Designer

These are “uncontroversial facts about modern physics”, Goff says. The question is: what do we make of those facts? Do we accept that “it’s just an unbelievable fluke that the numbers in our physics are just right for life”, or do we suppose a purpose and designer?

Goff says the kind of probabilities involved in getting all these laws of physics to come out just right for the creation of life are simply too enormous to be chance. “Imagine tossing a coin 70 times and getting heads every time, or rolling dice and getting six every time. Nobody would say that’s a fluke,” Goff says. “Once you pass a certain point of improbability, it’s no longer rational to say it’s a fluke. If people break into a bank and there’s a 10-digit combination for the safe and they get it the first time, nobody would say ‘oh, they just guessed it’. That’s too improbable.

“So the alternative is that this isn’t a fluke, that the numbers in physics are there because they’re the right numbers for life. In other words, there’s some kind of ‘directedness’ towards life at the basic level of physics.”

Evidently, in world religions, the creator god doesn’t twiddle the dials of physics to set the conditions for the slow unfolding of life, including here on Earth 13 billion years after the Big Bang. He – and it’s always a “he” – simply switches on the universe, creating life instantly.

So, even if people of faith understandably reject the thinking of Goff and others, the ideas around fine-tuning that he’s promoting must have some effect on how they understand “creation”.

Science shows us that “creation” is a series of glacial steps from Big Bang to evolution on Earth. Yet, if Goff is correct, these steps are designed by an “intelligence” rather than a matter of chance.

So, his thinking presents a challenge to both science and religion. Goff believes his ideas “fit into the space between traditional religion and secular atheism”. Indeed, it feels like a sort of “spiritual atheism” – there’s meaning in the universe but no “deity”. His ideas also seem attuned to modern environmental concerns about nature.

Goff’s theories challenge the notion that people must be either on the “side of Richard Dawkins or the Pope” – Dawkins being a hardline proponent of atheism.

“Both these views are inadequate,” Goff says. “Both have things they can’t explain about reality. There’s a much-neglected middle ground: the possibility of ‘cosmic purpose’, that there’s some kind of ‘goal-directedness’ at the fundamental level of reality. We can make sense of that in the absence of the traditional God.”

Evil

CERTAINLY, for Goff, the argument for the existence of the traditional God fails fundamentally given “evil and suffering. It’s difficult to reconcile with a loving God – the Omnigod that’s all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good”.

Perhaps we should think of creation not as an act of “god” but as “something much more generic, as some kind of goal-directedness”.

Opting for “goal-directedness” avoids the far-fetched concept of a traditional god, Goff feels, but explains the seemingly designed nature of the universe.

Equally, the fine-tuning of the universe, directed towards the “existence of life”, undermines the atheistic notion that the cosmos is “meaningless and purposeless”.

Goff adds: “Traditional atheism struggles to explain fine-tuning. Evil and suffering is the issue that the traditional God-hypothesis struggles to explain.

“Why would a loving God create the northern short-tailed shrew which paralyses its prey and eats it alive over days? That makes no sense. Why would ‘God’ choose to create us through such tortuous long-winded processes like natural selection?”

To Goff, the theory of Cosmopsychism deals with the problems inherent in both the traditional belief in god and atheism.

Modern intellectual thought is stuck, Goff feels. It hasn’t synthesised the facts of fine-tuning into a wider theory of what that these “Goldilocks” numbers mean for creation. He thinks we’re like people in the 16th century when proof emerged that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. Like our ancestors, we find the new reality hard to compute.

Although Cosmopsychism is Goff’s favoured hypothesis to explain the deficiencies in both religion and atheism, he has explored other ideas.

One concept would be “to just tweak the definition of God”. Given the universe in which we live, “God” can’t be either good or bad. Maybe, Goff suggests, God is simply a designer who is “amoral, or has limited abilities”. He adds: “Maybe She’s made the best universe She can and is like ‘sorry, I know this is messy with all the evolution stuff, but it’s the best I could do. It was this or nothing’.”

Quarks

SO, what is a “conscious universe”? Clearly, says Goff, there are different forms of consciousness. Humans, snails and sheep all have very different states of consciousness. Might “the basic building blocks of reality” – like quarks and electrons – have their own forms of consciousness?

It’s something Goff and others have speculated about. Could consciousness be a “fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world”? Might consciousness go “all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality”?

Most theoretical physicists, Goff says, think some of these fundamental building blocks – like electromagnetism – operate as “universe-wide fields”. Could this be part of the underpinning of a “conscious universe”?

If the universe is conscious, then that consciousness isn’t humanlike. Goff speculates it would be “radically alien”. Nor is the universe “alive”. Life, as we understand it, means digestion, respiration, reproduction.

But would a conscious universe be “aware”? Goff feels consciousness must involve “some kind of awareness”, though “not necessarily self-awareness” like humans. However, the fine-tuning of physics, Goff believes, indicates that the universe can set “certain goals and aims”, namely the eventually achievement of intelligent life.

So, “in some sense the universe must have had foresight” as it “fine-tuned itself”. By “fine-tuning itself to bring about life, it must somehow be aware of future possibility”.

Goff adds: “It had a range of options, though not unlimited, which is why the universe isn’t better than how we find it. Those limitations are what we call the laws of physics … So, we’re imagining a mind that has options and selects the best from what’s available.”

If we can call this a “mind”, then it’s a “very mechanical mind, it doesn’t have the flexibility of the human mind”. And, perhaps, the “thought processes” of this “universe mind” are still happening. We humans are but a blip in time. Who knows what shape life will take as billions of years pass?

If we accept “cosmic purpose”, says Goff, “then it’s rather improbable that we humans happen to be at the climax and ultimate end of that cosmic journey. It’s more probable that this cosmic purpose is still unfolding in ways we don’t understand, and there could emerge some greater form of life that’s as unfathomable to us as our existence is to worms”.

We could just be “an unfortunate by-product” of the universe’s much greater “cosmic purpose”.

Religion

GOFF, however, prefers to think that “perhaps we can in some small way contribute” to this cosmic purpose “by trying to make the world as best as we can”.

And it’s here that we get into the territory of religion. If the notion of a universe with purpose makes Goff want to be a good person, isn’t this close to what we mean by “faith”?

Cosmopsychism could change how we think about spirituality, Goff feels.

Our lives can still have meaning without a creator god or a conscious universe or any belief at all, he thinks, “but if there is cosmic purpose then there’s potential for a more meaningful form of existence”.

It’s obvious how the idea of a conscious universe – the universe as “god” – could easily fit with modern environmentalism.

If we think about the universe as having a consciousness, Goff says, then perhaps we might start treating the things in the universe with a little more respect. “It adds a whole extra moral dimension,” he adds.

Goff knows that his theories come at a time when the Western world is experiencing a “meaning crisis”. In a post-god, secular world, what really gives purpose to our lives?

As Goff began to embrace Cosmopsychism, he found it added meaning to his own life. And what was that meaning? “To live in hope that the good you do contributes to some greater purpose.”

Indeed, some Christian thinkers are concerned that people are now beginning to ponder the notion of the universe as “god”. It presents a clear challenge to organised religion.

Might there come a time when people actually “worship” the universe? “When we hear the word ‘worship’,” says Goff, “many think of getting on your knees in supplication to some anthropomorphic deity.

However, in progressive religions, such as Quakers, “worship” is used to mean practices to invoke contemplation and connection.

“Perhaps new worship practices will emerge as society takes both the fine-tuning that rules out atheism, and suffering that rules out God, seriously.”

Goff likes to think of Cosmopsychism as “the Liberal Democrats” – offering a third way between the austerity of atheism and the fantasy of religion. Within academia, he notes, the idea is now “taken much more seriously”. Evidently, however, many dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo pseudoscience.

Rest assured that Goff isn’t pitching himself as a prophet for a new religion. “I’m certainly not going to be starting a cult,” he says.

As the conversation ends, however, one thought remains: if the universe is conscious, and if that consciousness did indeed set the conditions for life, then who – or what – created the universe?

https://www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/24222253.mind-blowing-theory-god-may-...

Let's see if someone worth talking to comes along.

mothra wrote on Apr 6^th, 2024 at 6:12pm:


Chicken. 

I can't get past the idea that the universe has a conscience . The universe is a reaction to a series of events.  Much like thunder, sunshine and rainfall.

Sounds more like modern day sun worshipping

Super Nova wrote on Apr 6^th, 2024 at 6:52pm:


I wonder if this is just something pumped out to get a Academic Grant for a Uni?
https://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1712386684
Considering there was some real good 'April Fools' papers put out just recently with a lot of work put into them.

I've also noticed the creeping in of Human Religious perceptions into Cosmology/Astronomy/etc - in their 'interpretations'. God needs his religions updated to incorporate that he created Supernovas, Black Holes and Dark Matter as well. 

Until there is 'evidence' Mothra.
Anything speculative, if not 'imaginative' is about as believable as a Rainbow being a Serpent.
There is no evidence, so this does not 'exist'.
Stabs in the dark are dangerous - they create wounded animals like It_is_the_Light riding planet Nibiru's around.