Finding Purpose in a Godless World (Ralph Lewis)
OVERVIEW
If the universe was not created and there’s no cosmic purpose, does that make our lives purposeless? Meaningless? Without moral direction? How can science help answer these and other “big questions?” Psychiatrist Ralph Lewis tackles this and more in Finding Purpose in a Godless World. This book has so much juicy content that I can’t possibly cover it all, but if you’re an atheist interested in big questions, run don’t walk to your nearest bookstore.
Why do we expect the world/universe to have purpose?
Our brains are wired for patternicity, noticing meaningful patterns in our environment. This would have helped our early ancestors hunt prey, avoid predators, and navigate their habitat. However, this cognitive programming also leads us to overattribute patterns to meaningless noise… to see patterns and connections where there aren’t any. Your late mother’s favourite song comes on the radio right as we were thinking about her, or you hit 7 green lights in a row on your way to work. Our tendency toward patternicity brings these events to our attention. And then, there’s agenticity, our predisposition to infer intentions behind those patterns. Closely related to theory of mind (the capacity to identify the mental states of others), both agenticity and theory of mind help us identify the desires, mental states, and intentions of other people and animals – to search for agency in the world. A crying child with outstretched arms wants to be held, a snapping twig in the woods might be a leopard stalking us. As hominids interacting with a world full of sentient beings, we needed both to identify patterns and to perceive the meaning and intentions behind those patterns. The overattribution of patternicity and agenticity, attribution bias, is why you notice that song on the radio and wonder if it’s your mom communicating with you… why you notice those green lights and decide to buy a lottery ticket (because the universe is sending us luck!). We are so hardwired to discern patterns and mind/agency in our environment that this often spills beyond the reasonable. Combined with our expectations for patterns and agency, we also display selective attention (noticing things when they have personal relevance), confirmation bias (paying attention to things that confirm our beliefs or perceptions), and hindsight bias (seeing meaning or predictability in an event after it has happened). Add to these intuition bias, making automatic assumptions and jumping to conclusions unconsciously (following our “gut feelings”). Lastly, there’s teleological reasoning, our tendency to reason that things exist for a purpose. Ask children why mountains exist and they’ll say: “for goats to climb on.” Ask scientists why the ozone layer exists and they’ll say: “to protect us from the sun.” Of course, mountains and the ozone don’t exist for any purpose, they simply are, but these examples betray our fundamental preference toward purpose-based reasoning.
What can we gather from all this, this plethora of cognitive biases and errors? Simple: that we are wired for belief in a purposeful universe… wired to look out into the cosmos and see a giant mind looking back, one that created everything for a purpose and that has a plan for us. We’re wired to believe a higher power is sending us “signs” and that everything happens for a reason. We are purpose-driven, pattern- and agency-seeking creatures… apt to be self-centered and notice things that have personal relevance, apt to impose meaning on those events, and apt to make assumptions following not objective reasoning but gut intuition (think of that spine-tingling sensation you get when you notice an uncanny coincidence… think how that reinforces your willingness to attribute a self-referential interpretation of the events).
What else predisposes us to supernatural belief, and to religion?
Lewis explores several other cognitive quirks and biases that push us toward supernaturalism. There’s person permanence that leads us to believe in ghosts and afterlives, and dualism that sets us up for belief in souls (did you know that we use different parts of our brain to perceive the physical vs. social/symbolic world? Our minds are inherently dualistic). A lot of the rest boils down to our innate desire to be protected from harm, our desire to predict and control our environment (a completely natural and evolved preoccupation), and our desire to be loved and cared for – it all stems from our drive toward self-preservation. Religion gives us the authority we crave, the reassurance that there is a plan for us, that all of this was meant to happen. It gives us a benevolent super-parent watching out for us. It gives us social cohesion. It gives us ritual, a way to establish a sense of predictability (after all, certainty and control can only be achieved if there are rules that can be obeyed). It also satisfies our desire for justice and fairness (moral values instilled by our social evolution). Lastly, religion and supernaturalism give us something the secular world can’t: a way to cheat death… a way to believe that we won’t really die, and that our loved ones won’t really die. Persistent existential anxiety is unique to humans, and something that is ameliorated by belief in God, fate, and the afterlife.
It’s often said that we should be most suspicious when the thing we think is true is also the thing we badly want to be true.
Why are beliefs so difficult to change?
It should be clear by now that our cognitive hardware and software biases us toward perceiving purpose and supernatural agency, and it’s obvious why we’d want to maintain those perceptions (abandoning them would cause anxiety we’d rather avoid; we don’t want to feel powerless or mortal, and we don’t want life to be meaningless). But also consider energy conservation. The brain is an expensive organ, and so you can think of our cognitive biases as shortcuts… ways to do things automatically that don’t require a huge investment in objective contemplation. But beliefs are energy savers too. Beliefs make processing information easy and efficient (less energy drain). Establishing new beliefs, re-examining our worldviews, that takes time and energy. This also helps explain our response to cognitive dissonance – when we find faults or flaws in our beliefs it creates mental discomfort. Psychologists know that we are much more likely to double down on our existing beliefs when this happens, which instantly removes the discomfort and restores us to homeostasis (at very little energy expenditure, we now know). The trade-off for the efficiency of belief, of course, is that our beliefs are often mistaken and not self-correcting. If you’re a fan of Terror Management Theory, you’ll also appreciate that our worldview, and belief in the rightness of our worldview, protects us from death anxiety.
Admitting our supernatural beliefs are wrong is not a simple thing, we’re predisposed to have them, and then we’re inclined to keep them (it’s expensive and uncomfortable to change our minds). All this ladders up to the main thrust of the book: that we’re programmed for supernatural, purpose-driven belief, and that all systems and motivations work together to sustain wishful thinking.
Does this mean our lives are without purpose?
Time to get down to the hard question we can no longer escape: does lack of supernatural belief… lack of belief in a higher power, or fate, or destiny… mean that our lives are purposeless?
No, our sense of purpose is not dependent on the universe having a purpose. That’s Lewis’s argument. Purpose is not something bestowed by a supernatural creator, it’s something created by a natural mind. Think of purpose as a goal, something you are motivated to work toward. All organisms have goals. They may be rudimentary (like a bacterium moving along a chemical gradient), primitive or instinctual (like a bird flying south), or complex (like a human pursuing their PhD). All goals, all purposes, are chemically mediated – either across a simple lipid membrane, or within the vastly interconnected neural network of a mammalian brain. Purposefulness is goal-directedness, and in humans this is an emergent phenomenon, caused by neurobiological interactions. Like all mammals, our brains evolved to move us toward goals that would promote our survival and successful reproduction (and, like all other primates, achieve and maintain good social status). The complex chemical stew in your brain makes you feel “good” when you move toward stimuli that advance your goals, and “bad” when you move toward stimuli that thwart them. This chemical motivation/reward circuitry is what drives you (what makes you purposeful). Humans, of course, have more nuanced feelings beyond “good” and “bad”… we feel guilt, shame, anger, joy, sadness, elation, disgust, boredom, embarrassment, jealousy, pride, envy, love, happiness, and frustration. All these emotions, too, are created by chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, to be specific). Regardless of whether the universe has a purpose, we have purpose because we are alive. Purpose is an emergent phenomenon created by the organic chemical interactions in your brain (the same way wetness is an emergent phenomenon created by the interactions of hydrogen and oxygen in water). Humans bring purpose into the world because purpose is what emerges from our brain chemistry… the symphony of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators motivating us to eat, have sex, get a mate, get a raise, impress our parents, win a match, look good, stand out. Purpose doesn’t exist out there, purpose exists in us. It’s simply not possible to be alive and to be without purpose.
Although it’s only a small blip in the book, let’s turn quickly toward meaning: “the value or significance we interpret our life to have”. We want our lives to matter, to be important. But ask yourself: “to whom?” It is completely natural that we would want our lives to mean something to our family and friends, and maybe to the people we work with, or those we help. This is understandable… our social evolution instilled in us a deep yearning to be of importance to the people we interact with, to be seen as valuable members. And it certainly makes sense that pursuing worthwhile goals would be tied to meaning. In this way, meaning and value are like purpose… baked into our circuitry, emerging. But does it make sense to ask: “what is the meaning of life?” If there is no God, no cosmic intention, no purpose we were created for… to whom could you matter besides other sentient beings? If the cosmos has no consciousness, if the cosmos is not sentient, you cannot matter to it. Like purpose, meaning is something natural to yearn for, but something unnatural to expect an indifferent universe to bestow.
A secular humanist worldview
We want cosmic purpose and God and supernatural assurance because we are pattern-seeking, agent-seeking creatures… frightened apes who want the world to be predictable and the universe to be benevolent. We now better understand why these desires are natural, but also why they are fanciful, a wishful thinking that protects us some but also deceives us plenty. But we are not without purpose, because we are alive, and to be alive is to create purpose, to create meaning and morality – all of these emergent phenomena birthed into the cosmos by our brains. And while we may not have God or a universe suffused with consciousness, we do have each other. The cosmos may not care, but we can care, and that’s what matters.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Apathy and nihilism are not normal
Motivation and goal-directedness are the natural state of most brains. Accomplishment should give you a sense of fulfillment; achievement should be rewarding. It’s apathy that is exceptional, abnormal. If you find yourself consumed with nihilistic thoughts and lack of appetite for life, seek professional help.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Why science can help answer the big questions, including where purpose, meaning, and morality come from and why we yearn for them.
Who should read this book? Atheists and fence-sitters.
P.S.
Science to the rescue
We’ve tackled how science helps us address the worries of purposelessness and meaninglessness, but what about the other “big questions?” Here are scientific responses to some other common metaphysical meanderings:
· “It’s impossible for something to come from nothing” – According to the laws of physics, the universe absolutely could have arisen out of nothing. As long as the total energy in a system stays at zero, quantum particles can spontaneously arise and disappear. There simply could have been nothing, and then something (sounds weird, but it’s physics). Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist, also posited that “nothing” is an unstable state, and it’s much more probable that nothingness would eventually turn into somethingness.
· “How did life begin without a creator?” – The predictable formation of organic chemicals, the inevitable self-assembly and replication of simple molecules, and the containment of those molecules within lipid membranes.
· “But look at the complexity of life… it must have been designed” – If it was designed, the design was very poor. Blind spots in eyes, the totally unnecessary meandering of the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve, the fact that we breathe and eat using the same tube! Nature is replete with examples of anatomical structures that show no evidence of intelligent design (but their strangeness, redundancy, and faultiness is exactly what you would expect if they “evolved by unguided, unplanned, spontaneous ad hoc adaptations.”)
· “Okay, so you’re saying all of this is random chance?” – No. Evolution is not a product of random chance. Genetic mutations and some environmental pressures are random, but natural selection is not. Natural selection applies selection pressure toward fitness and reproductive success. Adaptation and evolution are, then, the product of non-random pressures acting on random events. (A reminder that non-random does not mean guided).
· “What about consciousness… how could something non-physical come from mere matter?” – the answer is emergence. Consider, like we did above, water and “wetness.” The hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water have no property of “wetness,” and yet their interactions cause this quality to emerge. Wetness, like consciousness, is an emergent property. Your sense of self is created by your neural circuitry, non-physical properties arising from physical matter and physical interactions. Lewis (as a psychiatrist) would emphasize that there’s nothing about you that is fixed or immutable, that can’t be changed by chemicals (drugs) or physical trauma to the brain.
These are some of the big questions that science can and does tackle. And, as we’ve seen, the science of psychology tackles: “What is the meaning of all this?” The truth? There is no inherent purpose, no universally ratified meaning… but it makes sense why we would hope there is.
“To gain a more realistic picture of how the world really is, we need to bypass our subjectivity, our intuitions, our cognitive biases, our fears, and our wishful thinking. The most reliable way to do this is to apply the scientific method. Once we consider the relevant scientific evidence, it becomes clear that the idea of a designed, purposeful universe is a human construct. We also come to see plainly that there is no basis for believing that religion is the source of purpose, morality, and meaning. Instead, religion can be understood as having incorporated these natural motivational and social dispositions and having coevolved with human cultures over time.”