Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn't - Hardcover

Lewis, Ralph

 
9781633883857: Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn't
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 163388385X ISBN 13: 9781633883857
Verlag: Prometheus Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A psychiatrist presents a compelling argument for how human purpose and caring emerged in a spontaneous and unguided universe.

Can there be purpose without God? This book is about how human purpose and caring, like consciousness and absolutely everything else in existence, could plausibly have emerged and evolved unguided, bottom-up, in a spontaneous universe.

A random world--which according to all the scientific evidence and despite our intuitions is the actual world we live in--is too often misconstrued as nihilistic, demotivating, or devoid of morality and meaning. Drawing on years of wide-ranging, intensive clinical experience as a psychiatrist, and his own family experience with cancer, Dr. Lewis helps readers understand how people cope with random adversity without relying on supernatural belief. In fact, as he explains, although coming to terms with randomness is often frightening, it can be liberating and empowering too.

Written for those who desire a scientifically sound yet humanistic view of the world, Lewis's book examines science's inroads into the big questions that occupy religion and philosophy. He shows how our sense of purpose and meaning is entangled with mistaken intuitions that events in our lives happen for some intended cosmic reason and that the universe itself has inherent purpose. Dispelling this illusion, and integrating the findings of numerous scientific fields, he shows how not only the universe, life, and consciousness but also purpose, morality, and meaning could, in fact, have emerged and evolved spontaneously and unguided. There is persuasive evidence that these qualities evolved naturally and without mystery, biologically and culturally, in humans as conscious, goal-directed social animals.

While acknowledging the social and psychological value of progressive forms of religion, the author respectfully critiques even the most sophisticated theistic arguments for a purposeful universe. Instead, he offers an evidence-based, realistic yet optimistic and empathetic perspective. This book will help people to see the scientific worldview of an unguided, spontaneous universe as awe-inspiring and foundational to building a more compassionate society.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Lewis, MD, is a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada; an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto; and a psycho-oncology consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto. Dr. Lewis writes a popular blog series, Finding Purpose, hosted and promoted by his hospital (http://health.sunnybrook.ca/finding-purpose/). He has published articles on a psychiatric understanding of belief and purpose in Skeptic magazine and the Human Prospect, and he has delivered presentations on these topics at the James Randi Educational Foundation's TAM conference, Institute for Science and Human Values, and Canadian Association for Spiritual Care. Dr. Lewis helps people who are seeking meaning in the face of severe and tragic adversity, in addition to his extensive experience with complex and subtle psychiatric and psychological conditions. He is interested in the unreliability of intuition and subjective perception in shaping our explanations and beliefs, and the neural basis of motivation and purposiveness.

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FROM THE INTRODUCTION

COSMIC MEANING AND THE “BIG QUESTIONS”

Our sense of purpose and meaning is entangled with assumptions that life events happen for intended reasons and that the universe itself is inherently purposeful. Why is this so?

Belief in a purposeful universe is pervasive, and not just among conventional religious believers. It is a belief generally also shared by many followers of more nuanced theologies that don’t subscribe to a belief that specific events in our individual lives happen for intended reasons. It’s also typically shared by “spiritual but not religious” people who may not even believe in a “personal god” who intervenes in our individual lives.

Before the transformative scientific insights of the last few decades, it could quite reasonably have seemed self-evident that our world is purposefully designed and controlled by intentional higher power(s). It might actually have seemed naive to suggest that the ingenious complexity that characterizes our world could have arisen spontaneously. Even today, a few highly reputable scientists still maintain that the physics of the universe appears to be precisely fine-tuned to allow life to evolve.

Adding to the impression of a spiritual realm and supernatural design, the mystery of consciousness is especially compelling: How can consciousness possibly be derived from material particles, and how could such a complex phenomenon evolve spontaneously and unguided? How can the experience of “I” be reducible to the laws of physics and to mere matter? Moreover, what about values and ethics? How could such abstract and intangible qualities arise from the material “stuff ” of the universe? Even if they somehow could, wouldn’t morality be relative? How can meaning arise in a random, material universe? How does purpose itself emerge in a purposeless universe?

Despite many seemingly convincing arguments in favor of a grand design, modern science tells us otherwise about the nature of reality.

THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW OF AN UNGUIDED UNIVERSE

A powerful scientific worldview has been steadily constructed over the last four centuries, at a pace that has been accelerating almost exponentially in modern times. In the last decade or two, several key parts of the overall picture have been snapping into place. We now have highly compelling and entirely plausible models for how our world, life, and consciousness could have emerged entirely spontaneously and unguided — all the way from the universe’s origin (astonishingly) to its present complexity. No external or first cause is required, no intelligent designer, and no guiding hand.

At the same time, advances in psychological sciences have demonstrated that our tendency to assume that the universe or specific events have inherent purpose and meaning simply reflects cognitive biases of our human brains. Humans are strongly predisposed to overattribute pattern and conscious intention to events. These tendencies most likely evolved as by-products of our highly attuned capacities to detect predators and prey and to cooperate as social animals by readily identifying patterns and inferring other beings’ intentions from those patterns.

Pivotal breakthroughs have been made in disparate scientific fields such as cosmology, theoretical physics, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory. Considered separately and individually, their insights are already radically paradigm-shifting, but taken together, they may actually be leading to a tipping point in the intellectual history of humankind.

But if these scientific insights compel us to regard all existence as random, where does this leave us? Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg famously wrote, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Dissatisfaction with the scientific materialist worldview keeps vast numbers of people believing in a higher power and a higher plan, even if they are skeptical about and disillusioned with traditional, institutional religions. And as the influence of religion declines in Western society, many worry that societal values will become nihilistic — that is, lacking a moral compass and lacking a sense of purpose and meaning.

A PSYCHIATRIST’S PERSPECTIVE ON WHY WE HAVE EVOLVED TO CARE, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSE DOESN’T

Scientific insights addressing the big questions have been acquired at such a rapid rate that most people have not kept pace with them, do not understand them, and have not grasped their full implications. I will share many of these insights with you in this book, to bring you up to speed, and we will consider how they can inform a coherent and meaningful worldview. I will show how science can plausibly explain not only the origin of the universe, of complexity, of life and of consciousness, but also the origin of values and the emergence of caring about our own lives and about the lives of others. I would particularly like to share insights that I think can help relate the science to the humanistic level of our individual lives. For this, I will draw extensively from my experience working as a psychiatrist at the front lines of the human condition. Helping my patients through their struggles has provided me with a subtle understanding of human motivation. Many are young people maturing from adolescents into adults: I help them as they define their goals in life, launch their careers, and start families. But some never develop sufficient motivation. My job is to figure out why and to try to influence their trajectory.

The experience of [my wife] Karin’s cancer got me interested in expanding the scope of my clinical work to provide psychiatric and psychological help to cancer patients and their families. After some years of reflection, I became a consultant psychiatrist in the regional cancer center at the university hospital where I work—the same center where Karin received her treatment. I wanted to give back, and I wanted to learn more about how other people cope with such profound existential threats, including terminal illness.

There is much else I have learned from my patients in other aspects of my work—human nature is writ large in mental disorders. Psychiatric disorders help us understand normally subtle human traits and cognitive habits by amplifying or distorting them. Psychosis and mania, for example, magnify ad absurdum the general human tendency to overidentify patterns and to perceive deliberate intention in random events, especially in self-referential ways. More obviously, obsessive-compulsive disorder magnifies our need for order, control, and predictability; our propensity toward superstitious rituals to symbolically control our environment; and our obsession with purity and perfection—all widely prevalent human tendencies that find expression in religion.

People with psychiatric disorders are often misled by faulty subjective perceptions and distorted beliefs. But such errors and distortions are by no means confined to mental disorders. Subjective experience is immensely powerful for all of us. We tend to take our perceptions, intuitions, and beliefs as accurate representations of reality and are often unable to recognize or accept when these are total misrepresentations. We tend also to believe the subjective experiences of others and are easily swayed by their anecdotal testimony. Intuition, subjective perception, and the personal testimony of others underpin religious faith.

Fear of death is another common theme my patients ask me to help them with, and to which we can all relate. Some have partially consoled themselves with religious belief in an afterlife, but some just don’t...

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Verlag
Prometheus Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
163388385X
ISBN 13 
9781633883857
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
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