Purpose in the Universe: The moral and metaphysical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism

"This is Purpose in the Universe: The Moral and Metaphysical Case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism , by Tim Mulgan. This is somebody who got into this as I did, through teaching philosophy of religion, teaching the arguments against God, the arguments for God, finding them both compelling, and thinking, ‘We need to find a middle-ground option.’ Mulgan’s book has very similar motivations to my own project, but he ends up in a different place. He defends a view that he calls ‘ananthropic purposivism.’ There is cosmic purpose, but it has nothing to do with human beings. We’re an accidental byproduct created on the way to a greater form of life and intelligence that the universe will ultimately produce. That’s how he explains both the evidence of fine-tuning and some other philosophical considerations. He also takes seriously other traditional arguments for God – the cosmological argument, and the problem of evil. Why do human beings suffer so much? Because cosmic purpose doesn’t care about us. We’re not part of the plan. It’s a very interesting book, though it’s not that accessible. It’s a long, academic book, but it’s wonderful. I reviewed it in International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion , and the draft version appears on my website . “Most philosophers are secular atheists of one kind or another” My disagreement with Mulgan is, I think, a common sense one. His view implies that human suffering is not morally significant. I think all suffering is morally significant. Therefore, even if there are to come some great beings, relative to which we are like ants, I still think our suffering is morally important. I think ants’ suffering, if they do indeed suffer, is morally significant. He’s neutral between whether this is a creator God who’s perfectly good or whether there is impersonal goal directedness towards the good. In either case, he thinks the universe is, in some sense, perfectly good. I can’t accept that because it doesn’t seem to be an adequate explanation of human suffering. Having said that, he does take this worry very seriously and has very interesting things to say. He’s a moral philosopher, a consequentialist of a certain radical kind, who, like Peter Singer , thinks morality should be very demanding on us. Mulgan connects it all in interesting ways to both foundational questions about the nature of value, but also to his very radical, demanding consequentialist framework. It’s a very interesting book."