We need a universe infused with meaning

What’s the meanin of life? Yes, what about the whole universe?

In May, a new philosophy festival on the East coast of Norway called Wonderful World, should have received a visit from a coming international star. His name is Philip Goof, is a British philosopher and has newly written the book “Why?” (2023, Oxford University Press), where he thinks he found the answer.

A local journalist and philosopher, Jørg Arne Jørgensen, writes in Aftenbladet 18.05 that it is damaging for people to turn inwards. Purpose takes us outwards – and we have good reason to think so.

Our western crisis of meaning

The solution comes in the brink of time. Our therapeutic culture is suffering. The number of young people with depression, anxiety and suicide thoughts is rising in the West. Several reasons are suggested. The know social psycologist Jonathan Haidt thinks an important reason is the screens we give our kids. Maybe a secular culture is too weakly equipped to handle purpose. Probably a bit of everything. Purpose is an important medicine to face this.

The person with a why, can handle almost every how, wrote Nietzsche. The experience of meaninglessness is a person’s worst enemy. Worse than pain and sorrow. It renders us unable to find a way forward.

The jewish psychologist Viktor Frankl observed fellow inmates in the concentration camp under the Nazis. After he survived the war, he shared that those who survived tedious torture under inhuman conditions, were not the most physically capable, but those who experienced meaning and a reason to endure.

It, to put it mildly, important if meaning exists. But after God’s supposed death and the decline of traditional religion in the West, where someone claims we can’t accept belief in anything outside the material realm, this isn’t easy.

Problems with a Universe Without Meaning

An extreme example is the philosopher David Benatar.

It is immoral to have children, he believes. Not just now, because the world is a turbulent place, with crises, wars, and climate challenges, but generally. Human life is a project that can never be justified. Every birth is a death on the way. This is the logical conclusion of a world without meaning, he argues.

Philip Goff believes there are really only two alternatives, that meaning is an integral part of reality – or does not exist.

Goff believed the latter for a long time. And it can sound tempting. Because that means you are free to create meaning on your own?

But no. These are ideas more suited to fancy slogans, when promoted by the Humanist Association and others, than rational defenses.

To claim that humans can create meaning, without reference points outside themselves, is at best to willingly throw themselves into a life lie, better translated to "pretend". Such ideas we live well with as long as we can divert reason from too many questions. Fortunately, there is yet another Netflix series to distract us.

For there is much that is meaningful, such as being a parent, helping others, creating art, learning new knowledge, mastering a skill, going to church, trekking in nature, and much more. Not because we are just pretending, but because we discover meaning. Meaning is mysteriously fundamental to the world, as much as mathematics and logic.

"Sure, this sounds nice," you might think. "But can anyone believe that the source of meaning is out...there somewhere? Hasn't modern science put the nail in the coffin for that?"

Yes, most people in history have believed in a form of teleology (from Greek: telos = goal). We are the deviation. Maybe with poor reason.

But meaning does not appear in scientific explorations? Haven't we thus learned that it has no place in nature?

This is what we call a "category error". Many believe science and meaning are in conflict. In reality, scientific methods are silent, because the pioneers consciously did not develop them for that purpose. But to conclude from silence to non-existence is like claiming that because a metal detector is good at finding metal, we have reasons to think we can exclude non-metal from reality. We never had better reasons to dismiss a telos.

A finely-tuned universe

"Then something happened," Goff believes. Physics has recently made discoveries pointing towards meaning. He is thinking of the fine-tuning argument. This is unknown to many, but is completely uncontroversial physics.

In short, the idea is this. What we call the laws of nature have a number of constants. These have an exquisite precision for there to be a universe with life. A microscopic change would have catastrophic consequences.

It's not just that humans could not have existed in the current carbon-based form. No, an ordered universe would never have developed. The universe would in several cases have collapsed in on itself moments after the Big Bang, or matter would have been flung into the vacuum of space at such high speed that no interesting elements would have formed.

A quick example is the entropy in the earliest universe. According to the renowned mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, it must have been fine-tuned to 10 raised to the power of 10^123. By comparison, the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is only about 10^80.

This requires explanation. The overwhelmingly most likely, Goff believes, is that our universe is what he calls value-specific. This means that the values are such because a universe that can develop intelligent life was intented.

Chance is not an option. The numbers are too large. An infinite multiverse doesn't solve much either.

The lesson is that meaning is fundamental. It's good for us to believe in it. I think there are even better arguments for meaning than Goff's, but this is a start for those who enjoy a more scientific approach.