Lewis - Finding purpose in a godless world : why we care even if the universe doesn’t

Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn't. Copyright 2018 by Ralph Lewis, MD. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lewis, Ralph, 1966- author.

Title: Finding purpose in a godless world : why we care even if the universe doesn't / Ralph Lewis, MD ; foreword by Michael Shermer.

Description: Amherst : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002954 (print) | LCCN 2018020335 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883864 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883857 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Meaning (Psychology) | Psychology, Religious. | BISAC: RELIGION / Atheism. | RELIGION / Psychology of Religion.

Classification: LCC BF778 (ebook) | LCC BF778 .L49 2018 (print) | DDC 158dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002954

Printed in the United States of America

Six months before his death in 2015, as he was dying of cancer and knew the end was coming soon, renowned physician, neurologist, and science writer Oliver Sacks issued this final public reflection on how one can find meaning in the cosmos through our uniqueness as sentient beings:

When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fatethe genetic and neural fateof every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

A thinking animal. It is not the adjective but the noun that troubles a great many people when they think about who we are and why we're here. Of the several assaults on our anthropocentrism that science has generated the past half millennium, even more troubling than the discovery that we are not located in the center of the universe, is that we are not even special on our own planet. Darwin revealedand evolutionary science has since confirmedthat we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved on a planet over the course of nearly four billion years, 99 percent of which were winnowed out by natural selection's cruel algorithm. Our planet is one among eight that make up our solar system, along with nearly two hundred moons, dozens of dwarf planets (like Pluto), and many millions of comets and probably billions of asteroids. Our solar system is one of many billions of solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, most of which are whirling away from one another in an accelerating expanding cosmic bubble universe that quite possibly is only oneamong a near-infinite number of bubble universes in a vast multiverse. We can't help but wonder what our place is in this immense space and deep time, and evolution has vouchsafed our species with a gift perhaps unique to usthe awareness of our own mortality, and along with it the challenge to consider what our fourscore years mean on a cosmic time scale measured in billions. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life?

For millennia, religions, myths, and spiritualist movements have furnished answers to these questions, possibly as far back as eleven thousand years to Gbekli Tepe in modern Turkey, the oldest religious/spiritual center ever excavated. What did these people think was their purpose in life? Did they wonder, Why am I here? We may never know, but for 10,500 of those 11,000 years, religious and spiritual movements owned the category and offered up various supernatural answers involving gods and heavens as external Archimedean levers to lift us to higher meaning. But now a revolution is underway, begun with the Scientific Revolution (dated roughly from the publication of Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 to the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia in 1687) and carried forth with the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (dated from approximately 1687 to 1795, Newton to the French Revolution), in which science and reason became the primary tools of understanding the world, including the human world and all it entails. This is the worldview of Enlightenment humanism, and it offers answers to life's deepest questions, however provisional and personal they may be. Enlightenment humanism eschews the supernatural and relies exclusively on nature and nature's lawswhich include human nature and the laws and forces that govern usfor guidance on how we should behave and how we can derive meaning and purpose.

For reasons historical and psychological, it is at this point that many scientists and philosophers pull back from the precipice and hand such problems over to theologians, ministers, rabbis, and other spiritual leaders, as if it is not the place of science and reason to address such moral and existential issues. But a number of us now reject this balkanization of knowledge, going over the top into no-man's-land or breaching the walls of the epistemological citadel to see how far we can go to answering the ultimate why questions. This is sometimes dismissed as scientism, a calumny that I, for one, gladly embrace. Bring it on, Isay! Let's reject all supernatural claims and follow nature as far as it will allow us to go. The psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Lewis is one such fellow traveler, and this book is a testament to how an Enlightenment humanist finds purpose in a godless world and why we care even if the universe doesn't. Dr. Lewis's humanity comes through on every page as that of a caring physician who appreciates the uniqueness of individuals and treats his patients with compassion and his readers with respect. He reveals the bug (or is it a feature?) of human cognition that leads us to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise (what I call patternicity), and some of those patterns include gods and the purposes they provide, all of which appear to exist exclusively in our minds. Like other grand synthesizers and interdisciplinary thinkersJared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari come to mindLewis employs evolutionary theory, complexity theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to review the best evidence we have for why consciousness evolved out of primitive brains; where goal-directedness and will come from and how they drive us to strive for more meaning than other animals; and where our moral sense comes from and why we care about others, even those not related to us. Dr. Lewis also draws on the wisdom he has developed as a practicing psychiatrist, relating his experiences with real people in real crises to how any of us can derive inspiration, meaning, and purpose from life, the universe, and everything. What the reader will gain from this book is a deep understanding of how spontaneous, unguided evolutionary processes and self-organizing complexity in an indifferent, random cosmos could in fact produce unique, self-aware human beings living caring, purposeful, meaningful lives.