Universes

"It’s the earliest book on the list that I’ve chosen last: John Leslie’s absolute classic: Universes . This is one of the earliest books reflecting on the enigma of fine-tuning as the evidence was starting to develop. It was written in the ’80s. A number of ground-breaking books published in the ’80s defend the reality and the evidence of fine tuning, such as The Anthropic Principle , by Barrow and Tipler, and Just Six Numbers, by Martin Rees, the former Astronomer Royal. Although Rees didn’t explicitly commit to it, he was more on the multiverse side. Certainly, he was saying that there’s something here we need to think about. Universes is one of these ground-breaking books. Probably, in terms of the contemporary evidence of fine tuning, A Fortunate Universe is better, but Leslie is such an interesting, heterodox thinker. He doesn’t fit into the categories of traditional religious philosopher or secular atheist philosopher. Leslie takes the multiverse very seriously, so he’s not got a definite view. He has also developed a view which he calls ‘axiarchism.’ This is the view that the universe exists because it is good. The way we typically think of this is that ‘there’s a good God who created the universe for a good purpose’; but he thinks instead that it’s just a brute fact that the universe exists because it is good. He’s open to a range of hypotheses, and that’s one hypothesis for explaining fine-tuning. Also, the ancient question, of why there is something rather than nothing, is a hypothesis he takes very seriously. That’s very nice. I would disagree with Leslie on this score, just as I would disagree with Mulgan, because they both think there is some overarching drive towards the good. I would say that we have to take the problem of evil more seriously than that. To my mind, the universe, as I take it, is a mix of design and accident. There is horrific, arbitrary, terrible suffering, and we need to factor that in as well. Wittgenstein says that explanations have to end somewhere. I guess that atheists would typically say that the Big Bang is the end of the story. That’s the brute fact. Leslie takes it a little bit further and says the Big Bang happened because it’s good, but then he stops there. That’s the brute fact. It’s almost as though the platonic facts about value are reaching out into concrete reality and creating the universe. A lot of people worry about the intelligibility of this, and ultimately I don’t buy Leslie’s proposal, but it’s an interesting view and worth having on the table. What I suggest in my book is more of a hybrid view – a little bit of the axiarchic push to the good, but also with a role to play for the more traditional, impersonal, arbitrary laws of physics. In this way, we can explain both the fine-tuning and the arbitrary, pointless suffering. I think we need to take the problem of evil more seriously in that way. Yes. Both the traditional sides of this dichotomy (which dominates Western analytic philosophy but not necessarily globally) have something they can’t explain. Traditional theists can’t explain arbitrary, gratuitous suffering and traditional atheists can’t explain fine-tuning, so we need to look to hypotheses that explain all of these data. In my book I consider a range of hypotheses. We already discussed impersonal teleological laws of nature with goals built into them, which I take seriously. But I also consider supernatural designers but without omni characteristics, for example, a God of limited capacities who’s made the best universe they can, or a bad God, or maybe we live in a computer simulation that was created by some random computer programmer in the next universe up. Ultimately, the hypothesis I think is perhaps most preferable and connects to my earlier work on panpsychism is cosmopsychism – the idea that the universe is itself a conscious mind with its own goals. I like the hypothesis because there is something unsatisfying about saying ‘it’s just these brute laws.’ It feels like we need a deeper explanation. You can get a deeper explanation by postulating a supernatural designer, but that comes at a cost, in terms of simplicity or parsimony. I like cosmopsychism because it doesn’t postulate anything supernatural, and yet it still manages to give us a deeper explanation of cosmic purpose, in terms of the goals of the conscious universe. In terms of my own journey, I’ve always taken fine-tuning seriously. But for a long time, I thought the multiverse looked to be the more plausible explanation. However, just over a couple of years, I was persuaded by arguments from philosophers of probability that there’s some dodgy reasoning going on with the inference from fine-tuning to multiverse, that multiverse theorists commit what’s known as the ‘inverse gambler’s fallacy.’ This is something that’s been in the philosophy journals for decades but, in a typical case of academics talking to themselves, it’s largely unknown outside of academic philosophy, despite the huge interest in fine-tuning. One of the things I’m passionate about with this book is getting this argument out to a broader audience. In the 16th century, as the evidence started to mount that we weren’t at the centre of the universe, people struggled to accept that because it didn’t fit with the picture of reality to which they were accustomed. Nowadays, we laugh at them. Pop science programmes wonder why they couldn’t follow the evidence where it leads. But every generation absorbs a worldview it can’t see beyond. I feel it’s the same with fine-tuning now, that we’re not following the evidence where it leads because it doesn’t fit with the picture of the universe we’ve grown used to."