The Purpose-Guided Universe:

Believing in Einstein, Darwin and God*

 

By

Bernard Haisch

 

An Excerpt from the Introduction

 

Has the time finally come for humanity to transform its behavior and raise its consciousness to a new and better level? Is it possible that we can connect with an intelligence whose thoughts created a Universe tailor-made for life? Given the present state of the world this may sound like the most naive of fantasies. Nonetheless, the idea resonates with many. Millions are buying books, such as the runaway bestseller by Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, and countless others offering a similar message of hope and opportunity for mankind.

          It would be none too soon. The last violent century saw more than 100 million people slaughtered in wars, genocides, and mere crimes of all sorts, large and small, significant or simply overlooked. The madness continues in the new century. And if mankind's cruelty to each other were not enough, we are now facing the first unmistakable signs of planet-wide environmental disaster on our present course and trajectory. A radical shift in our human consciousness may be the only hope we have.

          Is there any chance it could come about?

          The possibility of such a transformation has been at the core of religious beliefs, though unfortunately more often than not buried or misinterpreted in self-serving ways. I will not promote any specific religion; indeed I see most organized religions in their present state as part of the problem, not the solution. Instead I will point to the wisdom teachings drawn from the depths of essentially all religions known as the Perennial Philosophy, made famous by the 18th-century mathematical genius, Gottfried Leibnitz, and published as a compendium in 1945 by Aldous Huxley.

          Just as science derives its truths from experiment and careful observation, the Perennial Philosophy derives its truths from the transcendent experience that saints and sages, along with countless ordinary men and women, have reported throughout the ages and across varying religions and cultures. When it happens, this experience is so profound that the true reality revealed in those moments becomes absolutely undeniable, more certain than any other knowledge or prior belief. It is the ultimate "Aha, now I get it!" moment. The same truths emerge over and over again with respect to our true nature as both physical and spiritual beings and our relationship to an underlying intelligence that goes by many names in different cultures, but that is really the same.

 

A Purpose Guided Universe

 

On the cover of A New Earth is the bold subtitle: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. And there lies the question: Is there a purpose for your life? And not just a decent but transitory purpose such as a successful career, a happy marriage, or even children of whom you can be proud. Those are laudable, but is there an ultimate purpose transcending all others? Is there a purpose that goes beyond a single mortal lifetime? Is there a purpose for all of us human beings, the widespread realization of which could in fact bring about a transformation of human consciousness.

          Let me take this question to the ultimate level. Do we live in a purpose-guided Universe? As an astrophysicist I am well aware of the enormity of space and the vast time scales such as the 14 billion years or so since the Big Bang. Purpose for such an enormous "inanimate physical system" as many of my colleagues would put it, seems to many, indeed probably most, scientists as a blatant absurdity. What could it even mean?

          But in physics and astrophysics discoveries are being made that point to a fine-tuning of physical laws and constants of nature that taken together are conducive to life and evolution. This has become an important issue in astrophysics, something that cannot be overlooked or brushed under the cosmic carpet. There are really only two ways to explain it. One of them involves a purpose-guided universe.

          Imagine a pyramid made up of stacked basketballs. Picture it a thousand feet on each side and a thousand feet high. That's twice as high as the real great pyramid in Egypt. That's as tall as a hundred-story building. To stack such a pyramid would require about a billion basketballs. It's a big number.

Rounding off to the nearest billion, we live on a five-billion-year-old planet in a 14-billion-year-old universe. Our Sun is one star amid a few hundred billion others in the Milky Way Galaxy. Our Milky Way Galaxy is one of a hundred billion or so other galaxies in the visible Universe.

That's a lot of billions.

Given this large scale picture of things, how could there be any purpose in any man or woman's brief life, amounting to perhaps 80 years or so on average, on one obscure planet? That is a question that matters a great deal to most of us.

As noted physicist Freeman Dyson said in his Templeton Prize lecture:

"The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe. Why are we here? Does the universe have a purpose? Whence comes our knowledge of good and evil? These mysteries, and a hundred others like them, are beyond the reach of science. They lie on the other side of the border, within the jurisdiction of religion."

Is there a purpose behind the Universe? There are two diametrically opposed answers coming from the two camps of science and religion ensconced on opposite banks of the stream of life. In my view, neither is satisfactory which is why I propose a third. But first the two opposing views.

There are those who believe in God. In the United States the percentage of the population falling in this category has hovered around 90 percent for decades. The purpose of life for most believers is clear. It is to live the kind of life that will merit the reward of entrance into an everlasting kingdom of heaven. There, presided over by a heavenly grandfatherly patriarch with the able assistance of an angelic bureaucracy, choir, and legion of saints, the righteous will live in eternal bliss. Given the limited human attention span and the propensity to always want the latest and best, it is hard to see how the eternal heaven business can actually satisfy the clientele for that length of time, that is, forever. One might worry that eternity could possibly become tedious. Still, that's the reward and it's better than life down here ... putting the eternity issue aside.

But you had better be careful, because one life chance is all you get in this view. Given the wide disparity of life circumstances and influences, this one shot at getting it right for all eternity may not seem fair. And indeed, I propose that it is most certainly not. That is one reason why I will suggest a more plausible and humane alternative.

On the other side are the secular humanists, meaning those who dislike and reject the idea of a God, who scoff at such a make-believe purpose as getting into heaven. Unfortunately what they can offer in its place in the way of life purpose is rather limited.

The English poet Francis Thompson wrote: "An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident." That does seriously limit the options available for the purpose-of-life question. Life merely for the sake of living is a risky philosophy that could logically lead to nothing greater than an objective of achieving maximum wealth and pleasure here and now. Some people in this camp do come to this conclusion. Fortunately, though, most have no less altruism than the believers -- perhaps even more because there is no expectation of a reward in the afterlife for doing good here. The problem is that in this view all purpose is ultimately transitory. Recall Weinberg's "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." Unfortunately that would carry over to us individually as well.

The purpose I propose that life has is a grand one, and even, I think, a logical one. We are the means whereby God experiences his own potential and this is why the Universe has some of the amazing properties conducive to life that it has. Making the analogy of God as a vast bonfire, we are candles whose tiny flame is the same fire. We are sparks of God living in a physical universe of matter and energy in which we are able to experience things, make things happen, live and love and climb up or ski down mountains and enjoy operas or rock concerts, take your pick. The adventures we literally live out were merely possibilities existing pregnantly in the infinite intelligence that is God prior to the creation of the Universe. You might think of the Universe as some of God's thoughts, his daydreams. With the right combination of thoughts providing the basis, the laws of nature, a Universe capable of hosting life becomes possible. God then enriches himself by living through all the life-forms that the Universe can provide ... us included. Why shouldn't God get to enjoy the World Series or the Super Bowl or the Indy 500 through the enthusiasm of us fans? Of course first you have to dream up a universe. God can do that.

In this view heaven is not a place, it is a state of reunion with God from whom our consciousness has temporarily and deliberately separated itself to make physical existence and all its richness possible. The purpose of life is to let God make his own potential real. And of course this cannot be limited to human experience. God in this view seeks the experience of all living things on this planet and wherever else life might exist and whatever else it might be like.

Kaballah scholar Daniel Matt writes in his God and the Big Bang:

"In the beginning, there was Existence alone -- One only, without a second. It, the one, thought to itself: 'Let me be many, let me grow forth.' Thus, out of itself, It entered into every being. All that is has itself alone. Of all things it is the subtle essence. It is the truth. It is the Self. And you are that."

Or from a much more ancient text from India cited by Matt:

"He manifested Himself as creation. It is He alone who is born into the world. He lives as all beings; it is only Him everywhere."

Not Intelligent Design

 

Let me be clear. This has nothing to do with so-called Intelligent Design. In the view I propose, Darwinian evolution is essential for fulfilling God's purpose. The unpredictability and novelty afforded by evolution is absolutely necessary; otherwise existence would be a preordained puppet show. It is the peculiar character of the Universe itself -- an issue that has come to the fore in astrophysics -- and its origin in the Big Bang that I attribute to an infinite intelligence, not the microengineering of life-forms. It is, in fact, a more impressive feat of intelligence to dream up a few essential laws that can give rise to a universe in which life can evolve, than it would be to tinker around designing creatures like Santa in his workshop.

One might worry about how this view of human beings -- and all other life-forms -- as extensions of God jibes with our own sense of separation from God. Perhaps even more problematic is the existence of evil. It is evident that there have been -- and continue to be -- some really rotten characters on this planet: despots, predators, and others who care about no one but themselves. How can they be God in human form? You cannot blithely brush aside things such as the holocaust.

The answer, I believe, lies in our being born into life with free will and with amnesia with respect to our true nature as spiritual beings. In order for the life experience to be potentially rich and original it is necessary to arrive on Earth with a new start. We enter physical life with no memories of the existence we had before birth nor of other lives we may have lived. We acquire an ego that sees ourselves exclusively as the bodies we currently inhabit, separate from others, separate from God. Couple that with our free will to live as we choose, and the possibility of some humans turning to evil becomes ever present. Free will can be a loaded gun.

Some people claim to have at least glimpses of other lives they have lived. Such claims should always be treated with a healthy skepticism -- healthy meaning open-minded willingness to examine the evidence, not mere scoffing. Some are likely to be spurious products of the imagination, but such anecdotal evidence does support the idea that our spiritual and physical history goes beyond one lifetime. The lifework of the late Prof. Ian Stevenson, a University of Virginia psychiatrist and researcher, actually provides forensic evidence supporting the memories of some children who recall a former life. His numerous books and research articles are eye opening for their thoroughness and rigor and even moved Carl Sagan to write in his The Demon Haunted World that this evidence was worthy of consideration.

That such a view of many lives strikes people in western society as preposterous is more cultural conditioning than anything else. It would certainly provide a rational basis for understanding how Mozart could play minuets flawlessly at age four and write a full-fledged symphony at age eight. Presumably that was not his first life as a musician.

If more than one life is too challenging a concept, set it aside for the time being. But it is fair to ask the question: Does the idea of getting one shot at life, perhaps in good circumstances, perhaps in bad, and based on that going to an eternal reward or punishment really make more sense? How could such a system be consistent with a just and fair God?

Back to the question of evil. If we are to believe in a God we would surely like for him or her to be benevolent and merciful in addition to all knowing and all powerful, omniscient and omnipotent. How could he or she tolerate the cruelty that some inflict on others (including on animals) and still merit our respect as a kind and loving God?

What I am proposing -- and it is no original idea of mine -- is that God chooses to deliberately stay off the playing field in order to let freedom of choice create the new and original experiences that the Universe affords and that God seeks through us. By this I do not mean that God is inaccessible to us, rather that he does not interfere in the evolutionary process and the workings of nature. If we are actually sparks of God, we can cultivate a relationship with him through prayer, or meditation, or just talking to an invisible friend. Working creatively together with God we can to some extent shape our present reality and our future. Clearly we cannot just create any reality we want, but the power of our intention to shape what happens in our lives should not be dismissed. But as for divine meddling in the day-to-day workings of the world -- God lets nature and evolution operate independently. The unplanned novelty which that leads to is, after all, the objective.

In his book God After Darwin Harvard theologian John Haught makes a compelling case for Darwinian evolution being a necessity for the origin of new, autonomous, and unforeseen life-forms. For evolution to work requires God to voluntarily relinquish control, set aside his omnipotence in the arena of life. I would argue that allowing evil as an undesirable but perhaps inevitable consequence of free will is also an unfortunate necessity.

Perhaps those of us who have chosen life on Earth are the hardy, adventurous souls willing to risk the dangers of coming into an environment where evil exists, and in some cases even predominates and threatens us. Perhaps that is the path of the warrior to spiritual evolution. Certainly I would like to think so.

But that does not give evil a free pass. Whatever we do, in my view, has consequences, and these consequences almost certainly transcend one lifetime.

I don't pretend to know what has become or will become of a monster such as Hitler or an abomination such as Stalin, responsible for millions of deaths and untold suffering, or the deranged suicide-bombing lunatics waging war against civilization today. Likely there will be many lives of atonement and compensation. But while my emotion might wish for them to have lowly lives as cockroaches or slugs for every human life whose suffering they caused, I don't think that such regression is possible. My view is that we come back into life at the same level, as a human being, or perhaps progress upward. There may be wondrous, advanced alien civilizations out there that we could deserve to be born into in some day if we evolve to an appropriate level. A peaceful rational place like Mr. Spock's Vulcan appeals to me. I'm not the Klingon type. Pure speculation, of course.

Regardless of precisely how it works, I propose that evil does get its due, not from the direct action of a judgmental God, but from a karmic balance built into the system. I see karma as a kind of spiritual conservation law, cosmic rules of balance and compensation functioning perhaps as autonomously as gravity does here. There are many billions of years remaining for the Universe. I suggest that this affords ample time for even the worst evildoers to compensate, and effectively be punished, for their transgressions. For some of the worst it may deservedly be a most unpleasant fate.

 

Three Different Possibilities

 

But why take any of this seriously at all? Is it not just wishful thinking that there is a purpose to the Universe and a purpose to our lives? What an imagination we humans have! And let's not forget conceit. Sparks of God indeed. Bah, humbug. Where's the evidence?

Some remarkable discoveries have emerged in astrophysics during the past 20 years or so. There are numerous laws and constants of nature, discussed in detail in Chapter 3, whose properties and values could have been radically different, for all we know. Instead, all together, they are tuned in such a way as to make life possible. This fortuitous fine-tuning is not in dispute. It is a recognized "problem" in astrophysics that is in need of an explanation. Not surprisingly books are written on it by prominent mainstream scientists.

There are three possibilities to explain, or explain away, the fine tuning:

(1) It's just a lucky accident that the laws and constants are what they are. Of course because we would not be here if they weren't, that part of the mystery is solved. But why the Universe should have the properties it does in the first place is just something we have to accept as given, a fluke.

(2) It's a matter of statistics. All sorts of universes exist with different laws and constants. There may even be an infinite number of other universes. All these hypothetical universes together are called a multiverse. But that is just a convenient label. No one knows what kinds of universes a multiverse might contain and it is all pure theory, no evidence. In the multiverse explanation, we live in a "just right" universe because we could not exist in any other one. In fact some are so eager to explain away our "just right" conditions that they take our very existence as proof that there must be a multiverse of universes.

(3) It's a matter of intelligence. The laws and constants were determined with a purpose in mind: for all sorts of life-forms to evolve thereby affording the intelligence behind it all the opportunity to experience its creative potential in a tremendous diversity of creatures, us included.

Possibility 1 is not capable of any further elaboration. It could be true but is a dead end in terms of further exploration.

Possibility 2 is quite logical and obviously consistent with science. It's the one you will find in the mainstream popular science books. The problem is that you have to hypothesize a vast, perhaps infinite, number of other universes. These hypothetical universes are ones we will never be able to detect because, being different, their laws of nature are incompatible with ours. That is required to make the statistical argument work. You need a huge, perhaps infinite, sample. With a big enough sample the unlikely possibility -- a Goldilock's just right universe like ours -- becomes inevitable. Statistics are wonderful.

Still, the numbers of other universes needed for the statistics to come out right are huge. In his book The Cosmic Landscape Stanford physicist and father of string theory Leonard Susskind comes up with the figure of ten to the 500th power  (10500) for the number of other universes. That's one followed by 500 zeroes. By comparison to that, the number of atoms in the entire Universe is insignificant (only one followed by around eighty zeroes).

It is a pretty big leap of faith to believe in such a multitude of other unseen universes. To me it's a bigger assumption than one intelligence behind it all. The other issue with this possibility is its causation. One might argue that quantum laws somehow resulted in some vast fluctuation that gave rise to a multiverse of universes. That got us off and running. But if so, some kind of quantum laws had to pre-exist. After all, no laws, no fluctuations. There appears to be no escaping starting with something that just "is," don't ask why it is or how it came about.

Possibility 3 is as logical as possibility 2. In that case there is an intelligence behind the beginning of our universe. The fact of the matter is that there is no rational way to decide the matter between the two possibilities. But I would argue that the mystical and prayerful experiences of mankind throughout the ages provide not proof, but at least evidence that this may be the better choice. In this view it is a transcendent intelligence that pre-exists, outside space and time.

Who or what made the primordial laws?

Who or what made the intelligence?

No one, because if someone or something did, we have simply not regressed far enough, so dig deeper. The point is, you either accept something, following the logic of Aristotle, as the original uncaused cause ... or you are stuck with an infinite regress. That's true whether it is quantum laws or God at the root of things. In terms of causation quantum laws have no particular edge over an intelligence.

But there is more to consider. Yet another discovery is pointing at least indirectly toward an intelligence underlying the Universe. The history of this discovery goes back to a 1935 attempt by Einstein and two of his coworkers to disprove one of the most significant consequences of quantum mechanics: the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein believed that quantum theory, including the uncertainty principle, implied what he termed "spooky action at a distance." By this he meant that distant objects can have a direct influence on each other not limited by the speed of light. Einstein thought this was absurd. It violates the laws of special relativity. Einstein could not accept quantum mechanics for that reason.

As it turns out, it took nearly 50 years, long after Einstein's death, for his attempt to disprove quantum mechanics to itself be disproven. Spooky action at a distance is part of quantum theory and points to a fundamental role for consciousness.

The experiment that proved Einstein wrong was a measurement of the so-called Bell inequality, discussed in Chapter 8. The Bell inequality addresses the issue of whether certain quantum properties exist independently prior to measurement, or whether the properties are actually created by the measurement. The first Bell inequality experiment happened in 1982. Physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner state in their Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness:

"As a result of Bell's theorem and the experiments it stimulated, a once "purely philosophical" question has now been answered in the laboratory. There is a universal interconnectedness. Einstein's "spooky interactions" do, in fact, exist. Any objects that have ever interacted continue to instantaneously influence each other. Events at the edge of the galaxy influence what happens at the edge of your garden. Though these effects are completely undetectable in a normally complex situation, they now get attention in industrial laboratories because they may also make possible fantastically powerful computers."

          Then, in 2007, a yet more profound result emerged from the physics laboratory. A new and even more probing version of the Bell inequality was carried out in the prominent Quantum Optics Laboratory at the University of Vienna and published in Nature. This experiment demonstrated that even "spooky action at a distance" was not sufficient to account for the new observations. The property of "local realism" also needed to be sacrificed. Local realism is the assumption that all objects must possess pre-existing values for any possible measurement, prior to the measurement being made. This was shown to be false. In other words, as reported in the weekly science magazine, New Scientist, " ... there is no reality independent of measurements .... Rather than passively observing it, we in fact create reality."

          Local realism -- which now appears to be disproven -- maintained that whatever we measure in an object was there to begin with, even though we might not have been aware of it until we made the measurement. Take an analogy. An apple was found to contain ten apple seeds after we sliced it open. Were they there all along? Local realism said yes. The new quantum experiment says no. The act of slicing open the apple resulted in the 10 seeds appearing there. (This, of course, does not really happen with apples. We are considering golden delicious quantum apples.)

With local realism overruled, does consciousness create reality? These latest discoveries have now moved the question from the realm of philosophy into the quantum physics laboratory. The virtually inescapable conclusion now is that consciousness does create reality. If that is the case, it makes it far less plausible to view consciousness as merely an epiphenomenon of the brain. Consciousness needs to be something greater than a mental illusion created by brain chemistry. Consciousness is the primary stuff.

I propose that the consciousness creating reality in the physics laboratory and the consciousness creating the reality of our lives are a reflection of a transcendent consciousness that gave rise to the Universe itself. Certainly I am not claiming that we have now found God in the physics laboratory. But we do now have telltale signs pointing in that direction.

 

*This excerpt reprinted by permission of the publisher, New Page Books. COPYRIGHT C 2010 BERNARD HAISCH. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

 

To order THE PURPOSE GUIDED UNIVERSE from Amazon.com, click here!