big Bang followed by a Big Crunch followed by a Big Bang followed by…”You get the thing,” as President Biden might say. So regressively, “It’s universes all the way down.” ***
In fact, Leslie’s argument for a universe with a purposeful start derives not on the absolute force strengths but rather on the ranges of those strengths: “Possibilities not straightforwardly countable can still be compared with respect to their ranges…an inexpert dart thrower gets little hope from the reflection that the infinite number of points inside a bulls-eye is no smaller than the infinite number outside…A Cicero who, flinging a great many letters in the air, then actually finds they have fallen so as to form the Annals of Ennius, cannot reasonably exclaim, ‘There’s nothing remarkable here since there were countless slightly different ways in which this could have happened’” (199).
Is it possible for those letters Cicero tossed to fall as a meaningful document, both grammar and syntax incorporated with correctness in paragraphs with unity, coherence, and emphasis sufficient to earn an A in Composition 101?
So, if the atheist says, “Well, if there are 1010^1115 possible universes, then the chances that one—the One we are in—is as it is for us, that is, fine-tuned for life as we know it. There’s also a chance letters tossed by Cicero fall to make a meaningful document in one of those other universes.There’s also a chance that an indefinite number of chimpanzees sitting each in front of a keyboard will in some duration have typed all of Shakespeare’s plays. There’s no need for purpose. No need for Telos, and no need for a teleological perspective. Yes, on Earth acorns do grow into oak trees if they are not by some squirrel interrupted in fulfilling their role, but in an alternative universe acorns might grow into babies or cars. Acorns do what they do on Earth because this universe randomly evolved that way. You do what you do…
And in 1010^1115 universes it is likely that everything about your life could be duplicated, meaning that even what you find meaningful is just a product of a randomness beyond your imagining. Your doppelgänger is out there somewhere right now wondering if you exist and think the same way. Your doppelgänger in another universe envisions a purpose you share. At least two universes in the multi-universe were fine-tuned for both of you.
Happy in a Purposeful World, Happy in a Random World
Back to the top, here: Are you happy? I guess you could reiterate what the Buddha said, “There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.” Obviously, even in this universe, there are many paths, so whether or not you are on a path toward nowhere or somewhere is irrelevant if you want it to be irrelevant. If you contend the universe has order and meaning, then you have another question to answer: Does the order impose predestination. “Sure, you’re happy (or unhappy), but you don’t have a choice.” If you contend the universe is random, you might still hear the same statement because the balance of forces require the universe to be what it is. Your happiness originated in the Big Bang, in the collision of neighboring universes, or in the unfolding of a universe obeying certain laws and constants. Wow! Did I just accidentally make an argument for predestination? Well, if I did, it was for predestination WITHIN this universe, and not beyond this universe. Hakuna matata.
*Leslie, John. 1989. Universes.
**As a corollary: Is math derived or imposed. Is the Cosmos a mathematical construct? The “constants,” and numbers like 1/137, the “Planck length,” π, and the speed of light demand an answer to “Did we constants and laws exist before the universe?” “Did we cause the universe to be as it is?”
***The WMAP image of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) suggests to some that our universe might have had a Harry H. Bliss-taxicab moment as it collided with another universe or was entangled in the fender of another universe in a wreck called the CMB or WMAP Cold Spot. From Wikipedia: A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it [the Cold Spot] could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[3] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "... the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own." If true, this provides the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe (though theoretical models of parallel universes existed previously).
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