Does the Cosmos Have a Purpose?
Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention.
Applying the idea of purpose to the totality of things cries out for examination.
The idea of purpose, perhaps. But connecting ideas to something that can be sustained socially and politically and economically?
Again, let’s focus in on the part where someone insists the purpose of life is encompassed only in being on the One True Path. You’re not on it? Well, let them tell you the price you might pay if you don’t get on it. And then those who insist that some will never be permitted to become “one of us” because given the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation or the God they worship, they’re lucky they’re not sent to a reeducation camp or to a gulag or to a gas chamber.
Is this another example of just how unimaginably vast the gap is between “I” and “all there is”? We can try, but how do we wrap our heads around numbers like that? What does it even mean? How was it even calculated?
And then the idea of the multiverse. Reconfiguring “an infinite number of universes” into whatever meaning our own might encompass.
And, of course, who can leave out the quantum world?
Not really sure what he is suggesting here in regard to purpose. But how would you connect the dots between “the purpose of my life” and something in the vicinity of a “universal purpose”.
Click of course.
As for those “localized, transient, and often conflicting” purposes each of us as individuals might acquire and sustain, start here:
Also, whose idea of universality? And all we have in the way of arguments are those we are familiar with on planet Earth. Who knows how many millions of additional civilizations there might be “out there”.
On the other hand, bring meaning and purpose back around to an omniscient and omnipotent God, and, just like that, there is nothing at all that can’t be explained [eventually] given His “mysterious ways”.
So, I ask myself, how, given arguments like the one above, are all those Gods still around? You know my own conjectures here.