Sean Michael Carroll

As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.

If theism were really true there's no reason for God to be hard to find. He should be perfectly obvious. Whereas in naturalism you might expect people believe in God but the evidence to be thin on the ground. Under theism you'd expect that religious beliefs should be universal. There's no reason for God to give special messages to this or that primitive tribe thousands of years ago. Why not give it to anyone? Whereas under naturalism you'd expect different religious beliefs inconsistent with with each other to grow up under different local conditions. Under theism you'd expect religious doctrines to last a long time in a stable way. Under naturalism you'd expect them to adapt to social conditions. Under theism you'd expect the moral teachings of religion to be transcendent and progressive: sexism is wrong; slavery is wrong. Under naturalism you'd expect that they reflect, once again, local mores, sometimes good rules, sometimes not so good. You'd expect the sacred texts under theism to give us interesting information. Tell us about the germ theory of disease. Tell us to wash our hands before we have dinner. Under naturalism you'd expect that sacred texts to be a mishmash, some really good parts, some poetic parts, and some boring parts, and mythological parts. Under theism you'd expect biological forms to be designed. Under naturalism they would derive from the twists and turns of evolutionary history. Under theism minds should be independent of bodies. Under naturalism your personality should change if you're injured tired or you haven't had your cup of coffee yet. Under theism you'd expect that maybe you can explain the problem of evil. God wants us to have free will. But there shouldn't be random suffering in the universe. Life should be essentially just. And, at the end of the day, in theism, you basically expect the universe to be perfect. Under naturalism it should be kind of a mess.
    “This is very strong empirical evidence.
    “Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking But I can explain all of that. I know you can explain it all. So can I. It's not hard to come up with expos facto justifications for why God would have done it that way. Why is it not hard? Because theism is not well defined. That's what computer scientists call a bug, not a feature. Emanuel Kant famously said There will never be an Isaac Newton for a blade of grass. In other words, sure you can find some physical explanation for the motion of the planets but never for something as exquisitely organized and complex as a biological organism. Except, of course, that Charles Darwin then went and did exactly that. We can paraphrase Dr Craig's message as saying there will never be an Isaac Newton for the cosmos. But everything we know about the history of science and the current state of physics says we should be much more optimistic than that.

Our tendency to give higher credences to propositions that we want to be true... this can show up at a very personal level, as what’s known as self-serving bias.

When we want something to be true, when a belief makes us happy – that’s precisely when we should be questioning. Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously greater.

Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand–born experimental physicist who was as responsible as anyone for discovering the structure of the atom, once remarked that ‘all of science is either physics or stamp collecting.’

Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures – including, but not limited to, living creatures – in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don’t even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be?

Life ends, and that’s part of what makes it special. What exists is here, in front of us, what we can see and touch and affect. Our lives are not dress rehearsals in which we plan and are tested in anticipation of the real show to come. This is it, the only performance we’re going to get to give, and it is what we make of it.

We talk about awe and wonder, but those are two different words. I am in awe of the universe: its scope, its complexity, its depth, its meticulous precision. But my primary feeling is wonder. Awe has connotations of reverence: this fills me with awe and I am not worthy. Wonder has connotations of curiosity: this fills me with wonder and I am going to figure it out. I will take wonder over awe every day.

At heart, science is the quest for awesome – the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It’s a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives.

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation – but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.

If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.

We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.

The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a single motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.

If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can’t turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?

The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility.

We are part of the universe that has developed a remarkable ability: We can hold an image of the world in our minds. We are matter contemplating itself.

The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life. Scholars who study meaning in life distinguish between synchronic meaning and diachronic meaning. Synchronic meaning depends on your state of being at any one moment in time: you are happy because you are out in the sunshine. Diachronic meaning depends on the journey you are on: you are happy because you are making progress toward a college degree. If we permit ourselves to take inspiration from what we have learned about ontology, it might suggest that we focus more on diachronic meaning at the expense of synchronic. The essence of life is change, and we can aim to make change part of how we find meaning in it.

Even if we don't know the answer, a change of perspective can help us improve the question.