Some scientists hold that even if our universe was divinely created, it was long ago abandoned to the laws of physics, as the second law of thermodynamics dooms everything to run down, including our bodies and the sun. 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 implies that a universe that is going nowhere, so we are too because nothing really matters at all. This dismal vision calls itself the voice of reason, but it is really just cosmic nihilism.
If evolution is a universal principle like thermodynamics, our universe needn’t be pointless. It is running down, but it also evolved conscious human beings, so are we pointless? If we are then so is the universe, but if we aren’t then neither is what made us. The choice 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 evolving for a reason, whether we realize it or not.
Evolution makes a difference because it works differently. A house is made from bricks that remain bricks, so its parts stay the same, but when Hydrogen and Oxygen combine into water, its parts become liquid, with the property of wetness that its gaseous parts 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, as the caterpillar parts just recombine in a new way to give the property of flight. Emergence is then how evolution produces new entities.
To suppose 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 it assumes that its parts don’t change. In contrast, this model describes the nucleus as an emergent quark string (4.6.1) that has a 3D shape, unlike its components. Likewise, electrons emerged from light to have matter and charge as new properties.
We say that hydrogen and oxygen make water but emergence isn’t manufacturing. The hardness of a sword is made by hammer blows in a furnace, but water isn’t made wet by the gases that produce it. Wetness emerges as a property not as we make things, but as evolution does. When parents make a child, genes combine in new ways to produce offspring not products. Short parents can have a tall child and caterpillar parents can have a butterfly child, so they aren’t manufactured.
A machine is designed to a blueprint, built from passive parts, and operates in defined ways, but an evolution has no blueprint, active participants, and an undefined result. 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 made itself by emergence. 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, but that it becomes an oak isn’t accidental. Likewise, a universe predisposed to evolve will do so and what emerges from it isn’t accidental or designed.
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. The alternative is that we are the product of an evolution, and so are neither 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, so the reader can decide for themselves.