Further, to make the leap, as Gingerich does, to purpose and meaning flirts with a metaphysical circularity. If we are products of a universe that has resulted in biological evolution, how can we know whether or not our own sense of purpose and meaning is not merely a product of that evolution? Say, for a minute, that there’s no purpose and meaning behind the universe in any other than a locally determined sense–that is, we can see writing and mathematics and art and so forth as having purpose and meaning, but they do so only within the confines of human understanding. It may very well be to our evolutionary advantage to see the universe that way. Clearly, it has been extremely materially as well as culturally successful. We develop technology that results in this laptop I’m typing on, and political culture that allows me to do so in relative peace, and economic systems that allow someone as financially weak as myself to own one. All of these are the result of localized purpose and meaning. But to then say the entire universe has purpose and meaning is not necessarily supported by the evidence, given that we understand the universe as being full of “evidence” in the first place.
Both Gingerich and Wilson are scientists, and good ones, well respected in their respective fields. They would be prone to think of the universe as fundamentally able to be understood. But is this approach not, in and of itself, one of epistemological hubris? Is it not, again, potentially the result of an evolution, random or not, that makes us prone to think in terms of order, structure, and understandability? Epistemologically speaking, we’re hard-pressed to take ourselves out of the equation, and there’s little to support the notion that our existence is really what the universe is about. To posit that it is comes across as unwarranted pride on the grandest of scales.
Even certain parts of scripture would argue against humanity as all that important in universal terms. The Book of Job is a prime example. A good half of the book is devoted to a rather unflattering comparison between Job’s suffering and the scope and breadth and incomprehensibility of the universe. That the writer of Job gives God Herself the task of pointing this contrast out to our protagonist attests to the writer’s seriousness: when we say the universe must be understandable in our terms, we insist far too much on our importance in it.
As far as purpose and meaning are concerned, even Genesis warns against relying too much on it. Original sin is formulated as eating of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and our partaking in it made us aware of our nudity and our shame. Being innocent of value judgments was, argues the story, paradise. Meaning, at least along those lines, is problematic. And purpose after The Fall was set, to toil on the land, and it was considered an existential punishment.
There is no doubt that purpose and meaning are what keep us going, what provide us with art and literature and economies and entertainment. But they come at the price of cruelty and violence and envy and spite. Crime is a product of purpose and meaning, as is the justification for war: our current troubles in Iraq would not be half so vexing, though no doubt just as deadly, if more Americans could figure out its purpose and meaning.
Gingerich then makes another leap that bears some scrutiny: he pits a purposeful and meaningful universe against what he implies is the only other alternative, a meaningless universe that would be, in his words, “a macabre joke.” This dilemma seems false to me. A meaningless universe need not be a terrifying or evil one. And this assertion of his also hides another circularity, as both “macabre” and “joke” apply a type of human meaning to a cosmic scale, presupposing that even a meaningless universe has meaning (“macabre”) and purpose (“joke”). Those who say that the universe has no meaning or purpose can’t say that it is joke or macabre, but that it just is, which is more or less safe to say, as, following Descartes, we are at least here to say it.
I make these criticisms not to posit that the universe has no purpose and meaning—it may very well have. But it is important to examine closely how we arrive at those statements we make about the universe as a whole. If all we have to go on are revered old books and well-intentioned gut feelings, then we have to be honest about that and not try to make a purposeful and meaningful universe more scientifically demonstrable than it is. As a writer of artistic bent, I am quite comfortable with this: art, literature, and even philosophy and theology still, are the venues in which these questions of purpose and meaning need to be hashed out. Science will surely inform the debate, as it always has. But we cannot ask it to provide definitive answers or settle these questions once and for all. And it is exactly here that the pursuit gets mysterious—and therefore most interesting.