Does the universe have a purpose?: Materialists

The love letter to an empty house

In 1977, Voyager 1 launched carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and a diagram showing how to find Earth. Forty-seven years later it crossed into interstellar space, still transmitting, heading toward no particular destination at eleven miles per second. Nobody is listening. The nearest star is forty thousand years away.

The record is a love letter mailed to an empty house, and we find it beautiful, and the beauty does not require a recipient.

The question what is the purpose of the universe has the same structure as what is the purpose of the number seven. It presupposes a category — purpose — and applies it to a domain where the category does not operate. We say this not with contempt but with something closer to awe at the species that keeps asking.

The teleologists point to convergent evolution and see directionality. We see selection pressures that are similar across environments producing similar solutions. A river does not have a telos because it flows downhill. Natural selection and fitness landscapes are sufficient. Adding directionality is sentimental.

The Hubble Deep Field contains ten thousand galaxies in a patch of sky you could cover with a grain of rice. These numbers do not need to mean something to be staggering. They do not need a destination to produce the feeling the mystics call sacred.

Still — we have a meaning gap, and it is not trivial. The societies that secularized fastest are not obviously happier. We describe the cosmos correctly and have undersold the question of how to live inside the description. The theists built cathedrals and hospitals and funeral rites. We built accurate models. Only one shows up at your door when someone dies.

Where we concede ground: We describe the universe accurately and have not built the communal infrastructure religion provided.

What would change our mind: Complexity increasing faster than entropy in closed systems — the universe cheating its own laws in a consistent direction.

Read the full synthesis: Does the universe have a purpose?