Although we tend to think that our schools are not in the business of indoctrination, most children graduate from Western schools with a very particular view of the universe and their place in it. Concretely, most young people will enter adulthood believing that:

• The universe is essentially a giant box which operates in entirely mechanical ways.
• Because it’s a machine, the universe has no meaning and no goals.
• Humans emerged from this machine accidentally, and so we too have no meaning and no purpose.
• Human consciousness has no meaningful connection to the physical universe.

In general, this worldview is treated as an incontestable truth — the necessary consequence of our clear-eyed, scientific view of reality. As a result, our children are taught that they must simply accept the fact that meaning and values are nothing but human contrivances. As the Nobel-winning biologit Jacques Monod counseled, “Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream; and in doing so, wake to his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. Now he at last realizes that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.” 

As I see it, this vision of the cosmos is not an irrefutable fact — it is, rather, a particular worldview, which emerged at a particular time in history based on a complex set of cultural factors. In this post, I’d like to suggest that treating our current mechanistic view of cosmos as a worldview rather than a fact can new shed light on our current planetary predicament.

As we’ve discussed previously, orienting stories are essential to human life. At the same time, however, not just any story will do. To effectively guide our behavior — and also to make life’s grueling challenges tolerable — these stories must present us with a coherent vision of the world, and they must offer us a meaningful role within it.

Tragically, the cosmological story that now dominates the secular West does not integrate our individual lives with the larger cosmos in a coherent and meaningful way. To see this incoherence in action, think about how you’d answer the following questions:

• How do events in your personal life (say, the birth of a new child or a new work of art) matter in terms of the galaxy as a whole?
• How do events at the galactic level (say, the birth of a new star) matter in terms of your personal life?

Within the secular West, we have no satisfying answers to these questions because our dominant story insists that the human world and the galaxy are radically discontinuous. Within the cloister of the human world, we inhabit a world suffused with meaning and values, but outside it, our cosmological story tells us that there is only senseless, indifferent mechanism.

In our modern world, this incoherence is reflected in the fact that the study of the universe (cosmology) and the study of consciousness (psychology) are approached as if they had nothing to do with each other. As a result, the physicists searching for a Grand Unified Theory — a framework that can explain all of reality — don’t believe that this theory must account for consciousness. From the other direction, this incoherence can be seen in the fact that psychotherapists almost never talk to their clients about the nature of the physical universe. Although the goal of therapy is very explicitly to help clients gain a sense of meaning and belonging, the cosmos is treated as nothing more than an empty stage on which this quest for connection plays out.

It’s worth dwelling on the fact that the modern West is one of the very few societies in all of human history to live without a profound sense of cosmological coherence and existential meaning. Across every continent and every epoch, the vast majority of human cultures have organized all their activity around a coherent account of the cosmos. For almost all of the past 2,500 years, in fact, even our own Western ancestors believed that humanity played a profoundly meaningful role within a fundamentally coherent cosmos.

Today, however, we’re now forced to navigate two incoherent dimensions of existence — inside, a private life predicated on the reality of purpose and significance, and outside, a random, mechanistic universe in which we have no meaningful place. Although we inhabit a human world based on meaning and care, beyond that, we confront a universe that is utterly indifferent.

One of the tragic implications of this incoherence is that truth and meaning now appear to be mutually exclusive. While the story of the cosmos revealed by science can provide us with empirical truth, it appears incapable of furnishing us with any real existential meaning. Conversely, the vision of reality supplied by spiritual faiths is profoundly meaningful, but it seems to require a rejection of empirical truth. Given that the flourishing of human life depends on a story that can offer both truth AND meaning, we are therefore faced with an agonizing, impossible choice.

In some ways, the frantic pace of modern life allows most of us to avoid reckoning with this excruciating choice between truth and meaning, and so even the most hard-nosed neuroscientist can cry unselfconsciously at her daughter’s wedding. However, the psyche insists on coherence (above all else, I suspect) and so on both the personal and collective level, this bifurcated existence cannot be maintained. Something must give.

With the help of ancient spiritual traditions and new-age faiths, some Westerners have found ways to push the boundary of meaning back out beyond the confines of the human world, and to rejoin a coherent universe pervaded by purpose. In general, however, the dominant current of Western civilization has pushed steadily in the opposite direction. Like an island facing rising sea levels, the territory of meaning has been slowly eroded by scientific truth, to the point where most neuroscientists now assert that consciousness itself is nothing but an illusion created by molecular machinery. As Francis Crick, the discoverer of the DNA’s structure, put it, “‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” In this vision, consciousness is simply a mirage produced by biochemical activity, and so our cherished dreams and noble ideals are nothing but hallucinations generated by neurochemistry.

We should say, here, that this position actually describes a coherent cosmos — both the inner world of psyche and the outer world of cosmos are governed by the same mindless movement of molecules. At the same time, however, we should also point out that this coherence comes at a staggering price. Although we each want to believe that there is something profound (and profoundly meaningful) about our inner experience, our current scientific worldview contends that this sense of freely directed awareness is simply an illusion.

Historian Robert Bellah has argued that, while hard-nosed scientists may hold this position intellectually, it’s actually impossible to actually live this philosophy fully — largely because so many aspects of human life simply make no sense without taking the reality of meaning and conscious experience seriously. As a tiny thought experiment, imagine a person who interacted with your crying children as is they were actually nothing more than molecular machines. Or, imagine a person who fully accepted that he bore no responsibility for his actions because they were entirely determined by his genes and his neurochemistry. Wouldn’t we treat such people as pathological monsters, to be avoided at all costs?

According to Bellah, the West’s dominant cosmological story is actually “unperformable,” and as a result, most of us are forced to submit to an incoherent existence — while we assent intellectually to science’s mechanistic view of the universe, we still live our personal lives as if meaning were somehow real and important. In the cool light of reason, we may concede that it would make no difference if this planet were suddenly vaporized by a passing asteroid, but in the dead of night, we still find ourselves wracked by worry about the fate of our children and of our species.

YourCosmos courses are founded on the premise that a rigorous commitment to scientific evidence doesn’t require us to give up on meaning. In fact, we believe that science can be a wonderful ally in the search for cosmological meaning. As just one example, we are one of the very first generations to learn that the universe exploded into being from a single point billions of times smaller than an atom. Tragically, however, very few physics classes ask what this revelation means. While it’s certainly possible to conclude that the universe is just a machine, and so it’s birth doesn’t mean anything, it’s also possible to entertain a different interpretation: that the universe was born from a seed, just like all plants and all humans. In this light, of course, the cosmos would appear to be more like a developing organism than a machine.

Out of respect for our students, we are extremely careful not to steer them towards any particular conclusion. Instead, we simply support students in contemplating the available evidence and reaching their own conclusions. At the same time, however, we feel strongly that engaging in this kind of inquiry is fabulously important. In our view, the question of whether our planet is more like a cog in a giant, cosmic machine or a cell in a giant, cosmic organism has enormous ramifications.  

In this next post, we will continue our exploration of the difficult choices forced on us by our current scientific worldview.