If our universe was made by accident, whatever made it has long ago abandoned it to the laws of physics. 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. This dismal vision, of a universe going nowhere, implies that we are too, so what we do doesn’t really matter at all.
This cosmic nihilism calls itself the voice of reason, but what if our universe is also evolving by a general principle that is just as important as thermodynamics? A watch doesn’t evolve, it just runs down, but our universe has evolved new outcomes 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. And what our universe will evolve in the future is unknown, so to conclude that it is going nowhere is premature. If we are part of an ongoing evolution, then nihilism is just a belief, not a certainty.
A machine is designed to a blueprint, built from predictable parts, to operate in defined ways, so a universal machine should be the same. In contrast, an evolution needs no blueprint, is based on unpredictable participants, and unfolds in undefined ways. Given these perspectives, of engineering and biology, the latter seems to describe our universe better. Newton’s vision of a universal machine designed, built, and run by God isn’t supported by modern science.
Our universe then wasn’t built as a watchmaker builds a watch, from known parts, to a pre-existing plan, with an expected result. The alternative now explored is that it began as a seed that grew to become what it could, as the Goldilocks effect suggests. This allows a perspective not found in either engineering or biology, that our universe was predisposed to evolve based on its quantum origin.
In the beginning then, there was light, that had the potential to evolve into matter, so it did. Matter then continued to evolve into atoms and molecules, to eventually form the complex molecules that led to life. All this, not by design or accident but by inheritance. For example, an acorn that grows into an oak tree wasn’t designed to do that, neither did it do so by accident. It inherited that ability from its origin so if it succeeds, it always becomes an oak not some random thing. 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. For example, a caterpillar that crawls can form a pupa from which emerges a butterfly that flies. Inside a pupa, the parts of a caterpillar recombine to form a butterfly that behaves differently, so it remakes itself by emergence.
Matter can also emerge, as water emerges when hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine to form it. Again, the result has properties that didn’t exist before, like wetness, yet water arose from hydrogen and oxygen gases that aren’t wet. To think we make water from hydrogen and oxygen confuses emergence with manufacturing, as a sword can be forged in a furnace by hammer blows to a given length or sharpness, but emergence isn’t like that. Water emerges from hydrogen and oxygen by its design not ours, just as a butterfly does from a pupa.
Evolution is then based on emergence, as each generation allows new gene combinations. We then don’t make our children but rather they emerge from us, as offspring not products, so short parents can have a tall child. Emergence lets caterpillar parents have a butterfly child.
To think that a butterfly contains a caterpillar within it, or that water has a gaseous base, is to misunderstand how new properties emerge. For example, the fruit bowl model portrays the nucleus of an atom as protons and neutrons sitting side by side but in this model, it is an emergent quark structure (4.6.1) that has a shape, unlike the particles that comprise it. Likewise, when light combines into electrons or quarks, matter and charge emerge as new properties. Emergence is then how our universe creates new entities with new properties.
We build things and so think that our universe was built, but an evolving universe is building itself. The options and implications for us are then that our universe is a(n):
1. Machine, so we are the accidental byproduct of a universe that is indifferent to us.
2. Creation, so we are the intended product of a universe that was made for us.
3. Evolution, so we are the offspring of a universe that is discovering its future.
In the first cases, our universe was built from matter so humanity could be by accident or design, but in the last case we emerged naturally, as the poem Desiderata expresses:
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 how physical realism and quantum realism describe matter, so the reader can decide if we are the accidental byproduct of an indifferent machine or the natural result of a universe evolving to become what it can.