Like so many young people, I graduated from college believing that the universe is a purposeless machine. Although I was acutely aware of the distress this view caused me — after all, how could my choices matter if I was just a collection of atoms governed entirely by the laws of physics? — I believed that a rigorous commitment to science left me with no alternative.

All that changed when I discovered a few audio lectures from cosmologist Brian Swimme while driving across the country in my late twenties. Listening to those cassette tapes as I sped across the vast expanse of the American West, I found myself immediately enraptured. In Swimme’s work, I noticed a profound allegiance to science’s empirical evidence, but I also noticed something wildly refreshing: an interpretation of that evidence which suggested that human lives actually matter in the context of the cosmos as a whole. Simply put, Swimme claims that through the human species, the universe’s fundamental processes can now occur in conscious self-awareness.

Personally, I found Swimme’s perspective to be immensely comforting and inspiring — in his vision, not only does our species fit coherently into this universe, but we also play a unique role in its development. For many scientifically minded people, however, this idea might appear to be a classic example of nonsensical new-age pseudoscience. I should admit that I myself harbored these same doubts. Partly to see how well this radical perspective could withstand my own skeptical voices, I’ve spent the last five years pursuing a Ph.D. with Professor Swimme. In that time, I’ve become convinced that a rigorous commitment to science and logic does not, in fact, require us to accept that the universe is a meaningless machine. In the essays below, I suggest that there may be good reasons to question the mainstream scientific worldview and reconsider the possibility of cosmological meaning.