[image: dailygalaxy.com]

Is This a Purpose-Driven Universe?

A healthy debate currently exists among physical scientists and theologians about the origins of the universe. When asked the title question most tend to agree that all events in the universe can be traced back to the “Big Bang” in lengthy cause/effect linkages. Collapse all such events backward, and repeat the Big Bang, and we almost certainly would cease to exist. Repeat that exercise a trillion times and we still would not exist. That is because all that we can observe or not are the results of random collisions, hence we are just another set of occurrences that popped up by chance. Or not.

Others point to the same immense data sets and point out that there is something uncannily perfect about our universe. The laws of physics and the values of physical constants seem to be “just right.” If even one of a host of physical properties within the universe had been different, stars, planets, and galaxies would never have formed. Life would have been all but impossible, hence something beyond the universe must have put it all into motion with a deliberate outcome in mind.

Both conclusions cannot be correct. Beyond that, each also suggests something very different about how present and future research should proceed.

If we were to accept the first conclusion, more likely than not this universe is but one of many universes that exist, and each is expanding outward in its own random set of occurrences. This path would lean toward the notion of “multi-universes,” perhaps an infinite number of universes. It also leaves open vast avenues for investigation into multi dimensions and to unifying theories that might connect them all.

The second conclusion would place constraints on future research. We do not tend to search for answers when we believe we already have them. Moreover, the same conclusion would flow from anything that we can now observe. By this notion every grain of sand exists and is situated where it is now because someone or something put it there for a purpose.

Science correctly takes the first path. It is concerned with things that are verifiable, not with things that cannot be verified. To assume a purpose-driven universe is to assume that there is someone or something driving it. While this assumption could be true , it cannot be verified hence it lies outside the domain of science. If we were to act on such an assumption, we would effectively end all serious inquiry into the many avenues of research that other universes and other possibilities posit. As astrophysicist Neil degrasse Tyson explained it:

“Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations are just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it. Let there be cosmology…I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans [and others] will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. “ (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson)