Peaceful Wolverine Over the last few centuries, we’ve done a very thorough search. Since the Enlightenment, at least.
Not one search, obviously. Millions of them, by people who mostly weren’t looking for the same thing and often actively disliked each other’s conclusions (“actively disliked” ranges from marital stress to the Spanish Inquisition). We took apart the sky and found more of the same stuff we’re made of, burning. We took apart the body and found chemistry — and oodles of symbiotes, for that matter. We took apart the chemistry and found smaller chemistry, and under that, particles behaving in ways that are deeply strange but not, it turns out, in any way intentional.
We have looked, exhaustively, for the seam where the mechanism stops and something else takes over.
There isn’t one. Not only is there not one, we’ve never found so much as a hint that there “should” be one, that there “must” be one. It’s mechanism the whole way down, and the whole way out, as far as anyone has ever managed to look.
This isn’t about anyone’s god in particular-and-specific. It’s simpler than that. It’s that we went looking for a note left behind — an author, an intention, a reason the whole thing is running — and we found an extraordinary depth of physics with no signature needed. Despite our own awe and emotion, we are as much a product of however the universe began as the moon is.
Here’s kind of a funny observation: We never had any grounds to expect a note in the first place.
Think about how our search was/is framed. What is the purpose of all this? The question arrives with the answer already stuffed inside it. It assumes purpose is the kind of thing the universe has, the way it has mass and temperature — that if we just got the instruments sensitive enough we’d detect it. But we invented that expectation. We are creatures who do things on purpose, who make tools for reasons, who leave notes. We’ve looked at the universe and thought of it as a process designed to result in us, and that vanity demands a designer.
We were begging the question the entire time. Not finding the note isn’t a failure of the search. It’s realizing the universe is not a designed process.
There really isn’t any need to interrogate every tree and its resident squirrels, its falling leaves, its thirsty roots, with an insistence that someone must have put them there for a reason, and that reason involves you. No, really. This stuff just grows. The rabbits and the squirrels aren’t reproducing for any reason in particular. Maybe they get bored.
Back to realizing the universe doesn’t need a designer. Two people can accept every word of that and walk away with completely different lives.
The first one takes it as a demotion. No author, no plan, no point — and if there’s no point, then nothing anybody does matters, so why bother getting up. It’s like Game of Thrones fans not bothering to rewatch the series.
This is the version everyone pictures when they hear that a person has stopped believing in a higher power. The shrug. The black clothes. The sense that the floor dropped out and now we’re all just falling in an indifferent void, pretending otherwise to stay sane.
The second one accepts the same finding and notices something different.
As best we can tell, the universe has been tick-ticking for something like thirteen and a half billion years. From plasma to hydrogen, then stars, then heavier things in the furnaces of those stars, then rock and water. And then — on at least one warm, moist pebble — it produced something that looks around at it, and wonders why. Matter arranged itself, over an unfathomable stretch of time and with nothing steering, into a configuration that has a point of view. That notices. That can be curious about its own origins, and lonely, and struck by a sunset, and irritated by a slow driver, and happy in a home, with multispecies families.
That is not a consolation prize.
The first person misses it because they’re still grieving a note they were never owed. The despairing version of this is still holding the old assumption. It’s disappointed. You can only be disappointed if you expected something. They looked for cosmic purpose, didn’t find it, and concluded that meaning is therefore absent — which only follows if meaning was supposed to be out there to begin with.
Meaning is a thing that happens where there’s a perspective. It’s not a property stamped into objects, like density. It’s a relation — something matters to someone. A collapsing star doesn’t mean anything. It’s enormous and violent and it doesn’t care, because there’s nobody home in it to do the caring. Empty space doesn’t mean anything. A rock on a hillside on a planet with no observers doesn’t mean anything.
But you are not a rock on an unobserved hillside.
The universe means nothing, and that’s fine, because the universe isn’t the kind of thing that can mean. Meaning requires a someone. And the mechanism, running blind for billions of years, eventually produced someones. That’s not the absence of meaning. That’s its arrival — late, local, unplanned, and the only way it was ever going to happen.
There’s an intuition that runs very deep in us: That perspective must be the reason, that consciousness is what the whole thing was building toward, and everything else — the stars, the deep time, the trilobites, the ice ages — was scaffolding erected to get us here. That we require a backstory. That we’re the point.
I think the un-flattered version is better. Not more comfortable — better. More interesting, and more true, and I’d rather have both of those than comfort.
Because if meaning had been handed down, it would be somebody else’s. Assigned. You’d spend your life auditing whether you were living up to a purpose you had no part in choosing, on the authority of an author you never met.
Instead, it turns out that the capacity to find things meaningful showed up in us, and it’s ours, and it’s real in exactly the way everything else about us is real.
Consider thirst. There is no thirst woven into the vacuum. Thirst is a state that occurs in certain complicated arrangements of matter under certain conditions. It is entirely dependent on there being a creature to have it. Nobody has ever concluded from this that thirst is an illusion, or that a person dying of it is merely under a misapprehension — “Don’t worry, dude, nothing matters.” Colour is the same. Grief is the same. We’re giving labels to our experience. All of it is generated rather than discovered, and all of it is completely real to the thing generating it, because that’s where real happens. There is no other venue.
When my stepdaughter was younger, we were out stargazing one night. You can get apps now, amazing mobile applications, that project the names of the stars onto the sky. They overlay the constellations, and lots of other stuff. So, we’re looking at the sky, referencing my phone, tagging stars with lovely names like Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and HD 114762. And she cocks her head suddenly and looks at me and asks, “How did people figure out the stars’ names?”
I think of that a lot. Wonderful question. I remember it all the time. Because we don’t discover the names and meanings of the constellations. The patterns and stories and deeper wisdom are ours. And yet, in our religions and our intuitions, that order is always reversed.
That’s not a void to fall into. It’s the strangest and best thing that could have happened, and we’re standing in the middle of it, doing the only thing that could ever have made any of it mean anything at all.
Which is looking. And being amazed.