Some argue that even if our universe was divinely created, it was long ago abandoned to the laws of physics, because the second law of thermodynamics dooms everything to run down. Not just our bodies but also the sun, and even the universe itself, so its likely future is a big freeze, an eternal emptiness where everything stops, like a clock that has run down. Current physics concludes that the end of everything is nothing, and if our universe is going nowhere, we are too, so nothing really matters at all. This dismal vision calls itself the voice of reason but it is actually just cosmic nihilism.
Yet if evolution is a universal principle, like thermodynamics, perhaps our universe isn’t pointless. It is indeed running down, but it also evolved conscious beings like us, so are we pointless? If we are, then so is the universe, but if we aren’t, then neither is what made us. The answer depends on why the universe is evolving, which we don’t know, so we carry on, not because we know but because we don’t. Nihilism is then just a belief, and the alternative is cosmic hope, that our universe is becoming what it can for a reason, whether we know it or not.
Evolution makes a difference because it works differently. A house made of bricks doesn’t change the bricks that made it, so its parts stay the same, but when Hydrogen and Oxygen become water, its liquid parts have a wetness property that its gaseous constituents don’t have. Biology calls this feature of evolution emergence, when a new entity has properties that its parts don’t have on their own, and attributes it to how the parts combine. For example, when a caterpillar that crawls emerges from a pupa as a butterfly that flies, nothing external is added, yet the caterpillar parts recombine in a new way to give the property of flight.
To think that a butterfly has a caterpillar within it, or that water has a gaseous base, is to misunderstand emergence. For example, the fruit bowl model sees the nucleus as protons and neutrons sitting side by side, so its parts don’t change, but in this model the nucleus is an emergent quark string (4.6.1) with a 3D shape, unlike its components. Likewise, electrons emerged from light to have matter and charge as new properties. Emergence is then how evolution produces new entities.
We say that hydrogen and oxygen make water but emergence isn’t manufacturing. A sword is made hard by hammer blows in a furnace, but water isn’t made wet by the gases that cause it. Wetness emerges as a property not as we make things, but as evolution does. When parents have children, they emerge from their genes as offspring not products. Short parents can have a tall child and caterpillar parents can have a butterfly child, so children aren’t manufactured products.
A machine is designed to a blueprint, built from passive parts, and operates in defined ways, but an evolution has no blueprint, it has active participants, and the result isn’t defined. Newton’s vision of a universal machine designed, built, and run by God is then flawed. Our universe didn’t need a blueprint because it inherited the ability to evolve. It didn’t need to be built because it emerged by itself. And it doesn’t need to be directed because it chooses its own future. There is then no design but inheritance, no maker but emergence, and no certainty but choice.
Consider an acorn that is becoming what it can, based on what it is. It doesn’t contain the design to build an oak tree but it can grow into one. And it does so not by being made but by cells reproducing to give leaves, bark, and flowers that emerge by combinations. Each tree is different, as its choices produce variety not certainty, and accidents occur, but that it will become an oak if it can is not an accident. Likewise, a universe predisposed to evolve will do so, and what emerges from it isn’t an accident, or a preset design, but a hope.
Much has been said about whether we are the intended product of a divine plan in a world created for us, or the accidental product of a machine that is indifferent to us, but what if it is neither? The result of a grand evolution is neither specially chosen nor abandoned, but a child of the universe:
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. (Ehrmann, 1927).
Table 4.8 compares physical realism and quantum realism for matter, for the reader to choose.