The Order of the Universe – its Source and Implications …

The recent spectacle of Hobart’s religious leaders joining forces to issue a declaration opposing changes to the law on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and euthanasia ( the ‘Salamanca Declaration’: The Mercury newspaper, 9th April 2013: “Churches blast reform ‘tsunami’ “) is yet another instance of the predictable and (by now) traditional role of religious institutions in opposing progressive social change, a pattern that has been repeating itself for centuries as social progressives have struggled to improve the lot of humanity.

It’s no secret that the basic rationale underlying the repetitive pattern of institutional religious opposition to change is the assertion that religions are already in possession of perfect and timeless moral codes for the governance of society, which have the authority of God and for that reason, should not be changed.

Leaving aside a rather important political dimension – that religious institutions need to assert their self-proclaimed moral authority in order to preserve their long-standing traditional power and influence in society – the long-running opposition of religion to social change can be seen as part of its resistance to what I blithely and without a shred of doubt assert is no less than the single most profound and significant paradigm shift in the history of human thought. The paradigm shift in question refers to our understanding of the order of the universe itself, and is a deep change that has been in progress for at least three centuries now. Its implications flow through directly to the ways in which we order our societies, and are far from fully worked through yet.

The reason for the manifest order we see in the world around us is arguably humanity’s oldest and greatest mystery. Our deepest questions have always been those that go along such lines as: ‘What is the source of the order we see in the world? Why the ordered cycles of days and seasons, moon and planets? Whence the inter-related complexity, subtlety and order of life and ecology? And what of our senses of beauty, good and evil – where do these come from?’ These mysteries have never been merely ‘academic’ philosophical issues; on the contrary they have been primary underlying drivers of human culture for the simple reason that the perceived need to have an answer to them has directly given rise to what has arguably been the most pervasively influential paradigm (or institution) throughout human history, namely religious belief.

The origin and drivers of religious belief are of course very complex and in many respects unresolved, with intertwined issues of evolutionary psychology, emotional and physical insecurity, and social control. However I think that there is nonetheless also a very simple and basic sense in which the very existence of any religious belief at all owes itself to our earliest responses to our questions about the order of the universe. Our oldest answer to these biggest of questions was the intuitively obvious one: ‘Some higher power beyond the world we see must have deliberately and purposefully created the Universe and given it order.’ This answer is the notion which ultimately provides the intellectual underpinning of all religious belief, and indeed the perceived need for such a power to explain the existence and order of the Universe has traditionally been considered to be logical arguments – known as the cosmological and teleological arguments – for the necessary existence of a God.

But the traditional answer is fatally flawed, for a reason so simple that children regularly perceive it to the discomfort of their religious elders. That is, if something higher gave order to the Universe, then that something must implicitly have itself been in some sense ordered (rather than chaotic); so we must then ask how its prior order arose? If something else even more fundamental gave it order, then we must ask how did that order arise? And so on – we face an infinite regression of similarly unsatisfying answers. On the other hand if we suggest that nothing else gave the higher power its order, and say – as the discomforted religious elders of bright children often do – that it (i.e., God) ‘just is’ (inherently ordered), then this begs the question of “why can we not then simply say that the universe itself ‘just is’ inherently ordered, and leave it at that?”. Of course if we do so then we are actually still left with the original unanswered question of “well, why is the universe ordered anyway?” These responses are as stale as the original question, and admit no satisfactory conclusion.

However if the long history of human inquiry has taught us anything, it is that intuitively obvious answers are not necessarily the right answers. It seems intuitively obvious that the Earth is flat – and so it was believed to be for millennia. Yet by observation and inquiry we have discovered that the Earth is not flat, it is a ball. It also seems intuitively obvious that Earth is the centre of the Universe, since all other parts of the Universe seem to circle around this centre – and so it was believed to be for millennia. Yet by observation and inquiry we have discovered that Earth is not the centre of the Universe – it is simply one planet amongst others orbiting an ordinary star amongst millions of other ordinary stars in a galaxy which is simply one amongst billions of others, with no privileged status. It is noteworthy that this fact only became apparent after centuries of astronomical observations and inquiry.

In the same way – by observation and inquiry – we have discovered that there is indeed another explanation for the order of the Universe. It is not intuitively obvious, yet it is the answer that has arisen from long and detailed study of the workings of nature – and it is the only answer which is fully satisfactory in itself, since it does not require some deeper explanation or cause. That is the insight – in fact, the prosaic scientific observation – that order emerges spontaneously from chaos, or randomness1.

Inexorably and inevitably, without any need for a guiding hand, order emerges from random chaos – and it does so for a reason so simple that, once understood, it seems extra-ordinary that it took us so long to understand. Whilst not the first to understand it, Charles Darwin was the first to clearly express it in public, and his exposition of the principles of evolution has earned much vociferous denial amongst those of the religious who rightly understand that Darwin’s work was truly the beginning of the end for any hope of an intellectually supportable religious paradigm. Darwin perceived the process by which biological order – and evolutionary changes in that order – must inevitably arise from the random variations we observe in nature. Random mutation throws up an endless chaos of subtle irregular and unplanned variations in living things. Whilst many of these variants are either detrimental or of no consequence, it is inevitable that every now and then some will happen to be something more stable or – in biological terms – more fit for survival. Inevitably stable (or ‘successful’) variants will accumulate in a population, becoming more common and interacting (reproducing) randomly with each other until – every now and then – even more complex stable variants arise from these innumerable random interactions. To cut a long story short, given large populations of interacting random variations and enough time, organisms can evolve more complex or efficient forms better adapted to their environment (i.e., more ‘ordered’) without any sort of deliberate planning or guidance whatever.

This simple process is not merely a hypothesis or a ‘revelation’, as was the original notion that earthly order was created by some higher order. Rather it is what we actually observe happening in the world around us. Darwin first observed it in the biological processes of mutation and natural selection. Then physicists discovered and demonstrated through experiment the underlying fundamental randomness of the sub-atomic quantum world, from which by the same basic stochastic processes, atoms and the ordered systems of chemistry emerge from quantum chaos to yield geodiversity and biodiversity, and ultimately consciousness and the world of ideas.

At each level in this continuum, order emerges from chaos – or unguided variability – by the same simple process: random unguided variation occurs in profusion; most such variants are unstable (or ‘unsuccessful’) and disappear, a few are stable and persist. These interact randomly and profusely to produce more complex variants, a few of which are also stable and persist to yield more complex and ordered phenomena. And so on, inevitably and without any guiding hand being necessary, stable variants and complex ordered systems must form and accumulate, inexorably generating new and more sophisticated stable ordered configurations out of a roiling chaos of unstable random variation.

This process by which order emerges from chaos is a universal one. Not only does it work at the levels of physics and biology, but also in the seemingly quite different realms of human social organisation and conceptual development2. Consider the moral concepts of good and bad behaviour: whilst the religious will assert that these can have no meaning without religion, it is actually rather easy to see that any group of social animals must inevitably evolve some sort of agreed standards of acceptable behaviour since without them no society could co-operate and succeed. Early human social groups must have found – by trial and error with an endless variety of behaviour over long periods of time – that certain types of behaviour made the group as a whole (and thus individuals within it) more secure while other behaviours did not. These latter (‘unstable’ or ‘unsuccessful’ behaviours) would have become increasing rejected and sanctioned as ‘bad’. Any group that failed to discover that following more successful behaviours such as ‘doing unto others as you would have them do unto you’ makes life more secure for the group as a whole would have soon been swept aside by other groups that had more successfully discovered the advantages of co-operation and mutual trust that a shared moral code provides. Nor is there any need to suppose that successful groups were actually ‘discovering’ a pre-existing divine code of moral behaviour; they were simply creating a moral code through their own experience of trying a range of variable behaviours and finding out what works socially and what doesn’t (de Waal 2013 3).

Similarly in the complex histories of politics and philosophy, we can perceive the same slow inexorable emergence of more stable, successful ideas from the chaotic variation of unstable, ephemeral and failed ideas. Take the many forms of social organisation – or political ideologies – that have been conceived over the course of human civilisation. Some – like social democracy – have gradually given rise to more stable, successful and secure societies, while others – like the utopian but inevitably totalitarian dictatorships that Plato naïvely envisaged as the perfect form of government4 – have occasionally emerged from the chaos of politics yet inevitably fail and decay. Similarly in the history of concepts and ideas, an endless variety of philosophies, theories, ideas and concepts have been put forward to increase our understanding of the world. A few – like the standard model of atomic physics, the process of continental drift, the principle of evolution, and indeed the basic principles of ‘the scientific method’ itself – have withstood innumerable observational and experimental tests and have become stable paradigms that continue to be built upon as our understanding improves, whilst the great majority have failed and been discarded, such as the theory of phlogiston, phrenology and so many other discarded scientific hypotheses5.

Out of this chaotic ferment of ideas and theories, tested against observations of the world and mostly failed and discarded, we have arrived at a few robust, stable scientific and philosophical concepts that continue to withstand repeated testing against the real world, and provide us with a gradually deepening understanding of it. Two great over-arching paradigms stand out in this great long-term evolution of ideas: namely the gradual failure of the large body of intuitively obvious yet deeply irrational ideas grouped as ‘religion’; and the gradual emergence of what I consider to be the most fundamental insight of science, namely the principle of emergence (or evolution) – the principle that order emerges from chaos – and the understanding that this principle is not limited to the realm of biology (in which it was first observed empirically), but is a universal principle explaining the emergence of order at all levels from the quantum to the cosmological, and from the biological to the social and philosophical.

The intelligibility of the new paradigm

The impression that the notion of order arising inevitably out of chaos initially appears anti-intuitive is no disproof. Quite apart from the prosaic fact that we can and do actually observe the emergence of order from chaos in many realms from the sub-atomic to the social, it is also a matter of experience that intuition often proves to be a poor guide to the workings of nature. There is no reason why the fundamental workings of the world should comply with our everyday notions of what ‘makes sense’, grounded as those notions are in our everyday experience of only the macroscopic (i.e., human – scaled) workings of nature. The notion that emergent laws of nature which govern natural processes at the ‘everyday’ macroscopic scale of our direct experience should also explain how nature works at its largest (cosmological) and most fundamental (quantum) levels is not only self-contradictory6, but is also more importantly a perceptual bias which science clearly shows to be misleading and confusing7. We need to consciously set aside this bias and follow where the scientific evidence actually leads us if we hope to be open to a clearer understanding of reality.

Far from being confusing, the notion of randomness as the ultimate ‘ground state’ and organising principle of the Universe has an elegance and simplicity which arises from that fact that, by definition, it requires no further explanation. Since random quantum fluctuations have no cause, they require no explanation. In fact, it is the more traditional and religious notion of the Universe having to have somehow arisen out of ‘absolute nothing’ which has proven too difficult to make any sense out of. The notion of a ‘pure vacuum’ of non-existence or ‘nothingness’ from which the Universe was somehow created is unintelligible (Krauss 2012 8), since it would actually be a highly stable – and in that sense ordered – state that would therefore require some sort of explanation. The only conceivable ‘ground state’ of reality that requires no further explanation is one of random, causeless fluctuations and state-changes – and that is exactly what physics observes at the finest sub-atomic levels of nature. Indeed, causation itself is best understood as an emergent property of nature, rather than as a prior principle underlying it.

Many scientists themselves have still not yet fully grasped what the findings of science are actually telling us about the source of order in the Universe. Even amongst those most fundamental scientific disciplines of quantum physics and cosmology, there are many physicists who still see the basic Laws of Physics as being some sort of fundamental a priori source of order which in some sense must have existed or had meaning prior to or ‘beyond’ the Universe itself. However, as the physicists Lee Smolin and Marcelo Gleiser have pointed out9, this notion can be seen as simply a lingering hang-over from the traditional religious world-view which some scientists still need to shake themselves free of. From the perspective of the notion of emergence, even the most fundamental of physical laws can be seen as simply an outcome of the emergence of order from randomness, rather than somehow being the cause of it. That is, the Laws of Physics did not determine the emergence of an ordered Universe along a pre-determined path, but rather they are simply descriptions of the order that did in fact emerge from random chaos (Stenger 1988, p. 27 10).

Smolin11 and many other physicists have noted that it is entirely possible and logically consistent to imagine universes with quite different physical laws and constants to the one we find ourselves in. On this view, the physical laws and constants that we find in our universe (including the four-dimensional time-space framework within which we perceive the universe) were ‘set’ – or emerged – during the intensely energetic ‘big bang’ phase that forms the earliest time-horizon of our universe for which we have observational evidence. Given that these particular laws and constants emerged from the extra-ordinarily energetic conditions of that phase of the Universe’s history it is quite conceivable that any variety of entirely different physical laws and conditions might have been just as likely to have emerged from such a powerful melting pot of random quantum fluctuations (albeit the emergence of sufficiently different conditions might well have precluded the subsequent evolution of life in which case we would not be around to observe and discuss such a different Universe).

The social significance of differing views of the source of order – a closed versus open future

The two opposing paradigms are not merely two opposing views on the source of order of the Universe; they also lead to and embody two diametrically opposed views of the purpose and potential of human existence within the Universe.

The implications of the older and essentially religious paradigm – that the Universe was created and ordered by some greater power – were conceptualised as a philosophical system by Plato and others during the first great flowering of philosophical thought known as the Axial Age (Jaspers 1949, Bellah & Joas 2012)12. Plato’s Theory of Forms, illustrated by his ‘Simile of the Cave’ in his major work ‘The Republic’, expressed his notion that the manifest world we see is merely the imperfect shadow of a transcendent realm of perfection from which it has degenerated, and that the most important purpose of human life should be an effort to eliminate the degeneration and return to the original state of perfection. Religious beliefs revolving around this underlying notion have been the over-arching paradigm through which western civilisation at least has understood the world throughout our history until only the last 300 or so years. This paradigm implied that the world, its order, design, meaning and purpose, were created in some transcendent fashion, complete and perfect, and thus closed to the possibility of any further improvement. On this view any change can only be for the worse, decay from order into increasing disorder. This notion leads to the distrust of thinking, creativity and new ideas that has always been a characteristic of organised religion, because it assumes we were given a perfect world that cannot be improved on and thus we should not attempt to do so. In this paradigm, we cannot create better order, meanings and purposes for ourselves than those given by God; we must rather simply discover and conform to the pre-existing order and purpose of the world which has already been created perfect.

Held up as unchallengeable truth by the power of institutionalised religion, the old paradigm held sway until the second great flowering of philosophical thought, the Enlightenment Age of the last few centuries. This saw a philosophical revolution driven by the manifest success of scientific thinking – which inherently relies on the questioning of existing ideas, the generation of new hypotheses and the testing of these against empirical observations of the real world – as a new and better approach to knowledge. With the greater openness to new ideas that the Enlightenment allowed, a new paradigm has slowly emerged as the deepest insight of science during this second great flowering of ideas. The new paradigm is diametrically opposed to the old, seeing the world as having begun in chaos, with an emerging order and gradually dawning understanding evolving over time, so that change can be seen as an agent of real progress, and not only of decay13. Indeed, from this new perspective even decay can be seen positively as the necessary ‘creative destruction’ of the old which makes way for the new.

It is worth hoping that the emergence of this new paradigm marks the maturing of humanity to the point where we no longer need the cocoon of religious belief, and can move on from that stage of our evolution to live in a more direct awareness of reality. The incipient transition between the old and new paradigms marks the most fundamental intellectual transition humanity has experienced – fundamental because it is the long-needed solution to the problem that evolution burdened us with when we evolved sufficient conscious awareness as to perceive ourselves as being mortal in the world, and so began to worry about the nature and purpose of our existence. Lacking in real understanding of the world, we used intuitively obvious – but wrong – ideas to create religions that gave us a sense of purpose and security in the world, thereby calming the fears and insecurities that our conscious awareness of mortality had left us with. The fundamental importance of the new paradigm resides precisely in the fact that it at last gives us the capacity to understand the world without need for comforting illusions, and so to actively and creatively give our lives satisfying meaning without the comforting but misleading stopgap solution of pre-determined religious purposes.

Of course, religion is in many respects a ‘broad church’, and there are those amongst the religious who can see the need to incorporate modern social and ethical changes into their worldview while still trying to hold onto their core religious beliefs. However this is an impossible task for which only the most convoluted sophistry suffices. It has been perceptively stated (by someone whose name I unfortunately forget) that “those who think that science and religion are compatible have failed to understand either”.

Emergence – or the principle of evolution – is the great insight of science which at last allows us to see not only how complex ordered phenomena arise out of chaos, but also why we can value those things. Whether or not we ‘value’ something is ultimately a subjective choice that we make – it has nothing to do with how the thing originated or what it is made of. So for the religious to say that an evolved world is ‘hollow’, ‘depressingly meaningless’ or ‘pointless’ is merely their (rather poor) choice of an opinion, and nothing more. It is just as valid – and far more worthwhile – to regard the process of emergence as a profoundly wonderful creative process and to see value in it for precisely that reason. It enables us to see clearly that there is no mystery about what our purposes are in life – they are not pre-ordained at all, we must create them, it is up to us. There is nothing to “search” for, there is only creation to be done – and we must do it ourselves. The only meaning our lives can have is the meaning we give it ourselves; if we do not then we lead genuinely meaningless lives (as so many do)14.

We are moving from a notion of the world – and humans – as a cyclic, recurring closed system in which nothing new can be discovered, only old wisdoms rediscovered and lost ways resurrected; in which every age simply re-discovers or acts out the themes, characters and movements that have gone before; where orthodoxy assumes the Platonic view that the best or perfect ‘ways’ have already been laid down and our only task is to rediscover them; and that the further we have departed from these perfect original ideals, the more we have degenerated and decayed. From this notion of the world as closed and creation as ended, we are moving to a new notion of the world and humanity as an open system, allowing emergence of new forms and phenomena never seen before, creating original new ideas never thought of before, and moving towards a future that has at least the possibility of being better than anything that has gone before. This is why I find the sight of religious leaders playing out their traditional role of hindering social changes whose time has come so tiresome.

Moral or ethical values are not some transcendent code of divine provenance that we must never change. They are rather a system of appropriate behaviours that have emerged to allow improved social stability as societies have changed and become more complex. Moral progress is not a finished process; moral values do and should evolve to suit changing conditions in society. Whilst some moral values have proven so fundamental as to be robust under a wide range of social conditions – such as the golden rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ – others have been more relevant and useful under certain social conditions than others. Thus the growing need for new moral attitudes to issues like abortion and same-sex marriage are simply a reflection that society is now more complex and evolved than it has been in the past, and that this requires us to change our attitudes to some behaviours that may have been seen as less appropriate in the past, but are now more conducive to a flourishing society. Traditional religious institutions inevitably oppose such changes because to do otherwise would undermine the imagined transcendental basis of their supposed moral authority, but in the end moral values will continue to change and evolve in response to changing social needs, because this is how they always have emerged and changed.

The new paradigm of emergent purpose and order gives us the freedom to be creative and find new solutions to new (and some old) problems – and that is the key to human progress. It is of course undeniable that human greed and stupidity has resulted in much misuse of the emerging fruits of technological and scientific progress – resulting ultimately in the great global environmental crisis of climate change which is rapidly shaping up to be the driver of the next fundamental turning point in human history. However it is pointless and simplistic to see this as a cause to back away from the ideal of progress, to reject the power of scientific thinking as some have done, and to try to retreat into some imagined past state of perfection. It would be naïve to expect that there would be no difficulties in progressing towards a better future, no problems to be worked through. Of course there are. But there is no perfect original state to go back to, it always was a fallacy. The rational choice – and the only choice in any case – is to move onwards, to deal with our moral and technological ‘teething problems’, figure out the problems and work out a way through them; in other words, to continue to progress in a genuine sense.

Refs

1 Darwin, C., 1859: The Origin of Species; Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I., 1984: Order out of Chaos: Mans New Dialogue with Nature; Bantam Books; Dennett, D.C., 1995: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life; Simon & Schuster, New York; Stenger, V.J., 1988: Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe; Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York; and many other works.

2 Johnson, S., 2001: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software; Scribner, New York; and many other works.

3 Frans de Waal, 2013; The Bonobo and the Atheist: in search of Humanism amongst the Primates, Norton

4 Plato: The Republic

5 Note that in suggesting that the processes of variation and selection leading to the emergence of ideas are essentially the same as those resulting in the emergence of order at quantum or biological levels, I am not implying that ideas and concepts are in any way ‘randomly generated’. They are produced in a range of ways (from logical deduction through to intuition or just simple guesswork) which rely on our emergent and evolved capacity for conscious thought. However, none of us have perfect knowledge or are free of all traces of bias, and as a result our ideas are rarely correct and perfect in every respect. Many are simply wrong. It is criticism and review by others, together with the results of any attempts at practical application of our ideas, which in the end weed out the better from the less successful ideas and leads to the gradual emergence of more refined concepts that more successfully account for the nature of our world and lead to better ways of coping in it. Thus, even though the process cannot be described as involving truly random variability – it is occurring at too high an emergent a level for that – nonetheless the same basic elements are present in this process of ‘conceptual evolution’ as drive other forms of evolution; namely a rich source of variability (people constantly generating new ideas, good and bad), and a selection process that eliminates unsuccessful variants and preserves successful ones (criticism of ideas by others, and/or testing them by actually trying to put them into practice in the real world).

6 An emergent thing will by definition not be the same as those more fundamental things from which it emerges, nor those which emerge from it at even higher levels of organisation.

7 An example of the sort of confusion that arises from trying to understand more fundamental levels of natural processes in the light of our intuitive understanding of the ‘high-level’ macroscopic world which we perceive directly, is the misleading but often-stated notion that because quantum physics has shown matter to be made up of sub-atomic ‘particles’ which are also ‘wave-forms’ with no fixed size or position, our perception of solid macroscopic objects is therefore an ‘illusion’. Of course it is not an illusion; this is a misconception on a par with suggesting that because a house is composed of bricks, it cannot really be a house but is actually only a pile of bricks. In fact, quantum physics has simply given us an improved understanding of the underlying physics from which (perfectly real) emergent properties such as size, location and solidity emerge at macroscopic scales.

8 Lawrence M. Krauss, 2012: A Universe from Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing; Free Press, New York.

9 Lee Smolin, 1997: The Life of The Cosmos; Oxford University Press, p. 198-200; Marcelo Gleiser, 2010: Imperfect Creation – Cosmos, Life and Nature’s Hidden Code; Black Inc., p. 222.

10 Victor J. Stenger, 1988: Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe; Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York.

11 Lee Smolin, 1997: The Life of The Cosmos; Oxford University Press, Chapter 7.

12 The concept of ‘The Axial Age’ was established by Karl Jaspers, (1949: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte; Munich; English translation: The Origin and Goal of History, Translated by Michael Bullock, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul / New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953); a recent examination of the nature and significance of the Axial Age is provided by Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas (eds.), 2012: The Axial Age and its Consequences; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 548 pp. In essence, the Axial Age (roughly around 2,500 years ago) was the period when philosophers first began to use logical thought to develop theoretical concepts or philosophies that captured the key principles of the religious beliefs which up until that time had been expressed primarily in mythological forms.

13 Whilst Darwin and his contemporaries were the first scientists to explicitly recognise and lay out the mechanism – evolution – by which natural order arises from chaos, David Malouf (Quarterly Essay 41, 2011, p. 24-25) cites the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet (1793), in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, as being the first to explicitly challenge the old orthodoxy and propose the idea of progress through change as real creation, and a movement towards greater perfection still to be realised by the work of humans (rather than a movement away from some illusory lost perfection).

14 Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea (1938), Being and Nothingness (1943); Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus (1955).

*Chris Sharples is an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Geography & Environmental Studies (Spatial Science), University of Tasmania