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Does the Universe Have a Purpose? With prof. Philip Goff · The Smart Cookies podcast

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Okay, well, ladies and gentlemen, after such grand topics like the history of gladiators,
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the AI hype and Hitler's ascent to power, the last episode, the time has finally arrived
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for this podcast to tackle a much more modest subject.
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And that's the question, does the universe have a purpose?
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And who better to help me tame this giant pickle than Philip Goff, professor of philosophy
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at Durham University in the UK, author of extremely thought provoking titles, books
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such as Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science
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of Consciousness, and his last one, Why the Purpose of the Universe, Professor Goff, welcome
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to the show.
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Thank you for having me on and for that very kind introduction.
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It's good to be here to chat to you.
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Okay, so I gather that the premise or the conclusion of the book that the universe actually
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might indeed have a purpose wasn't the result of some spontaneous revelation, like a mystical
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experience or perhaps an acid trip or something fun like that.
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Quite the opposite, the argument you're making is standing on a couple of extremely sturdy
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and well taught out legs, quote unquote.
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But since this is not a philosophy, neuron astrophysics podcast, I got to be honest about
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that.
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We need to grapple with these kind of, I don't want to say elementary, maybe principle concepts
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first.
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Otherwise, I'm just going to look like I'm going to be feeling lost like Burek in space.
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Sorry, that's a Balkan metaphor, a piece of pie floating in space.
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So I was thinking it would perhaps be appropriate to begin this exploration with the so-called
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fine tuned universe argument or hypothesis.
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What is the fine tuned universe?
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This is the surprising discovery of recent decades that at least according to our current
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scientific theories, for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in
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a certain very, very narrow range such that on the face of it, it seems incredibly improbable
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that you get those exact numbers just by chance.
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So maybe this is clearer with an example.
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One of the most discussed examples is that revolves around dark energy, the force that
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propels the accelerating expansion of our universe.
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We discovered in 1998 that our universe is not only expanding, but it's accelerating
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in its expansion.
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It's getting faster.
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And we call the force that powers that dark energy.
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And if you measure what strength that force has, it's quite surprising that if that force
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was a little bit stronger, everything would have shot apart so quickly that no two particles
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would have ever met.
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So you'd have no stars, planets, any kind of structural complexity.
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On the other hand, if that force had been just a little bit weaker, it wouldn't have
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counteracted gravity.
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So the whole universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after its beginning.
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So for there to be any kind of life or complexity, that force needed to be kind of like Goldilocks
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porridge, right?
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Not too strong, not too weak, just right.
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And that's just one example.
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There are many numbers like this that at least on our current theories had to be exactly
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in this very narrow range for any kind of life to be possible.
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And that's what we call the fine tuning of physics.
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I remember the late Christopher Hitchens, probably the most prominent of the new atheism
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members said in one interview that out of all the arguments for theism, so against atheism,
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fine tuning made him, I think he said the most nervous or something.
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However, can't we just write off the fine tuned universe argument by introducing the
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multiverse hypothesis?
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So the theory that there is an infinite amount of universes out there and we just happen
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to be in the one that has the right parameters like you described for supporting life because
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we're just lucky like that.
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Yeah, just on the Christopher Hitchens video, you can get it on YouTube, I think it's a
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very entertaining little video.
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I think he's quite drunk in the back of a cab talking about the fine tuning and how
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he kind of stresses about it.
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I think Richard Dawkins has said something similar.
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Remember a conversation between the four so-called horsemen of the new atheism talking about
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which argument for God they find most persuasive, even if not persuasive.
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I think Richard Dawkins also said the fine tuning.
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And yes, you're right to raise the multiverse.
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And to be honest, this is what I used to go for.
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I always thought fine tuning needed explaining.
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It just seems too improbable to just be by chance.
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But I thought the multiverse for a long time seemed like a more plausible explanation.
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So if there are many, many universes, all with slightly different numbers in their physics,
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then one of them is going to get the right numbers for life just by chance.
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If enough people buy a lottery ticket, someone's going to get the winning numbers.
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But I was actually slowly persuaded by philosophers of probability that there is some really dodgy
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reasoning going on in trying to go from fine tuning to a multiverse.
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There's been a rich literature on this in the techie philosophy of probability journals
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for like 30 years.
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And it's a classic example of academics talking to themselves that nobody outside of this
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very specific area of philosophy of probability knows about this stuff, despite actually this
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huge interest in this fine tuning business.
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So part of what I hope my book's done is get this discussion, this particular worry about
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the multiverse out to a broader audience.
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But let me try and articulate what the problem is supposed to be.
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The charge is that trying to explain this fine tuning in terms of a multiverse commits
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what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy.
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So maybe I can explain this with an analogy.
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It starts from the regular gambler's fallacy where someone's been playing in the casino
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all night, they've had a terrible run of luck, and you think, oh, I'm bound to win this time.
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I've got to have one more go because I've had a run of bad luck.
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I'm due some good luck.
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So that's the gambler's fallacy, but the inverse gambler's fallacy is a little bit different.
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So let me give you an analogy to try and make sense of this.
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Suppose we go to a casino tonight and we walk in and the first thing we see is somebody
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in the first room winning really big.
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They're just winning time after time after time.
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And I turn to you and say, hey, Zaza, God, the casino must be very full tonight.
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And you say, Philip, what are you talking about?
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We've just observed this one person winning big.
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What's that got to do with the rest of the casino?
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And I say, well, if there are lots and lots of people, tens of thousands of people playing
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in the casino tonight, then it's not surprising that someone will win big.
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And that's just what we've observed, someone winning big.
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Now everyone agrees that's a fallacy, right?
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That's the inverse gambler's fallacy because our evidence is just this one particular individual.
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And no matter how many people there are or aren't elsewhere in the casino, it doesn't
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make it any more likely that this one particular individual is going to win big.
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So that's flawed reasoning.
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But it looks like someone trying to explain fine tuning in terms of multiverse is employing
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exactly the same kind of reasoning, right?
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They start off with this one universe.
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Oh, it's got the right numbers for life.
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How incredible.
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There must be lots of other universes with crap numbers.
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But that looks the same problem, right?
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Our evidence is just this one universe being fine tuned.
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That's what constitutes our evidence.
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No matter how many other universes there are or aren't out there, it has no bearing on
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how likely it is that this universe is fine tuned, which is what our evidence is.
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So yeah, so I've just slowly become persuaded that sadly you can't explain fine tuning
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in terms of a multiverse.
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And so we have to turn to stranger options, I think.
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How does consciousness feature in all this?
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Or maybe before you address that, do you believe that the question of consciousness is in fact
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still an open question at all?
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Or has neuroscience kind of pretty much sorted it out?
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I ask this because I interviewed neuroscientist Anil Seth last year.
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And he has his own theory.
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I don't know if you've heard of it.
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He thinks consciousness is actually an illusion that's being generated by the prediction machine
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that is our brain, which is always trying to predict what's going to happen next in
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order to kind of maximize our chances of survival.
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And the byproduct of this constant kind of stream of predictions is our experience of
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consciousness, which is ultimately an illusion.
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That's what he thinks.
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Anyway, he seems quite confident in his research.
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Now, I realize that's only one possible explanation of what consciousness might be, but I thought
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it points in the direction that maybe we are pretty close to figuring it out.
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Would you agree with that?
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Well, yeah, people may be interested.
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I've had, I think, four debates with Anil Seth now.
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Very enjoyable debates.
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People can find them on YouTube.
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And I think we've learned a lot from our discussions and we're very good friends.
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Actually, we had an evening together in Rome a few weeks ago.
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We were both filming in a basilica in Rome for the Closer to Truth US PBS show.
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And we were both filming for that within consecutive days.
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And so we had a night out in Rome together, which was nice.
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He's a really lovely guy.
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We disagree very much, but we get on very well and we have constructive disagreement,
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which is what it's all about.
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But yeah, well, here's what I'd say to start off with.
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What I am most passionate about, before you get to my view on consciousness or whatever,
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what I'm most passionate about is that this is not a purely scientific problem.
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I think it's the science is absolutely crucial.
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Anil does some wonderful science.
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But it's also a philosophical problem.
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At the core of this, we have the ancient challenge that philosophers have traditionally called
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the mind-body problem, which is the very general challenge of how does consciousness and the
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physical world fit together?
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Is the physical world fundamental?
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You know, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and maybe consciousness comes out of that.
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Or is it the other way around?
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Maybe some story about consciousness is fundamental and the physical world emerges from some underlying
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story about consciousness.
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So it's the other way around.
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Or maybe they're both fundamental, but very different.
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Maybe consciousness is in the soul, and that's just different to the physical workings of
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the body and the brain.
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So there are all these philosophical possibilities that philosophers have explored in great detail.
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Now here's the crucial point.
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Each of these options is empirically equivalent, which means you can't do an experiment to
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work out which is correct, because each of these theories will just give us a different
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story to how to explain the scientific data.
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So what we know scientifically about consciousness is that certain kinds of brain activity go
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along with certain kinds of conscious experience.
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And we're doing more and more science to try and work out a more specific story about that.
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You scan someone's brain, you ask them what they're feeling, maybe you stimulate a bit
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of the brain, and you work out how consciousness is correlated with brain activity.
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Very important scientific data.
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But that kind of data is just neutral on all of these different philosophical options on
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consciousness.
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All of those theories will just account for that data, but in very different ways.
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So one option is just to say, well, we don't know which is correct.
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We just have to be neutral.
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And another option is to say, well, maybe even though we can't do an experiment, maybe
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there are ways of evaluating these theories independent of experiments.
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Maybe there's ways we can explore how plausible they are over and above the experiments.
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It's called philosophy, right?
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That's what we do with philosophy.
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We see other ways of working out which of these theories are more plausible.
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And that's mainly what I've spent my time as a philosopher doing.
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But look, we just need to work out.
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I think we're going through a period of history where people are so blown away by the success
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of science and the wonderful technology it's produced that they think, that's it, right?
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That's the full story.
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But sadly, not all of our questions can be answered with an experiment.
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Sometimes you have to do something a little bit different.
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I think that's very much the case of consciousness.
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So do you think that science is just going to be able to describe these phenomena better
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and better?
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But that's kind of the extent to where it can go.
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It can't fundamentally address the more existential questions when it comes to, let's say, the
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universe or consciousness for that matter.
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Yeah.
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And I mean, there's a way of pointing to the reason for this and consciousness.
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There's something quite unique about consciousness.
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Maybe I should have started with this, that it's not a publicly observable phenomenon,
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right?
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I can't look inside your brain and see your feelings and experiences.
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We know about consciousness not from experiments, not from looking down a microscope or a particle
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collider.
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You know, we know about consciousness just by being conscious, by being immediately aware
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of our own feelings and experiences.
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Now you might say, well, you know, science deals with things you can't observe all the
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time, you know, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions that physicists talk about,
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maybe even other universes we've been talking about a moment ago.
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But there's a crucial difference with consciousness because in all these other cases, you're theorizing
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about things you can't explain in order to explain what you can observe.
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Sorry, let me say that again.
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You're theorizing about things you can't observe, like fundamental particles, in order to explain
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what you can observe, right?
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That's ultimately the aim of science, explaining experimental observations.
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In the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.
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You can't observe feelings you know about them because you have them and you're just
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immediately aware of them.
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So it's this weird extra thing we know about independent of experiments.
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But then we've got to put it together with the experiments, right?
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So we know about feelings because we feel them.
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But then we know about brains because we study them.
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And you've got to plug them together somehow.
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But because it's not publicly observable, you can't pin down the total answers just
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from doing experiments.
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So you've just got to explore these different possibilities.
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Okay, so what's your view on consciousness then?
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So I defend a strange sounding view called panpsychism, that consciousness goes all the
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way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
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So panpsychists needn't think necessarily everything is conscious.
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But the idea is that the fundamental things that make up our universe are conscious.
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Maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks have incredibly simple forms of
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conscious experience.
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And that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow built up
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from these simpler forms of conscious experience at the level of fundamental.
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Just to stop you really quick, just to so I can imagine it better.
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Are we saying that then everything in the universe is suffused with consciousness in
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a way?
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Does that mean that, sorry for being so silly, but that my shoe feels something when I put
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it on?
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Not quite, not exactly.
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It doesn't mean your shoe feels something.
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But maybe that your shoe is made up of tiny things that feel things.
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Okay, that's even more tricky.
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But those tiny things, it's not like they feel the kind of things a human being feels.
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It's not like we're saying the electrons are feeling existential angst or wondering if
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it's Tuesday yet.
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Human consciousness is obviously highly evolved, highly complex, the result of millions of
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years of evolution.
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But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes.
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The consciousness of a sheep is much simpler than that of a human being.
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The consciousness of a snail is simpler still.
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As we move to simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience.
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So for the panpsychist, this keeps going down right, right down to the fundamental building
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blocks of matter, which have incredibly simple forms of experience, according to panpsychism,
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to reflect the incredibly simple nature.
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How did you arrive at this view?
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I get a bit autobiographical in my book, Galileo's Error, which you kindly mentioned earlier
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about.
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Well, when I studied philosophy, we were taught that there were only two options really.
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Either you thought consciousness was something kind of supernatural in the soul outside of
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the body and the brain, or you thought, oh, it's just all just electrochemical signaling,
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right?
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And that's it.
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I find both of these views deeply problematic.
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And I thought, I actually wrote my end of degree dissertation saying, the problem's unsolvable.
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And I went on and tried to do something else.
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But then I just came across this view panpsychism, which is kind of a middle way option.
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Sounds a bit wild at first, but seems to avoid the deep difficulties of these two traditional
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options.
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So maybe focusing on the more traditional option, right?
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Well, we can just explain feelings and experiences in terms of electrochemical signaling of the
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brain, right?
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A little bit like the way we can explain water in terms of H2O, right?
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You explain the properties of water in terms of the chemical features of H2O.
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So one day we'll be able to explain the feelings and experiences, seeing color, hearing sound,
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experiencing love in terms of particular patterns of neural firings in the brain.
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What's wrong with that?
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I mean, the first thing to say is we've been trying for many decades now to make progress
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on that.
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And that project has gone absolutely nowhere, I would say, which doesn't mean the science
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of consciousness has gone nowhere.
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You know, Anil Seth, who we've already discussed, has fantastic science of consciousness.
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I haven't got any problems with anything, he says, but none of it thus far has explained
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why the brain has consciousness at all.
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Even a single experience.
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It's not just that we don't have the full story, but it hasn't managed to explain a
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single experience.
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I know you might say, and Anil does say, so I'm having the debate here, I'm channeling
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Anil, well, we need to give it time, you know, we need to give it time.
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What I try to do in my book Galileo's Error is take a bit of a broader perspective on
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the history of science, right?
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A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo's decision in 1623 that right
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from that point on, physics was going to be purely mathematical, right?
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This was a huge moment that from then on, we're going to have a purely mathematical
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science.
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This was perhaps the biggest intellectual philosophical innovation in the scientific
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revolution.
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But Galileo understood quite well that you can't capture conscious experience in mathematical
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terms because conscious experience involves qualities, the smell of coffee, the taste
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of mint, the redness of a sunset.
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These qualities can't be captured in the purely quantitative language of mathematics.
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An equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun, right?
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So Galileo said, right, well, if we want a mathematical science, we've got to take
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consciousness out of science.
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So that's in the soul, that's outside of science.
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Once we do that, we can capture everything else purely mathematically.
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Brilliant move that has gone really well, produced, made incredible progress, produced
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incredible technology.
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I think 400 years later, we're at this period of history of people saying, oh, it's gone
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so well, it's gone so well, it's surely explaining everything.
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Well, now hold on, hold on.
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It's gone so well because it was designed to exclude consciousness, right?
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I think if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about, oh, this troubles
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explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he'd say, of course, I bloody designed
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physical science to exclude consciousness.
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That's the very point.
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So I think if we want to really bring consciousness into science, we need to find a way of unifying
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what Galileo separated.
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This is why we're having so much trouble.
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We need to find a way of unifying what Galileo separated, the qualitative story of human
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consciousness, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and the quantitative story of physical science.
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And I think panpsychism offers a way of doing that.
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OK, so we have the fine-tuned universe hypothesis.
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Let's say it's true.
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We have the consciousness.
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We talked about panpsychism.
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With all of these in place, forgive me, but I still can't quite see how that makes the
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universe have a purpose.
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Couldn't everything just be a giant fluke?
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Maybe I'm guided by my intuition too much here.
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But do you ever have one of those weird existential moments when you're just like eating a sandwich
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or something and a sort of a wave comes over you, just a feeling telling you this is all
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a big misunderstanding, like a big accident, because it's just too odd to be anything else.
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And there's really no other possible explanation than all of this being a freak accident.
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Or is that just me?
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Yeah.
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So I think the purpose stuff comes from the fine-tuning, more than the consciousness issue.
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So let's come back to the fine-tuning.
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This surprising discovery that certain numbers in physics are against incredible odds, just
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right for life.
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So as you vividly put it there, well, maybe it's just a fluke, right?
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Flukes happen.
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Yeah.
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Sometimes people do win at the casino.
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Or you're thinking of someone and they phone.
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Or I have a wonderful picture in my book that my wife, Emma Bullock, does all the illustrations
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of her book.
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She did a wonderful picture of Jesus in toast.
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If you Google it, you get these times you've got a burn mark in the toast.
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It looks uncanny like Jesus.
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Or I say Jesus, or the Western idea of Jesus, I guess, in certain films or certain, well,
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I guess, the Gerard Leto paintings.
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But you don't say, oh my God, Jesus is communicating through us through toast.
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That's just a fluke.
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Well, I think that is a rational thing to say when it's not that improbable.
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But let me take another example.
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Suppose some burglars break into a bank, and there's a 20-digit combination, and they guess
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it first time in like five seconds.
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And we're considering two possibilities.
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Hypothesis one, they had inside information and they were told.
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Hypothesis two, they just guessed it.
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They got it right.
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What are you going to think?
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You're going to say, I suggest it would be profoundly irrational to say, oh, maybe they
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just guessed.
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No, look, right.
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That is incredibly improbable.
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And there's an alternative here that removes that improbability.
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I essentially think it's the same with the fine-tuning case.
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It's just we've got two hypotheses.
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It's just chance.
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Well, setting aside the multiverse, we've talked about that.
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Obviously, we can still debate that.
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But setting that aside, OK, it's just chance against these incredible odds.
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And they really are more than astronomical odds that you're going to get these numbers
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right just by chance.
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Or maybe it's just chance.
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But I think there are alternative options that remove all that improbability.
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And therefore, I think the rational thing to do is to go for those alternatives.
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It's not rational to believe in probable things.
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It's not kind of brave to believe in probable things.
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And this can be made more precise, actually, with our we do actually have a mathematically
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precise way of understanding how evidence works with something called Bayes theorem,
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which was very important in tracking the pandemic.
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I was very happy during, well, I wasn't happy during the pandemic, but I remember in the
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Guardian newspaper, they had an image of Bayes theorem because they had an article on how
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important this was in tracking the pandemic.
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But yeah, basically, Bayes theorem tells us, slightly oversimplifying, but all things being
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equal, you go for the hypothesis that removes improbability, that makes the evidence most
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likely.
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Right.
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So just like if our evidence is the bank robbers got the right 20 digit code, well, you go
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for the theory that makes that likely that like, you know, they got inside information.
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Likewise, when we're thinking of the fine tuning physics for life, to avoid the incredible
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improbability that this is just chance, I think we need to go for some sort of hypothesis.
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And I think there are rigorous hypotheses where there is actually some kind of goal directedness
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towards life in that very early stage of the universe.
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And I think really the reason we're not doing that is cultural, I think.
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We've just got used to the idea, oh no, science, that sounds too goddish.
28:30
Science has ruled that out.
28:31
So, you know, that's a load of rubbish.
28:34
And then the evidence changes.
28:37
But when we still don't want to go near it because we just kind of feel icky about it.
28:41
But I think there are ways of making sense of that, that there's some kind of goal directedness
28:45
towards life.
28:47
It makes the evidence we are finding more probable.
28:50
It explains that evidence.
28:51
I really think that's the rational thing to go for.
28:54
And I think we're kind of a little bit in denial about it as a society.
28:57
I think future historians will look back and think, why the hell did they ignore this fine
29:02
tuning stuff for so long?
29:03
That's what I think.
29:06
How is the universe with a purpose different from intelligent design?
29:10
Could you clear that up for us, please?
29:13
Well, what I should quickly say is, although I do have issues with traditional atheist
29:22
view that we live in a meaningless, purposeless universe for the reasons I've just been explaining,
29:27
I also have big problems with the traditional idea of God as an all-knowing, all-powerful,
29:33
perfectly good being.
29:35
I have issues there with the familiar problem of suffering.
29:39
Why would a loving God who can do anything choose to bring us into existence with the
29:47
horrific process of evolution by natural selection?
29:52
So I have problems with the traditional idea of God.
29:56
I think there's things that can't explain like suffering.
29:59
But I also have problems with traditional atheism.
30:02
I think there's things it can't explain like fine tuning.
30:05
And we're stuck in this perennial debate.
30:08
I don't know who's right, Richard Dawkins or the Pope?
30:10
Which team are you on?
30:12
When I think actually both sides of this never-ending debate get something right and something wrong.
30:16
And it's just high time we explored the middle ground options, which is what I tried to do
30:22
in my modesty title book, Why the Purpose of the Universe?
30:28
And just again, like so intelligent design means that there is a God who created the
30:35
universe and the God is all powerful and all knowing.
30:38
And everything else follows from that.
30:41
But it doesn't square up with what we're observing about the universe.
30:44
Yeah.
30:45
So what does intelligent design mean?
30:48
Often that term is used for theories where we need some kind of designer in biology.
30:55
And that's certainly not what I'm suggesting.
30:58
I'm not a biologist.
31:00
I'm happy to defer to the consensus of biologists about the best explanation of what's going
31:05
on in biology.
31:06
But I'm not opposed to some kind of designer.
31:14
And that is a natural way of making sense of goal-directedness, right?
31:21
There's some kind of mind.
31:23
I would want it to be a non-anthropomorphic, very, very different mind to us, to a human
31:30
evolved mind.
31:31
But yeah, there could be one explanation I'm open to is some kind of mind behind the universe.
31:40
So that's close to the traditional God idea.
31:42
But I would not go for an all powerful mind, right?
31:49
Or at least not all powerful and perfectly good, right?
31:53
Because that leads us back to the problem of suffering.
31:55
So basically, in the Y book, I consider three different ways of making sense of goal-directedness.
32:02
One is a non-standard designer, maybe a God of limited powers who's kind of made the best
32:08
universe they can, right?
32:11
Maybe God just can't create intelligent life in an instant.
32:16
Maybe the only way God can create intelligent life is to create a universe with the right
32:21
physics that will eventually evolve life.
32:23
And God's like, oh God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's really messy.
32:28
I wish I could do better, but it's this or nothing, right?
32:30
This is the best I could do.
32:32
So this hypothesis could explain both the fine tuning in terms of God's purposes, but
32:37
also the suffering in terms of God's limitations.
32:40
So that's one possibility.
32:41
I also explore just taking goal-directedness as a brute without some mind to underlie it.
32:49
We could have goal-directed laws or we call these teleological laws, laws with kind of
32:55
purposes built into them, sort of aiming at some future goal.
32:59
And actually, some of our best very rigorous philosophers have found a kind of very rigorous,
33:05
precise way of making sense of articulating such goal-directed laws.
33:12
Third possibility, as a panpsychist who already thinks the universe is filled with consciousness,
33:17
I explore the possibility that the universe is itself in some sense a conscious mind with
33:23
its own goal-directedness.
33:26
These sound kind of very weird, strange, unusual hypotheses, but I think we can make very precise
33:32
sense of them.
33:33
I think we can, the evidence, for example, of fine tuning supports them.
33:37
And then at that point, it's just cultural prejudice that is making this thing, oh, this
33:43
is stupid, this is really weird.
33:45
Well, tell me where the evidence is going wrong.
33:51
Don't some of these options kind of open more questions than they answer them?
33:55
Like for example, if there is a mind that's kind of directing or creating the universe,
34:01
who put the mind there?
34:02
Where does the mind come from?
34:04
What's the mind's purpose then?
34:06
Well, look, every hypothesis has to stop somewhere, right?
34:12
I often quote, I don't like Wittgenstein as a philosopher.
34:15
He's a great philosopher, but I don't really like it.
34:17
But I love this line he gives that I give a lot.
34:22
Explanation has to stop somewhere, right?
34:24
Every theory has to take something as the starting point.
34:30
Maybe you take the Big Bang as starting point, maybe the laws of physics, maybe the quantum
34:35
vacuum, maybe mathematics, maybe God.
34:39
So I don't see the problem with taking a God of some kind as a starting point as long,
34:50
what do we want out of theory?
34:51
We want it to explain the data that we think needs explaining.
34:54
And we want it to be fairly simple, not too complicated.
35:01
And I think if we can give some kind of hypothesis where there is some sort of mind or goal directedness
35:08
behind things, and that can be articulated in a not too complicated way.
35:13
And then we say, well, what's your justification for this starting point?
35:16
Well, it deals with the fine tuning and it can also explain the suffering we find because
35:21
of this mind has limitations or these goal directed processes have certain limitations
35:28
in their realization.
35:30
Then I think that's all you ever want from a scientific or a philosophical proposal.
35:38
That does make sense.
35:39
But I don't know where I heard this phrase, God of the gaps, that once you put God as
35:44
an explanation, he just fills up the gaps of everything that we don't know.
35:49
And then we just sort of stop trying because we don't need anything else.
35:53
Yeah, I would say this isn't God of the gaps.
35:56
God of the gaps, I mean, it's an important thing to be wary of.
35:59
God of the gaps is where you say, I don't understand this, therefore God did it.
36:04
I don't understand dark matter.
36:07
Therefore God made it.
36:10
But this is not what we're doing here.
36:13
This is saying, look, something God-ish is supported by this empirical evidence.
36:23
And as I say, we have a mathematically precise way of understanding how evidence works.
36:35
We get evidential support when the hypothesis makes the evidence likely.
36:42
That's how Bayes' theorem works.
36:44
We go for the hypothesis that makes the evidence likely.
36:47
So the argument is some sort of God-ish hypothesis makes the fine-tuning kind of likely, kind
36:53
of expected, whereas a sort of chance hypothesis makes the fine-tuning incredibly unlikely.
36:59
And if those two statements I've just said are correct, then Bayes' theorem kind of
37:05
mechanically churns out that you've got support for God.
37:08
And so in a way, when I teach philosophy of religion and they think they're going to give
37:16
all this sort of Richard Dawkins, students think they're going to give the Richard Dawkins
37:19
style intuitions and stuff, these kinds, and I make them do Bayes' theorem.
37:23
I make them do probability calculus, and it sort of disciplines the debate.
37:30
There's still debate to be had.
37:32
There's still a debate to be had.
37:34
But we work within our mathematical understanding of how evidence works.
37:41
So sometimes, we need to be wary of biases, right?
37:48
But I think there's a problem at the moment in that we're very well trained in Western
37:52
intellectual circles to be aware of religious biases.
38:00
That's important.
38:02
But there's also secular biases.
38:05
Every generation absorbs a worldview it can't see beyond, right?
38:11
I feel silly talking about this stuff in front of my peers as a philosophy professor, talking
38:16
about kind of a purpose to the universe.
38:19
I feel stupid, right?
38:20
And that kind of group think bias stops us looking at things impartially, right?
38:29
So I talked to a lot of physicists about that.
38:31
I talked more and more to loads and loads of physicists.
38:34
And a lot of them say, yeah, look, there is a deep problem in this fine-tuning evidence
38:38
we're talking about.
38:39
It's not like fringe controversial evidence.
38:41
It's very broadly accepted.
38:43
But they say, well, you know, the evidence will change.
38:46
Just give it time.
38:47
Maybe future physics won't have fine-tuning in.
38:50
Well, maybe we'll bring general relativity and quantum mechanics together and there won't
38:58
be any fine-tuning.
39:00
Maybe there'll be more.
39:03
All you can ever do is work with the evidence you currently have.
39:07
And it's the very definition of a bias to say, well, I'm going to ignore the evidence
39:13
we currently have until we get evidence that fits better with the theory I like.
39:18
And I think that's what almost everybody is doing at the moment with fine-tuning.
39:24
We've got this evidence that fits really well with something god-ish.
39:29
So we're just ignoring it until some different evidence comes along.
39:32
I like how you say something god-ish.
39:34
So you're allowing for a lot of different possibilities.
39:37
You're not saying this god or this god or whatever.
39:39
Yeah.
39:40
In a very generic way, I'd say it is some kind of goal-directedness towards life.
39:46
Maybe goal-directed laws of nature.
39:50
I reject the traditional god as much as the atheistic position.
39:57
But yeah, so we need to be open-minded.
39:59
But I think we currently have evidence.
40:01
And we need to be open-minded that the evidence will change.
40:04
Maybe it'll change.
40:05
But at the moment, there is evidence for some kind of goal-directedness towards life in
40:10
the early universe, I believe.
40:11
Well, since I am full of secular biases, I am an atheist.
40:15
Or maybe an agnostic would be more fair.
40:18
I'm just going to try to throw everything that I have, which is not a lot, at you.
40:23
What do you think of the simulation hypothesis?
40:26
Wouldn't that also solve many of the questions that we've addressed?
40:29
Oh, yeah.
40:30
That should be an option on the table as well.
40:33
Yeah.
40:34
I mean, that's a designer, right?
40:36
So the simulation hypothesis that we're in, and I consider this in detail in the book,
40:44
that we're in some computer simulation.
40:46
Maybe it's not a bad guy or a good guy, someone trying to work out how life evolves in intricate
40:53
details.
40:54
So they set up this computer simulation, and we're just in there.
40:56
So yeah, that's a design hypothesis.
41:02
I mean, ultimately, I guess I have issues because of my consciousness views with whether
41:11
beings in a simulation would be conscious.
41:14
I think you tend to think beings in a simulation would be conscious if you have a more view
41:22
of consciousness where it's more just sort of information processing kind of thing.
41:27
Then, you know, if the simulation is really that detail that all the structure of the
41:33
brain is preserved in the simulation, then you're sort of going to have the same information
41:37
processing.
41:38
Maybe you can have the same consciousness.
41:40
But if, as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is sort of the stuff of the world, the flesh
41:44
and blood of the world, then I don't really think a simulated system is going to be conscious
41:49
in the same way.
41:50
So that's one issue I have with the simulation hypothesis.
41:52
But yeah, my friend, the philosopher Richard Brown, who's got a good YouTube channel,
41:59
Consciousness Live, I think it's called.
42:01
Yeah, he's very passionate on that being the best explanation of fine tuning.
42:07
We aspire to have a conference one day on sort of God versus simulation, which is the
42:11
best explanation of fine tuning.
42:13
But yeah, that should be on the table.
42:16
Sure.
42:17
Okay, I'm tapped out.
42:20
That's all I had.
42:22
But don't just say like, oh, that's got to be it.
42:27
I think we should be open to all of these possibilities.
42:32
But yeah, sorry, I interrupted you.
42:34
Yeah, fair.
42:35
No, no.
42:36
I wanted to ask, okay, so if the universe indeed does have a purpose, what is it?
42:44
The big question follows.
42:46
How can we begin to grapple with this question if the answer to the first one is affirmative?
42:54
Well, you have to buy the book to find out.
42:57
The final page, it says the purpose.
43:02
No, of course, that's not settled at all by this fine tuning business we've been discussing.
43:12
I mean, it could be we've reached the end of the purpose.
43:16
Maybe the purpose was kind of evolved life or something, and that's it.
43:21
The purpose has run out.
43:22
On the other hand, you might think it would be surprising if there is a purpose to the
43:29
universe.
43:30
If there is a purpose, it would kind of be surprising.
43:32
Oh, we happen to be living at the final period of the history, the purpose of the universe.
43:40
So maybe there's more to come.
43:41
Maybe there's some greater form of existence to come that relative to that, we're like
43:48
our existence relative to worms.
43:52
But yeah, I mean, it's very speculative, I suppose.
43:56
I mean, what I ended the book with, I suppose, is that one could, in terms of thinking about,
44:03
you know, most of the book is just the kind of cold-blooded argument, but then the last
44:07
chapter is thinking about how this implications for human meaning and purpose.
44:12
And I talk about what one could live in, hope that there is some greater purpose to come.
44:20
There is some continuity of this purpose, and that maybe even we can contribute in some
44:25
small way.
44:26
The good we do may in some way contribute to the coming about of this greater purpose.
44:33
And at this point, it's going to be hope rather than belief, you know, it's living in hope
44:42
of something.
44:43
But I think that can be rational.
44:44
I'm a big fan of the great 19th century philosopher and psychologist William James, you know,
44:50
who talks about in situations of uncertainty, it can be rational to sort of choose to believe,
44:58
to choose to have faith.
44:59
I mean, take an example I like to give, are we going to deal with climate change?
45:04
You know, you might think, probably not looking at the evidence, or at least it's very far
45:11
from certain, but it could be rational to think, well, look, I'm going to choose to
45:14
have faith that we are, I'm going to live in hope that we're going to deal with it,
45:18
you know, and I'm going to, that's going to give me meaning and motivation.
45:21
So in situations of uncertainty, you know, so far I've been saying this is what we should
45:26
think because this is where the evidence points, but now we're going beyond that saying, situations
45:31
of uncertainty maybe can be possible to live in hope of something.
45:35
But it's, yeah, it's very uncertain.
45:36
Well, more recently, even than the book, I've come to the conclusion that a certain slightly
45:45
heretical version of Christianity fits quite well with all this stuff.
45:50
And so I've gone public embracing, self-identifying as a heretical Christian.
45:59
But that's much less, but again, to emphasize the same point, that would all be very uncertain,
46:04
right?
46:05
Well, I've come to think that this slightly unusual form of Christianity is a credible
46:11
possibility because I think it fits quite well with the God of limited, the God of limited
46:18
powers hypothesis I articulated before.
46:21
So I think if something's a credible possibility, then it can be a rational option to live in
46:27
hope that it's true.
46:29
But certainly I always want to emphasize this is very uncertain.
46:34
Yeah, so this is quite a bombshell.
46:37
Your article, My Leap Across the Chasm, in which you articulate how a sort of, like you
46:42
said, a heretical form of Christianity makes sense to you.
46:46
Could you talk more about this heretical form of Christianity?
46:50
What exactly, what happened?
46:51
What are we talking about here?
46:52
Yeah, it's a good title.
46:53
Listen, I didn't come up with that title.
46:56
That was the often, generally when you write things for magazines, the, excuse me, generally
47:04
when you write things in magazines, the editors come up with the title.
47:07
I particularly like that one.
47:08
It's really good.
47:09
Yeah, very, very catchy.
47:11
Well, it's a form of Christianity that fits well with how the Eastern Orthodox Church
47:19
thinks about things.
47:20
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, there's less of a focus on sin.
47:25
We've got wrapped up with that because of Augustine.
47:28
And the Eastern Orthodox Church, the ultimate goal of existence is for God and the universe
47:38
to come into a state of deep intimate unity.
47:45
This is what Jesus was getting at when he talks about this metaphor of vine and the
47:50
branches.
47:51
I think that the relationship between the vine and its branches, obviously that's a
47:55
very deep, intimate, organic relationship.
47:58
So the aim is that that's the ultimate goal of existence for us and God to come together
48:04
in this intimate, organic connection.
48:06
But there's a problem, right?
48:09
We're a bit different to God, right?
48:11
Don't know about you, Zara, but you know, God's sort of like the timeless, what's God?
48:21
Timeless source of everything that is and was and will be.
48:25
And we're just these kind of physical contingent embodied beings, right?
48:29
And the two kind of don't fit together.
48:33
Robin Collins, someone who defends this says it's like trying to graft a branch onto a
48:39
horse.
48:40
They kind of don't fit together.
48:41
So, right.
48:42
So the aim is for God and the universe to come together, but they're just two different.
48:47
So what's the solution?
48:48
The solution is for God to become a bit more like us, take on a physical nature, share
48:54
in our form of existence so that we can share in God's form of existence.
48:59
The thought is that this begins to close the gap between God and creation.
49:07
So basically, I thought when I learnt about this, you know, talking about reading and
49:13
talking to many different questions, first thing strikes me is it resonates with me in
49:20
a much deeper way, in a way that the Catholicism of my upbringing never resonated and I rejected
49:28
when I was 14 and, you know, and all these kind of Jesus paying the price for our sins
49:34
just kind of makes no sense to me on an intellectual or spiritual level.
49:38
But this way of thinking about things strikes spiritually resonates with me and it seems
49:44
to me to fit quite well with this hypothesis of a God of limited powers, although at least
49:49
in an Orthodox church, I'm not saying they believe in a God of limited powers.
49:52
This is why my view is heretical partly.
49:56
So the way I interpret Christianity basically is, you know, God's trying to create a perfect
50:02
universe but the only way God can do that is kind of in two stages.
50:06
Firstly creating a kind of okay universe with the right physics to eventually evolve life
50:11
and then when it's evolved enough, God kind of brings it to perfection by becoming more
50:17
intimately involved in it, sharing in its nature so it shares in God's nature and so
50:22
on.
50:23
So this, I'm very uncertain that it's true, as I've said, but I would say it's a credible
50:34
possibility because it fits quite well with a view I think is strongly evidenced, namely
50:42
the hypothesis of a God of limited powers or that's one of the possible explanations
50:49
of this fine tuning which is I think a serious piece of evidence.
50:55
When we were talking about the universe and how it's filled with suffering and you know
50:59
with other terrifying stuff and phenomena and so forth, wouldn't an evil God also solve
51:05
this problem?
51:06
What if the God is there but they're just evil?
51:10
Yeah, well again that should be on the table in terms of the general middle ways between
51:20
God and atheism, that should be on the table.
51:22
I suppose part of my effort with an evil God is it seems to lead to the mirror images of
51:28
the problems with the all-powerful good God, right?
51:32
So the problem with the all-powerful good God is oh yeah, why is there so much suffering?
51:36
So conversely for the evil God, why are there so many good things, right?
51:42
Why is there beauty and babies and love and everything?
51:49
Now you could make up explanations I suppose, oh you know maybe we're just having good
51:58
things so the suffering is even worse when we get those good things taken away or something,
52:02
but they end up sounding a little bit like the explanations which I think are bad explanations
52:07
people try to give to explain why the good God allows suffering.
52:14
So this has been pressed very forcefully by Stephen Law where he calls the evil God challenge.
52:19
So yeah, so I mean maybe you could say well it's a God that's kind of good but kind of
52:26
bad but I don't know, we'd have to be more precise about how to articulate that you know
52:31
what is it God gets angry or I don't know.
52:33
So I think what I like about a good God that's limited is I think actually we can very precisely
52:41
specify the limitations.
52:45
Just take physics, take the numbers out, that will give you a kind of mathematical structure
52:50
that's quite kind of simple and you say you know God's limited to physics with a form
52:54
like that.
52:55
So basically the specification of the limitations of God is simpler than physics so that's nice.
53:02
I don't know how you tell as simple a story with a bad God about like why we have the
53:09
suffering.
53:10
Last question before I finally admit defeat.
53:15
Why doesn't God reveal themselves even if it's a limited God, a God of limited powers?
53:21
God was capable enough to create this universe and us in it so surely they can reveal themselves
53:28
to us.
53:29
Not in just these sort of like literary appearances but in a way that we'd all understand what's
53:36
going on.
53:37
Yeah, well I mean this is a very important challenge called the hiddenness of God.
53:46
Why doesn't God make herself more known?
53:50
It's a very important part of why I don't believe in the traditional God.
53:54
It's been pressed very forcefully by John Schellenberg, probably the most famous proponent
54:02
of this objection who I had at a conference here in Durham, my university, last weekend
54:06
on panpsychism and panentheism.
54:10
Panentheism being the view that kind of the universe is inside God and John Schellenberg
54:15
has not only pressed that objection against the traditional God but he also has his own
54:22
brand of unusual religion.
54:24
He thinks we're very early in our evolutionary history so we should think he does believe
54:30
in something kind of like something God-ish but he thinks you know it's too early in our
54:35
evolutionary history to know the true religion.
54:37
We're gonna have to wait another few hundred thousand years before we know the true religion.
54:41
It's a very interesting perspective.
54:43
I don't have a couple million years.
54:46
Yeah, fair enough.
54:49
But yeah, to address your, I mean I address all of these challenges to the traditional
54:53
God by saying about God's limitations.
54:55
So I think yeah, I think God can't reveal themselves more precisely.
55:03
So I guess I want to say we experience God in some way in spiritual experiences, mystical
55:10
experiences but I think God is limited in just providing some very generic sense of
55:23
her essence, her presence that can only be grasped when you're in the right frame of
55:29
mind.
55:30
Maybe after a lot of meditating or great experience of beauty or taking some psychedelics or something.
55:36
It's hard to discern in the hustle and bustle of ordinary life and God kind of can't break
55:43
through that.
55:44
But also I think God can't convey more detail than that.
55:48
I think God's limited to just conveying some very generic sense of a greater reality at
55:54
the core of things which so many people do believe in right.
55:57
Even today with the decline of religion in the West so many people do say I don't believe
56:02
in God but I believe in something.
56:04
And I think that is the God conveying her existence to people.
56:12
So why do I think God's limited in that way?
56:13
For exactly the reason you think.
56:15
If God could convey her existence more precisely I think she would.
56:21
Things get trickier if you go for Christianity.
56:24
Even the heretical version I've given holds that in some sense God and the universe came
56:32
together in a quite unique way in the Jesus guy.
56:36
Well how come God's able to do that?
56:38
Why doesn't God do it more often?
56:40
That's tricky and I've got a long academic paper that's currently under review actually
56:45
trying to articulate why that could be.
56:51
To make sense of how you'd extend God's powers to make sense of God's capacity to become
56:59
deeply unified with a sort of human being in a way that still denies God the ability
57:08
to make the world better than it is.
57:10
So I admit that's very very tricky right and that's partly why I'm very very uncertain
57:15
that Christianity is true right.
57:17
I engage with Christianity as I think of faith as a matter of trust right.
57:23
It's trusting a certain view of the meaning of existence in terms of how you interpret
57:31
your deepest experiences, shape your life goals, engage with community and spiritual
57:39
practice and it's fine to do all that, engage with a religious tradition while being very
57:47
on an intellectual level realising it's very uncertain.
57:51
So yeah I'm very uncertain that Christianity is true, that the Christianity I engage with
57:58
but to the more generic problem of God communicating I would just say I think that's simpler I
58:07
think.
58:08
I mean all of this is hard but I just think God's not able to do that.
58:13
Last question, you kind of touched on it already but if the universe does have a purpose what
58:18
implications does that have for us?
58:20
In other words what's the best way to lead our lives?
58:22
I'm just going to press you on it a little bit.
58:26
So I take a middle way option, I'm always the middle way guy.
58:29
The centrist.
58:30
Yeah one extra.
58:31
Oh actually I'm quite lefty politically though so I don't like that.
58:36
But I'm still kind of, I think I would have been a centrist politically in the 70s.
58:44
Oh that's an interesting way of framing it.
58:50
Yeah this is interesting, I've got the post from 45 to 75 I think if I'd have lived in
58:57
that period I would have been pretty centrist.
58:59
Which is like a communist now.
59:03
Exactly the economic thing has gone so far right that if you have that kind of view that
59:09
used to be held in the conservative party here you're a radical leftist.
59:14
I've got a friend in his 70s who was an old school conservative, Pre Thatcher and his
59:21
economic views are the radical left of the Labour Party with Jeremy Corbyn.
59:28
Anyway we're digressing.
59:30
The purpose of existence.
59:32
Yeah the best way to lead our lives if the universe does.
59:36
One extreme view is if there's no purpose to the universe it's all pointless, we might
59:40
as well just kill ourselves.
59:44
Another extreme is a certain secular humanist view that says probably no purpose to the
59:50
universe but even if there is it's irrelevant, we make our own meaning and purpose that's
59:55
the end of it.
59:56
So I have a middle way view I think you can have a perfectly meaningful life independent
1:00:02
of there being a purpose to the universe if you pursue things that are worth doing, kindness,
1:00:07
creativity, the pursuit of knowledge and so on.
1:00:10
And I'm inclined to think there's the potential for greater purpose, greater meaning if there
1:00:17
is a purpose to the universe.
1:00:19
We want our lives to make a difference if you can contribute in some small way to the
1:00:24
purposes of the whole of reality.
1:00:27
That's massive.
1:00:28
That's about as big as you can imagine.
1:00:30
On the other hand that comes with risks right?
1:00:32
The risk maybe it's not true maybe I'm sort of living for something that turns out to
1:00:36
be false.
1:00:37
So that needs to be balanced and I would encourage lots of experiments in living.
1:00:44
Let's stop being so ideological like this side is obviously right, this side is obviously
1:00:49
wrong.
1:00:50
Let's be a bit uncertain, a bit heretical, try different things out and I'm trying out
1:00:55
this weird form of Christianity.
1:00:57
I feel quite happy actually so maybe I'm wrong but you know making me happy so that's all
1:01:06
right.
1:01:07
Professor Goff thank you so much.
1:01:09
Where can people find your books?
1:01:11
Find bookstores everywhere?
1:01:12
Oh yeah only good bookstores.
1:01:14
There's only about two of them that sell it but they're the good ones.
1:01:17
Oh I don't know my website philipgoffphilosophy.com.
1:01:24
Spend a lot of time arguing on Twitter philip underscore goff, philipwithonell.
1:01:29
I've just joined blue sky today because yeah I lost like 2000 Twitter followers in the
1:01:34
last week because everyone's mass leaving Twitter after the US election so I'm going
1:01:42
to do both.
1:01:43
I don't want to just be talking to people who agree with me so I'm on blue sky as just
1:01:48
Philip Goff.
1:01:49
And I've got a podcast, Mind Chat, where I argue with someone who has the polar opposite
1:01:57
opinions to me, doesn't believe any of this religious bullshit or you know he doesn't
1:02:02
think consciousness exists at least in the way I talk about it.
1:02:06
So yeah that's about it really.
1:02:10
Thanks again for this incredibly illuminating and mind-bending conversation.
1:02:14
I really really thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope we get to do this again.
1:02:18
Thank you very much.
1:02:19
It was fun.
1:02:20
Thank you for listening.
1:02:21
I really really appreciate it.
1:02:22
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