Read an Excerpt

FROM THE INTRODUCTION

COSMIC MEANING AND THE “BIG QUESTIONS”

Our sense of purpose and meaning is entangled with assumptions that life events happen for intended reasons and that the universe itself is inherently purposeful. Why is this so?

Belief in a purposeful universe is pervasive, and not just among conventional religious believers. It is a belief generally also shared by many followers of more nuanced theologies that don’t subscribe to a belief that specific events in our individual lives happen for intended reasons. It’s also typically shared by “spiritual but not religious” people who may not even believe in a “personal god” who intervenes in our individual lives.

Before the transformative scientific insights of the last few decades, it could quite reasonably have seemed self-evident that our world is purposefully designed and controlled by intentional higher power(s). It might actually have seemed naive to suggest that the ingenious complexity that characterizes our world could have arisen spontaneously. Even today, a few highly reputable scientists still maintain that the physics of the universe appears to be precisely fine-tuned to allow life to evolve.

Adding to the impression of a spiritual realm and supernatural design, the mystery of consciousness is especially compelling: How can consciousness possibly be derived from material particles, and how could such a complex phenomenon evolve spontaneously and unguided? How can the experience of “I” be reducible to the laws of physics and to mere matter? Moreover, what about values and ethics? How could such abstract and intangible qualities arise from the material “stuff ” of the universe? Even if they somehow could, wouldn’t morality be relative? How can meaning arise in a random, material universe? How does purpose itself emerge in a purposeless universe?

Despite many seemingly convincing arguments in favor of a grand design, modern science tells us otherwise about the nature of reality.

THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW OF AN UNGUIDED UNIVERSE

A powerful scientific worldview has been steadily constructed over the last four centuries, at a pace that has been accelerating almost exponentially in modern times. In the last decade or two, several key parts of the overall picture have been snapping into place. We now have highly compelling and entirely plausible models for how our world, life, and consciousness could have emerged entirely spontaneously and unguided — all the way from the universe’s origin (astonishingly) to its present complexity. No external or first cause is required, no intelligent designer, and no guiding hand.

At the same time, advances in psychological sciences have demonstrated that our tendency to assume that the universe or specific events have inherent purpose and meaning simply reflects cognitive biases of our human brains. Humans are strongly predisposed to overattribute pattern and conscious intention to events. These tendencies most likely evolved as by-products of our highly attuned capacities to detect predators and prey and to cooperate as social animals by readily identifying patterns and inferring other beings’ intentions from those patterns.

Pivotal breakthroughs have been made in disparate scientific fields such as cosmology, theoretical physics, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory. Considered separately and individually, their insights are already radically paradigm-shifting, but taken together, they may actually be leading to a tipping point in the intellectual history of humankind.

But if these scientific insights compel us to regard all existence as random, where does this leave us? Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg famously wrote, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Dissatisfaction with the scientific materialist worldview keeps vast numbers of people believing in a higher power and a higher plan, even if they are skeptical about and disillusioned with traditional, institutional religions. And as the influence of religion declines in Western society, many worry that societal values will become nihilistic — that is, lacking a moral compass and lacking a sense of purpose and meaning.

A PSYCHIATRIST’S PERSPECTIVE ON WHY WE HAVE EVOLVED TO CARE, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSE DOESN’T

Scientific insights addressing the big questions have been acquired at such a rapid rate that most people have not kept pace with them, do not understand them, and have not grasped their full implications. I will share many of these insights with you in this book, to bring you up to speed, and we will consider how they can inform a coherent and meaningful worldview. I will show how science can plausibly explain not only the origin of the universe, of complexity, of life and of consciousness, but also the origin of values and the emergence of caring about our own lives and about the lives of others. I would particularly like to share insights that I think can help relate the science to the humanistic level of our individual lives. For this, I will draw extensively from my experience working as a psychiatrist at the front lines of the human condition. Helping my patients through their struggles has provided me with a subtle understanding of human motivation. Many are young people maturing from adolescents into adults: I help them as they define their goals in life, launch their careers, and start families. But some never develop sufficient motivation. My job is to figure out why and to try to influence their trajectory.

The experience of [my wife] Karin’s cancer got me interested in expanding the scope of my clinical work to provide psychiatric and psychological help to cancer patients and their families. After some years of reflection, I became a consultant psychiatrist in the regional cancer center at the university hospital where I work—the same center where Karin received her treatment. I wanted to give back, and I wanted to learn more about how other people cope with such profound existential threats, including terminal illness.

There is much else I have learned from my patients in other aspects of my work—human nature is writ large in mental disorders. Psychiatric disorders help us understand normally subtle human traits and cognitive habits by amplifying or distorting them. Psychosis and mania, for example, magnify ad absurdum the general human tendency to overidentify patterns and to perceive deliberate intention in random events, especially in self-referential ways. More obviously, obsessive-compulsive disorder magnifies our need for order, control, and predictability; our propensity toward superstitious rituals to symbolically control our environment; and our obsession with purity and perfection—all widely prevalent human tendencies that find expression in religion.

People with psychiatric disorders are often misled by faulty subjective perceptions and distorted beliefs. But such errors and distortions are by no means confined to mental disorders. Subjective experience is immensely powerful for all of us. We tend to take our perceptions, intuitions, and beliefs as accurate representations of reality and are often unable to recognize or accept when these are total misrepresentations. We tend also to believe the subjective experiences of others and are easily swayed by their anecdotal testimony. Intuition, subjective perception, and the personal testimony of others underpin religious faith.

Fear of death is another common theme my patients ask me to help them with, and to which we can all relate. Some have partially consoled themselves with religious belief in an afterlife, but some just don’t buy it. Belief in the supernatural is fueled by our egocentric human inability to imagine our subjective conscious experience becoming utterly extinguished.

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. Unsurprisingly, religion has also incorporated our more selfish, aggressive, competitive, and xenophobic human proclivities. Modern secular societies have achieved far more compassion and success than religious ones—human caring does not depend on belief in a caring or purposeful universe or a higher power.

I still think that enlightened, intellectually sophisticated forms of religion can play a role in scientifically literate, predominantly secular modern societies. In its most progressive and nonliteral forms, religion can and does augment the capacity for caring in many people. Many of my patients have felt that they could not have made it through their adversity without the comfort of their faith — and some have been inspired by their religion to tremendous acts of social altruism. But too many have agonized in feelings of guilt, self-blame, or abandonment by God, asking, “Why me?” and others have diverted much precious time and energy to the fervent performance of religious rituals.

It is my aim in this book to provide a motivating and cautiously optimistic worldview but not a Pollyannaish one. This view builds on a solidly scientific understanding of the universe and human nature and so is based on reality and evidence rather than belief. It will not be a prescription for which moral codes to follow or what the purpose or meaning of life ought to be. I will simply present the argument that the fundamental human qualities that orient us toward purposeful, moral, and meaningful living are innate, instinctual products of unguided evolution. Purpose, morality, and meaning are not inherent to the universe. They were not present at its inception as part of its “design.” They emerged much later, with life itself, and were shaped by evolution. Remarkably and counterintuitively, there is nothing miraculous or mystically significant about the fact that our living world is now suffused with purpose and meaning and even moral values, though you would be justified in feeling a sense of awe at this realization.

I must caution you: this worldview is not as soothing and reassuring as the old stories we have been telling ourselves about a benevolent, purposeful universe. But neither is it nihilistic. People who are immersed in science and who have embraced it not only as a profession but also as a worldview tend to be among the most inspired and purpose-driven members of society.

As a psychiatrist, I have one foot in medicine and neuroscience, focusing on how the biology of the brain gives rise to behavior and what fuels our drives, and the other foot in the social sciences and humanities, focusing on people’s lives, relationships, and how they define their sense of purpose in society. And it is as a psychiatrist in the trenches of the daily human struggle that I offer here what I hope will be a unique contribution to this transformative societal debate.

A COUPLE OF DISCLAIMERS

1. This book describes findings and theories from a great many rapidly developing scientific fields in their state of development as of the time of writing. The very nature of the scientific method is such that many of the scientific findings and theories presented here will change over time, some of them quite rapidly, becoming updated or replaced by more accurate ones. Anyone reading this book some years after its publication will have the benefit of such knowledge regarding any erroneous theories presented here. The point is that scientific findings and theories need only be plausible, not necessarily definitive, to support the claim made in this book that today’s “big questions” are potentially answerable scientifically and rationally.

2. All case descriptions and vignettes have been presented in such a way as to maintain patient privacy and anonymity. Some details have been altered, and some cases are composites.