Scientific materialism suggests a universe made by accident and abandoned to the laws of physics long ago. The second law of thermodynamics dooms everything to run down, whether our bodies or the sun, and the universe is no exception, so its likely future is a big freeze, an eternal emptiness where everything stops, like a clock that has run down. And if the universe is going nowhere, we are too, so what we do doesn’t really matter at all.
This dismal cosmic nihilism calls itself the voice of reason but what if evolution is like thermodynamics, a universal principle? A watch doesn’t evolve, it just runs down, but our universe evolved conscious beings, so are we pointless? If we are, then so is the universe but if we aren’t, then neither is what made us. To call what is evolving pointless is to assume to know where it is going, which we don’t, so nihilism is just a belief. Between the abyss of extinction and the hope of evolution, we carry on, not because we know but because we don’t.
A machine that is designed to a blueprint and built from predictable parts operates in known ways, so a clockwork universe should be the same. In contrast, an evolution has no blueprint, unpredictable participants, and an unknown result. The perspective of biology then seems to describe our universe better than Newton’s vision of a universal machine designed, built, and run by God. Rather than being built by a watchmaker from given parts to a known plan with a certain result, our universe could be like a seed unfolding, evolving to become what it can, as the Goldilocks effect suggests, based on its quantum origin.
The beginning then was light that could evolve into matter, so it did. Matter then evolved atoms, molecules, and eventually complex life, not by design or accident but by inheritance. For example, an acorn doesn’t contain the design of an oak tree yet if it becomes one, it isn’t an accident either. It inherited the ability to grow from its origin, and likewise a universe predisposed to evolve will do so, and what emerges from it isn’t accidental or designed.
Emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties that its parts don’t have on their own, that arise from how they interact. An example is when a caterpillar crawls emerges from a pupa as a butterfly that flies. Inside the pupa, the parts of the caterpillar recombine to allow a new property, of flight. Likewise, hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water with the property of wetness that its gaseous parts don’t have. Emergence is then how our universe evolves new things.
Yet to say that hydrogen and oxygen make water confuses emergence and manufacturing. A sword forged in a furnace is made sharp by hammer blows, but water isn’t made wet by the gases that form it. Water emerges when hydrogen and oxygen combine not as we make things but as evolution does. In biology, generations emerge from gene combinations, so our children are offspring not products, as short parents can have a tall child and caterpillar parents can have a butterfly child. Evolution is then based on emergence not manufacturing.
To think that a butterfly contains a caterpillar within it, or that water has a gaseous base, is to ignore emergence. In physics, the fruit bowl model does this by seeing the nucleus as protons and neutrons sitting side by side, while this model suggests an emergent quark string (4.6.1) that has a shape, unlike its components. Likewise, when light combines into electrons or quarks, matter and charge emerge as new properties. Emergence is how our universe creates new entities with new properties.
Are we then the intended product of a divine plan in a world created for us or the accidental product of a big machine that is indifferent to us? Evolution isn’t by design nor is it accidental. It suggests that we are neither chosen nor abandoned but one of many offspring emerging, so:
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, so the reader can decide for themselves.