Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Meaning? I Don’t Need No Steenking Meaning…

I do despair about my species. It’s not bad enough that they feel impelled to invent a god to blame their existence on, but that even those who dismiss the idea of a god feel impelled to dream up the Goldilock’s Universe. Paul Davies says:
“Somehow,” he writes, “the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make, not just life, not just mind, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unravel the plot.”
 
What exactly is Davies saying? His starting point is the “highly significant” fact that the universe supports people who understand its laws. “I wanted to get away from the feeling in so many scientific quarters that life and human beings are a completely irrelevant embellishment, a side issue of no significance. I don’t think we’re the centre of the universe or the pinnacle of creation, but the fact that human beings have the ability to understand how the world is put together is something that cries out for explanation.”
Er, no, Paul, it doesn’t cry out for anything of the sort. It just is. If the physical laws were slightly different, we wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have a book that you’re trying to peddle. On the other hand, in that alternative universe perhaps there would be a nexus of fningian energy with a koob to lles. Either way, I don’t buy it.

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2 responses to “Meaning? I Don’t Need No Steenking Meaning…”

  1. Gelert Avatar
    Gelert

    Why is the cosmos ideally set up to support life?  I never did quite get this. Is the cosmos ideally set up to support life? Or just this life? Perhaps as you say, if it needs this, random chance has brought it about, or maybe some other form of life would have come about under other conditions?
     
    However, I agree that Dawkins sits at the same table as the raving fundamentalist in that each has closed the possibility book. We all need to allow room for what we just don’t know (yet?). My God belief is not that of others, its not so rigidly (and so my mind) so suspiciously framed as some, it’s more an acknowledgment of things I ‘know’ that just don’t fit. One way or another, I hope to hell we get the answers sometime, someway, but I guess if not, if we are no more than mere serendipity, then it won’t matter anyway.
     
     

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  2. Geoff Avatar
    Geoff

    You ask "why is the cosmos ideally set up to support life?" That’s a false question, in my opinion – another of the "why does a fish need a bicycle?" type. The very fact of posing it as a question implies that there is some sort of agency behind it. Whereas I see it as quite simple – life is here as a result of the cosmos being the way it is. If the laws were different, then life as we know it could not exist. That’s it. No need to imagine any sort of agency beyond the physical laws.
     
    And I strongly disagree with you about Dawkins. To say that he "sits at the same table as the raving fundamentalist in that each has closed the possibility book" is so far from the truth of how Dawkins views the world as to beggar belief. I suggest that you pick up and read The God Delusion.

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