Five Cosmological Theories of How It All Ends, And How They Are All Incomprehensibly Mysterious

THE BIG CRUNCH

The cosmological theory of the Big Crunch predicts that eventually the Universe will collapse upon itself, because the expansion of the Universe initiated at the Big Bang will begin to slow down through the force of gravity on matter until the Universe collapses back into something like a black hole, although this would be far in the future, probably tens of billions of years.

Deciding the plausibility of this theory depends on measuring the expansion rate of the Universe.  In the late 1990s, some cosmologists determined that far from slowing down, the expansion of the Universe was actually speeding up, which seemed to show that the Universe would be eternally expanding, and thus the Big Crunch theory must be false.

HEAT DEATH

If the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, that suggests that the Universe will end in Heat Death.  Here "heat" means not "warmth" but rather the "disordered motion of particles or energy"--entropy.  According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in any isolated system, the total entropy or state of disorder must increase.  If the Universe can be considered an isolated system, then it must evolve towards increasing disorder or decay, in which no organized structures can exist.  Most cosmologists consider this Heat Death the most likely fate of the Universe.

The problem with this theory of Heat Death, however, is that it depends upon some ideas that are so deeply mysterious that no one can understand them.  For example, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy permeating all of space that tends to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.  If dark energy keeps a constant density as the Universe expands, then we get Heat Death.

But while dark energy is believed by some cosmologists to constitute about 70% of the total energy in the observable universe, dark energy is invisible and undetectable in laboratory experiments.  If it is real, it must arise from a new kind of physics that no one understands today.  As Mack says, dark energy is "a sure sign of some new physics beyond our current understanding" (2020, 106).

THE BIG RIP

While the evolution of dark energy as a cosmological constant keeps a constant density as the Universe expands leading eventually to Heat Death, with "phantom dark energy," the density increases, and we get the Big Rip, in which everything in the Universe--even spacetime itself--is progressively torn apart.  First, the clusters of star galaxies begin to drift apart and then dissipate.  Next, the Earth drifts away from the Sun, and the Moon drifts away from the Earth.  Every structure begins to strain from the expanding space within it.  Planets explode.  Then atoms and molecules unravel from the expanding space within all matter.  Even the nuclei at the centers of atoms are torn apart.  But maybe we shouldn't worry about this because it is estimated that the earliest possible Big Rip is somewhere around 200 billion years in the future (Mack 2020, 114-15).

When Robert Caldwell and his colleagues first wrote about this in 1999, they explained their term "phantom dark energy":  "A phantom is something which is apparent to the sight or other senses but has no corporeal existence--an appropriate description for a form of energy necessarily described by unorthodox physics" (Caldwell 2002, 23).  In other words, no one understands what this means or whether it has any real "corporeal existence," because it is beyond comprehension through the established laws of physics.

VACUUM DECAY

                            Paul Sutter on False Vacuum Decay and the End of the Universe

Like Paul Sutter, Katie Mack explains the possibility of the Universe ending through vacuum decay by considering the Higgs field that permeates the Universe.  The Higgs field is a field of energy that is accompanied by a fundamental particle known as the Higgs boson, which interacts with other particles, and through this interaction, these particles gain mass.  Without the Higgs field, particles would not have the mass required to attract one another, which supports the physical structure of the Universe as we know it.

In 2012, the Higgs boson was detected at the Large Hadron Collider.  In 2013, the Higgs effect was proven at the LHC.

The value of a field can change depending upon its potential.  You can imagine the potential of the Higgs field as a pebble rolling down a slope into a valley, and the shape of that slope represents the potential.  Just as a pebble will roll to the bottom of a valley, the Higgs field will seek the lowest-energy state, where the potential is at its lowest value, which is its vacuum state.  The problem, however, is that the bottom might not really be the bottom.  There might be another vacuum state at a lower part of the potential that will be its true vacuum state.  Look at it this way:

Mack explains: "Each valley in the potential is a possible state of the Universe.  If our Higgs field lives in the higher valley (the false vacuum), it could transition to the other state (the true vacuum" via a high-energy event (marked 'fluctuations' on the diagram) or via quantum tunneling.  If we live in a false vacuum universe, a transition of the Higgs field to the true vacuum would be catastrophic" (Mack 2020, 143).

And by "catastrophic," she means that everything in the Universe would be annihilated.  It would start with the formation of a tiny bubble of true vacuum.  The world within that bubble would be governed by a physics with laws different from those that govern our Universe.  As that bubble expanded at the speed of light, the forces that previously held particles together in atoms and nuclei would no longer function, and consequently would be dissolved.

Mack reassures us: "it's for the best that you don't see it coming."

". . . if you happen to be standing nearby when the bubble appears, you won't notice it.  Something coming at you at the speed of light is invisible--any little glint warning you of its approach arrives at the same time as the thing itself.  There is no possible way to see it coming, or even to know that anything has gone wrong.  If it approaches you from below, there will be a couple of nanoseconds during which your feet no longer exist while your brain still thinks it is looking at them.  Fortunately, the process is also entirely painless: at no point will your nerve impulses be able to catch up with your disintegration by the bubble.  It's a mercy, really."

She also observes:

"In fact, it's entirely possible that, as we sit here now, calmly drinking our tea, vacuum decay has already occurred.  Maybe we're lucky and the bubble is beyond our cosmic horizon, swallowing up galaxies we would never have known.  Or maybe it is, cosmically speaking, right next door, quietly approaching with relativistic stealth, destined to catch us unawares, between breaths" (2020, 145-46).

Even without fully understanding what this all means, it's easy enough to see that the plausibility of this theory of how the Universe could be destroyed by a false vacuum decay depends on the claim that our Higgs field is indeed in a false vacuum or a "metastable state"--somewhat stable but not fully so.  

As she often does, Mack contradicts herself on this point.  On the one hand, she says that "the best data we have" confirms this claim that our Higgs field is in a false vacuum (143).  On the other hand, she says there are good reasons to doubt this.

"If we conclude that our vacuum really is unstable, this may be incompatible with the theory of cosmic inflation [in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang].  The quantum fluctuations during inflation, or the ambient heat afterward, seem like they should have been sufficient to trigger vacuum decay in the first moments of the cosmos, negating our very existence.  Clearly, that didn't happen.  Which suggests either we don't understand the early universe, or vacuum decay was never possible at all."

"Whether or not you trust early universe theories, taking vacuum decay seriously depends on placing a great deal of trust in the Standard Model of particle physics, which we know cannot be the whole story.  Dark matter, dark energy, and the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity all point to there being something more to the universe than what we can currently write down.  Whatever comes along to replace the Standard Model might, by the by, save us from even having to vaguely worry about a wayward bubble of quantum death" (154-55).

But then there's still at least one more cosmological theory of how the Universe might end.

THE BIG BOUNCE

According to a "bouncing" or "cyclic" cosmology, the Universe began as a bounce from a pre-Big Bang universe to our current universe, which will in turn come to an end, but will then be bounced into a new universe.  One version of this cosmology is the ekpyrotic scenario.  "Ekpyrotic" comes from the Greek for "conflagration," which is associated with the ancient Stoic cosmology in which the universe goes through an eternal cycle of fiery birth, death, and fiery rebirth. 

The ekpyrotic Universe is grounded in the idea of "braneworld" from superstring theory.  String theory is a theoretical framework for physics in which the particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional strings. But some string theorists have said that these strings could be multidimensional.  A multidimensional string is called a "brane"--short for "membrane."

The ekpyrotic theorist can say that our Universe lives on a three-dimensional brane within a larger space of multiple branes.  When two branes collide, this produces a new universe--that's the "bounce"--and this can become an eternal cycle of collisions and bounces.  This is a kind of multiverse theory insofar as the multiple branes can be understood as multiple universes.

There are many problems with this theory, however.  The most obvious is that there is no observational evidence for string theory or multiverse theory, because--as I have indicated in a previous post--looking for hypothetical strings and other universes reaches beyond the range of human observational experience, and therefore these hypothetical realities are in principle untestable and unfalsifiable.

Moreover, cyclic cosmology faces a fundamental problem shared with all other cosmological theories to explain the end of the Universe--physicists cannot reach any agreement on any of the theories.  Mack admits this: "Unfortunately, despite decades of hard work and extraordinary calculations, we haven't yet settled on a theory that's broadly accepted by the physics community" (161).

IF IT ALL HAS TO END, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR US?

Mack reports that even though they cannot agree on any one theory of how the Universe will end, physicists do agree that the Universe must somehow come to an end eventually, even if the end is far off in the cosmic future.  So, then they must wonder what this tells us about the ultimate meaning and purpose of life.

Mack has interviewed many physicists and asked them about this: What does it mean to us if the Universe must end?  Hiranya Peiris summed up her answer in one word: "sad."

"It's very depressing," she said.  "I don't know what else to say about it.  I give talks where I mention that this is probably the fate of the universe, and people have cried" (206).

Mack likes to quote from one of the earliest papers on vacuum decay by Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia.  Once the true vacuum bubble forms, everything inside it will collapse gravitationally within microseconds (154).  Then they wrote:

"This is disheartening.  The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate.  Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in a new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it.  However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy.  This possibility has now been eliminated" (Coleman and De Luccia 1980, 3314).

Surely, this must be what Leo Strauss saw as the "most terrible truth" of evolutionary science as taught by Lucretius: "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable."  And yet while most human beings would be crushed by this terrible truth, Strauss argued, those few human beings who can live the intellectual life of philosophy or science--devoted to Reason rather than Revelation--can bear this truth, because for them the intellectual understanding of the nature of reality, including the terrible truths of nature, is in itself deeply satisfying.

Mack and many of her colleagues in physics and cosmology seem to partly agree with Strauss about this.  They agree with him that understanding the nature of the Universe--including how it must end--is satisfying.  

Mack concludes her book by reporting an interview with a scientist who says that contemplating the end of the Universe in Heat Death isn't depressing or boring for her but "cold and beautiful."  "Even if we can do nothing to change it, that knowledge . . . even if that knowledge goes away, if all humans die, that knowledge right now is incredible. . . . I am delighted that we get to live at a time in the universe when we can see dark energy and not be ripped apart by it.  But that means the whole point is that you understand it, and then you enjoy it, and then . . . 'so long and thanks for all the fish.'  Cool."

As the last word for her book, Mack repeats that word: Cool.

But even if understanding that the Universe and everything in it must die is cool for scientists like herself, is it cool for everyone else?  Strauss thought not.  He thought that for thousands of years philosophers and scientists understood the need to hide such terrible truths by writing esoterically to avoid harming that great multitude of human beings who would be crushed by learning such truths, and who needed the comforting belief in the religious conception of the Universe as divinely created by a Creator who loved and cared for human beings.

Clearly, scientists like Mack think Strauss is wrong about this.  They accept the claim of the modern Lucretian Enlightenment that scientists and philosophers should openly share their understanding of nature with the general public, even when that understanding might seem at first deeply disturbing.  This is evident with someone like Mack who writes about science for a popular audience, and who often writes in a comic tone about the inevitable end of the Universe.  Evidently, she assumes that she can convince her readers, including those who are not devoted to the life of science, that understanding the terrible truths of modern science is cool.

But then when Mack and her colleagues say that "the whole point is that you understand it," we might wonder--do they really understand it?  After all, she repeatedly admits that the dominant components of the cosmos--such as dark matter and dark energy--are "beyond our current understanding" and "completely mysterious"--and "in that sense we don't understand at all" (106, 180-81).  So here she contradicts herself by both affirming and denying that scientists really understand the nature of the Universe.

She could resolve the contradiction by saying that by "understanding" she means the Socratic understanding of one's ignorance.  As scientists probe ever deeper and farther into nature, they discover the limits of human observational experience of the Universe.  And so, for example, we can infer the reality of phenomena like dark matter and dark energy; but since we cannot directly observe or detect them, we cannot fully understand them or explain them.  This illustrates how the evolutionary adaptation of the human mind gives us a reliable but fallible understanding of the world.

As long as the human mind faces such fundamental mysteries of nature that cannot be dispelled by reason alone, those of us who appeal to Reason as the ultimate authority cannot refute those who appeal to Revelation as the ultimate authority for understanding the nature of reality.  And so, for example, an atheistic scientist like Mack cannot refute a Christian scientist like Deborah Haarsma who argues that the scientific understanding of the Universe cannot refute the religious understanding of why the Universe is so fine-tuned for human life.

This leaves an opening for appealing to Revelation to explain how the Universe will end.  That will be the topic for the next post.

REFERENCES

Coleman, Sidney, and Frank De Luccia. 1980. "Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay." Physical Review D 21: 3305-3315.

Mack, Katie. 2020. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). New York: Scribner.

 

The Moral Meaning of the Winter Solstice Depends on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life

 

                                                        The Winter Solstice at Stonehenge

Today (December 21) is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  The winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year, because on this day one of the Earth's poles has its maximum tilt away from the Sun.  After this day, the Earth's pole will begin tilting back towards the Sun, lengthening the period of daylight, until the maximum tilt towards the Sun on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

In a post that I wrote four years ago, I suggested that the moral meaning of the winter solstice depends on whether one gives it a religious meaning or a secular meaning.  The religious meaning is expressed in religious rituals that sacralize the importance of the Sun as the source of life, which is connected in Christian traditions to Christmas and the birth of the Savior.

The secular meaning comes from the modern cosmological and biological sciences that recognize how all complex forms of life, including intelligent life, depend on the energy of the Sun as captured through photosynthesis on Earth.  Beginning with the formation of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, there was no life.  Then the simplest forms of life probably emerged among anaerobic microbes that could extract hydrogen and carbon dioxide gases from the atmosphere to get the energy and nutrients they needed to grow and divide, while emitting methane as waste.  Next, around 3.7 billion years ago, the cyanobacteria arose as the first photosynthesizing forms of life--water-using and sunlight-powered bacteria that produced oxygen as a waste product.  Later, with the increase of oxygen in the atmosphere, from 2.5 billion years ago to 700 million years ago, larger and more complex forms of multicellular forms of life arose that used oxygen as a powerful source of energy.  

The rise of animals and ultimately intelligence depended on the rise of oxygen as a source of energy for complex life.  Human beings require on average 100 watts of power per day to run their bodies (25 watts for the brain and 75 watts for the rest of the body), and oxygen is probably the only good source of such energy.  All of this depends on photosynthesis as the process by which the flow of energy from the Sun is captured in the biosphere of the Earth.

This teaches us that for billions of years in the past, there was no life.  And for billions of years in the future, once photosynthesis has shut down, and the Sun has faded, there will be no life in the cosmos.

The secular moral teaching here is that the human good has no eternal cosmic support, because the human good arises from the momentary conditions of human life on Earth, which cannot exist forever.  The cosmos does not care for or about us.  This is what Leo Strauss identified as "the most terrible truth" of evolutionary science in Lucretius.

Whether one adopts the sacred meaning or the secular meaning of the winter solstice depends on the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life.  The sacred meaning assumes that there is an extraterrestrial intelligent design behind the cosmos that cares for and about human beings, and that this philanthropic intelligent designer will secure the cosmic support for the perpetuation of human life, perhaps even for human immortality in an afterlife.  The secular meaning assumes either that there is no extraterrestrial intelligent life, or that if there is, it does not care for human life on Earth, or secure human immortality beyond the Earth.

Hey, this is the debate we should have with our family and friends around our Christmas dinner table!  To prepare for that Christmas dinner debate, you might want to read some of the books by astrobiologist Charles Cockell--Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe (Wiley, 2nd edition, 2020), Taxi from Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe (Harvard University Press, 2022), and Interplanetary Liberty: Building Free Societies in the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2022).  Cockell is one of those scientists who defends the secular meaning of the winter solstice and rejects the religious meaning.  If you want to read a scientist who defends the religious meaning, try the astrophysicist Owen Gingerich.  I have written previously about Gingerich's God's Universe (2006) and God's Planet (2014).

Studying these books suggests the four paths that the search for extraterrestrial life can take.  First, in considering the cosmic location of life, we might look for life within the Solar System (the Moon, other planets, and their moons); or we might look beyond the Solar System (within and beyond our Milky Way galaxy of stars).  Second, in considering the kinds of life in the cosmos, we might look for natural life (ranging from the simplest forms of microbial life to more complex plants and animals and finally to intelligent life); or we might look for supernatural life (God or gods, angels, and even human beings living immortally after death in Heaven or Hell).  Third, in considering the cosmic meaning of life, we might look for evidence that the cosmos has been purposefully designed to support life and particularly intelligent life, and thus displays a cosmic teleology that constitutes a moral cosmology.  Fourth, in considering the astrobiology of politics, we might wonder about how the extraterrestrial conditions of life will shape the political order of human communities in space (such as for human colonies on the Moon or on Mars); and in particular, we might think about whether extraterrestrial colonies will be inclined to liberty or tyranny.

I have written previously (here, here, and here) about how the ancient, medieval, and modern models of the universe have conceived of the distribution of these various kinds of life across the cosmos and how this might, or might not, manifest a moral cosmology.

And while many of us might assume that the search for extraterrestrial life is a recent phenomenon, it's remarkable that the prevalence of extraterrestrial life throughout the universe has been assumed by many people from ancient times to the present.  The documents showing this have been collected by Michael Crowe in his edited source book--The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).  The leading proponents of cosmic pluralism--the idea that beyond the Earth there are many, even an infinite number, of worlds with living intelligent beings--have been the Epicurean philosophers and scientists (like Lucretius and Giordano Bruno).

Up to the beginning of the 20th century, it was common for many people to believe that the Solar System was full of life--particularly, on the Moon and Mars, the planetary bodies nearest the Earth.  But as telescopes became ever more powerful instruments for exploring the planets and moons of the Solar System, it has become clear that there is no clear evidence for extraterrestrial intelligent life beyond the Earth.  Moreover, there has not yet been any evidence for even the simplest forms of life in the Solar System, although many astrobiologists see tantalizing evidence that there might have been at least some microbial life somewhere in the past.  The landing of men on the Moon and of robotic vehicles on the Moon and Mars has extended this exploratory search for the signs of extraterrestrial life in the Solar System.

In 1584, Giordano Bruno (in his book On the Infinite Universe and Worlds) asserted:

"In space there are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark.  There are also numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours.  For no reasonable mind can assume that heavenly bodies that may be far more magnificent than ours would not bear upon them creatures similar or even superior to those upon our human earth."

Bruno was tried and convicted for heresy by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600.  His teaching the "plurality of worlds" was one, but not the only one, of the heresies attributed to him. 

Bruno had no direct evidence of planets outside the Solar System.  And until recently no planets outside the Solar System had been discovered.  The first discovery of such a planet was in 1995.  Now, as of today, NASA lists 5,284 confirmed "exoplanets" in 3,899 planetary systems, most discovered by the Kepler space telescope.  Surely, out of so many planets, there must be some with life, even intelligent life.  Only some of these planets are in the "habitable zone": at a distance from their stars that would allow for the existence of liquid water (that is, not too hot and not too cold); and they also need to be rocky planets, as opposed to gaseous.  According to some current estimates, there are over 80 billion Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of their stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and probably many more in the trillions of other galaxies.

So far, there has been no evidence of life on any of these planets.  But the problem here is that exoplanets are so far away from us that we cannot even send a satellite to explore them.  The exoplanet nearest to us--Proxima Centauri b--revolves around Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the Sun.  This exoplanet is in a habitable zone.  But it is about 4.2 light years away (25 trillion miles).  NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flying at 52,000 miles per hour would take 54,000 years to reach this planet!

If Proxima Centauri b had intelligent life and a technologically advanced civilization, then we might expect that they could communicate with us through radio transmissions.  Since radio waves travel at the speed of light--186,000 miles per second--a signal could reach the Earth in 4.2 light years.  But even though scientists have been scanning the cosmos for many years trying to detect such radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence, there is still no evidence for this.

This lack of evidence has provoked what is called the "Fermi Paradox," named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who once asked: "Where is everybody?"  If extraterrestrial intelligent life is common in the cosmos, then why haven't we heard anything from them?  Well, maybe ET intelligence is extremely rare and so far away that we're just not likely to hear from them.  Or perhaps ET civilizations with the technology for interplanetary communication go extinct after a few million years.  Or perhaps they're out there, but for various reasons they choose not to communicate with us.

But at some point we have to consider the possibility that the conditions for the evolution of intelligent life are so exceptional that this has happened only once in the cosmos--on the Earth and nowhere else.  That's the "Rare Earth Hypothesis" of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee (Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, Copernicus, 2000).  The conditions for complex life and particularly intelligent life might be so rare as to be unique to the Earth, and even then only during the last 250,000 years of Earth's history.

The conditions for simple forms of life, such as microbial life, might be so much more common that microbial life might be found throughout the cosmos.  Ward and Brownlee suggest that.  And other astrobiologists (such as Cockell agree).

If the Earth is uniquely adapted for the emergence of human intelligent life, does that mean that the laws of nature have been fine-tuned to support human life on Earth?  If that is so, is that fine-tuning just an accident?  Or does it show purposeful design--by the Divine Intelligent Designer?  Owen Gingerich says yes, and that's why he calls the Earth "God's Planet."  

But as I suggested in my posts on Gingerich, there are some weaknesses in his arguments.  The fine-tuning of the unique conditions for human life on Earth looks mysterious.  But to explain the mystery by saying "God did it" is fallacious because this explains a mystery by positing an even deeper mystery--the mystery of God as Creator.

Moreover, it's not clear that the evolution of life in the cosmos with a special place for intelligent life on the Earth shows a divinely ordained purpose that supports the unique dignity of human life.  After all, for most of the history of the cosmos since the Big Bang, there has been no life; and if the distant future of the cosmos brings the extinction of all life, as many astrophysicists expect, then life, and particularly human life, would seem to be only a momentary blip in the history of a mostly dead cosmos.  That would seem to deny any conception of a cosmic teleology supporting a moral cosmology to guide human life.

But even without such a cosmic teleology, there can be a human teleology rooted in the human purposes of evolved human nature.  And as long as that evolved human nature endures, even without being permanent, it sets the natural ends or purposes of human life.  Isn't that enough?

That could hold true even for extraterrestrial human life--that is to say, when human beings travel in space or colonize a moon or a planet beyond the Earth, they will be moved by the same natural desires that move them on the Earth.  

Or will the extraterrestrial conditions for life distort or frustrate those natural human desires?  For example, when human beings colonize Mars, will the extreme conditions on Mars force the human beings there to submit to a tyrannical government that controls the constraining equipment and regimented institutions that secure the life-support systems necessary for human survival on Mars? Or will human beings organize their social and political order on Mars to secure their individual liberty even in the extreme conditions of Mars?

I will take up those questions in a future post.

The Evolutionary Lucretian Liberalism of Spontaneous Order: A Liberty Fund Conference

The Liberty Fund conference in Tucson last week on "Lucretius, Evolutionary Morality, and Spontaneous Order" helped me to think through the idea of evolutionary Lucretian liberalism.

The question for this conference was whether an evolutionary study of cosmic history--from the origin of the universe to the present and into the distant future--supports the claim of classical liberalism that order emerges best from the bottom up through spontaneous evolution rather than from the top down through intelligent design and planning.

The fundamental thought is conveyed in one passage of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things: "Nature is seen, free at once, and quit of her proud rulers, doing all things by herself spontaneously [per se sponte omnia], without control of gods" (2.1090-93).  Matt Ridley sees this Lucretian teaching as a general theory of evolution that applies the classical liberal principle of spontaneous order to everything in the universe: "the physical world, the living world, human society, and the morality by which we live all emerged as spontaneous phenomena, requiring no divine intervention nor a benign monarch or nanny state to explain them" (The Evolution of Everything, 8).  The French physiocrats expressed this thought in a motto: Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme! (Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!)  The alternative position is the Platonic teaching that all natural and social order requires intelligently designed planning from the top down.

With selected readings from Lucretius, Ridley, and Christian, Brown, and Benjamin's Big History, we talked about a wide range of topics over six sessions:

1. The Evolution of the Origin of the Universe
2. The Evolution of Life, Mind, and Culture
3. The Evolution of Morality
4. The Evolution of Religion
5. The Evolution of the Economy and Government
6. The Evolution of the Future

There were at least four kinds of criticism of the idea of Lucretian evolutionary liberalism.  The first criticism arose from the Straussian interpretation of Lucretius as an "ancient" philosopher, who therefore cannot rightly be identified as a "modern" liberal thinker.  I have responded to this criticism in my previous post.  After thinking more about this, I now believe that a crucial issue here is whether one can see Lucretius as drawing from an ancient Greek tradition of liberalism, as set forth by Eric Havelock in his Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, or whether Strauss was right in arguing that Havelock failed to identify any Greek thinker as a true liberal.  It seems to me that Havelock did identify in some of the pre-Socratic philosophers the evolutionary liberal idea of spontaneous order that was developed by Lucretius.

The second kind of criticism of evolutionary liberalism came from the traditionalist conservatives, who complained that this view of the world was morally, intellectually, and spiritually degrading--that it led to Nietzsche's "last man," who lives a comfortable life without any aspiration for anything high or noble.  The "Big History" of evolution that we were studying, one discussant observed, is actually a "small history" of small people in a soulless world with no transcendent longings.  This discussant also noted that in all of our reading nothing was said about the "regime"--Aristotle's politeia understood as the political community devoted to forming the human soul to achieve its highest virtues.

This is the conservatism of the Counter-Enlightenment with its scorn for the bourgeois liberalism and the scientific materialism that create a life of mediocrity without excellence.  In previous posts, I have responded to this Counter-Enlightenment attack on liberalism in my comments on Steven Smith (here), Roger Scruton (here), Patrick Deneen (here), and Benjamin Wiker (here).  I have also responded to the common appeal to Nietzsche's "last man" image by pointing out that the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human defends an Epicurean evolutionary liberalism that recognizes the moral dignity of the bourgeois virtues (here and here).  Moreover, I have argued that those who sneer at the mediocrity of the bourgeois life need to confront Deirdre McCloskey's argument for the bourgeois virtues as including all of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtues (here).

As I have indicated in some of these posts, this debate over the virtues and vices of evolutionary liberalism ultimately comes down to an empirical question about the facts of human history: Has life in the illiberal regimes been generally more or less civilized than life in the liberal regimes?  As summarized by Ridley (28-33), people like Steven Pinker and Norbert Elias have presented historical evidence that the move from the illiberal social orders of the European Middle Ages to the liberal social orders of modern Europe was a "civilizing process," in which the moral standards of life improved.  The conservative critics of classical liberalism would have to prove that the factual evidence of history does not support this claim.  They would also have to recommend illiberal alternatives to liberalism.

A third criticism coming from the traditionalist conservatives was that evolutionary liberalism seems to assume a naïve progressivism that is denied by the fact that the cosmic and cultural evolution of history does not show inevitable and linear progress.  The authors of Big History present the entire history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present as a movement from simplicity to complexity through eight thresholds of increasing complexity.  Although they never mention Herbert Spencer, he also argued for a cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity.  The authors of Big History rely on astronomer Eric Chaisson's claim that the cosmic history of increasing complexity can be studied through the measurable matrix of increasing flows of energy required to sustain more complicated structures against the entropy of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But eventually, according to the common view of many scientists, the universe must end in "heat death," because entropy will win.  Life on Earth will become impossible.  In 4 to 5 billion years, the Sun will die.  Over hundreds of billions of years, all the stars will fade out.  And with no stars, there will be no planets, and thus no biospheres to support life anywhere.  The universe will continue to expand forever into eternal darkness.  Entropy will have finally destroyed all structure and order.  For those scientists who believe our universe is part of a larger multiverse, other universes might continue to evolve.

Similarly, Lucretius offers four proofs that while the universe of atoms and the void--the "sum of sums" (summarum summa)--is eternal, our "world" (mundus) is mortal (5.235-415).  Our world as constituted by the Earth, all life on Earth, the Sun, the moon, and the stars will endure for a long time, but eventually it must all die.  New worlds can then arise out of atoms and the void.

Lucretius says that most human beings are afraid of this teaching that the world is mortal.  Earthquakes are especially fearful because they suggest the possibility that the Earth could be destroyed.  And "men fear to believe that a time of destruction and ruin awaits the nature of the great world, even when they see so great a mass of earth bowing to its fall" (6.565-68).

Leo Strauss quoted this as showing "fear of the most terrible truth"--the terrible truth that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (Liberalism Ancient and Modern, viii, 135).  Strauss believed that only the few human beings capable of living the philosophic life can calmly accept this most terrible truth; and so in any healthy social order, this terrible truth would have to be hidden from the great multitude of human beings who cannot bear it.

Since Big History was written as a textbook for high school and college students, the authors must disagree with Strauss's claim that most human beings cannot bear the truth about the mortality of the world.  The authors admit that their view of the remote future as the "eternal death" of the universe is a "bleak picture."  And yet they try to see this as a "quite satisfying" picture for human beings, because it indicates that humanity has been lucky enough to live in "the springtime of the universe," the brief time when the universe has had all of the conditions for producing the wondrous world in which life and human beings could exist (304).

But rather than worrying about cosmic history many billions of years into the future, most human beings are surely more inclined to worry about the near future--the next hundred years or so--because they might imagine what the world will be like for their children and grandchildren.  With this in mind, our discussion turned to a consideration of whether we should be hopeful or gloomy about how well human beings in the near future will handle environmental problems such as global warming and the scarcity of natural resources and the threats from destructive technologies such as nuclear and biological weapons.

The authors of Big History sketch two alternative scenarios for "ominous trends" and "hopeful trends."  For the "ominous trends," they rely on gloomy predictions about the "limits to growth" by people like Lester Brown.  This kind of thinking has led people like Naomi Klein to argue that the only solution to our environmental problems as created by unregulated capitalism is to have "managed degrowth" to drastically reduce global production and consumption and then to execute a global plan for spending at least 10% of our global economic output on building renewable sources of energy to replace all high-carbon sources.

Against this sort of thinking, Ridley is clearly on the side of the "hopeful trends" scenario, because he believes that as long as there are free market incentives for solving environmental problems, there are likely to be innovative technological changes that will protect human beings from catastrophe. (I have written a post on the debate between Klein and Ridley here.)  As always, the key for Ridley is to allow for spontaneous cultural evolution:  "It is a fair bet that the twenty-first century will be dominated mostly by shocks of bad news, but will experience mostly invisible progress of good things.  Incremental, inexorable, inevitable changes will bring us material and spiritual improvements that will make the lives of our grandchildren wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal--almost entirely as a serendipitous by-product of cultural evolution.  But the people with grand plans will cause pain and suffering along the way" (319-20).

Some of the discussants at the Liberty Fund conference agreed with this--thinking that as long as people were free to cooperate in spontaneously ordered groups, they could find imperfect solutions to their problems.  For example, one discussant spoke about Elinor Ostrom's studies of how neighbors cooperate to enforce social norms for managing common pool resources in ways that solve the "tragedy of the commons."

But at this point, some discussants brought up a fourth criticism of evolutionary liberalism--the fanaticism of Ridley's claim that everything good comes from bottom-up evolution, and everything bad comes from top-down planning.  Ridley declares: "bad news is man-made, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history.  Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves.  The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended. . . . Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history" (317-18).

While agreeing with Hayek about the importance of spontaneous order, Ridley ignores Hayek's claim that good order often does emerge top-down by design in deliberate organizations.  Families, firms, governments, military organizations--these are all deliberately designed forms of order.  And particularly in time of war, Hayek thought, a society might need to be centrally planned for warfare.

As I have indicated in a previous post (here), Ridley's version of evolutionary liberalism suffers from one fundamental flaw--an almost anarchistic scorn for government.  Unlike Hume, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek, Ridley fails to see that although governmental power is dangerous when it is unlimited and undivided, the spontaneous order of human civilization can arise only within a framework of general rules deliberately designed and enforced by government. 
Although Ridley has a short section on the evolution of marriage (85-90), he says nothing about the Hayekian account of the family as a deliberate organization rather than a spontaneous order.  I have written about that here and here.

Like Hayek, Ridley points to the evolution of the common law as an example of spontaneous order that shows how law can emerge without any need to be invented by lawmakers (33-36).  But Ridley is silent about Hayek's argument that the common law as "grown law" often needs correction by legislation as "made law" (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, 88-89).

I now regret that at this Liberty Fund conference we did not talk about the evolution of government, legislation, and the family as deliberate orders. We should have thought more about how the evolution of a free society requires both spontaneous order and deliberate order.

Some discussants suggested that good things can come either bottom-up or top-down.  One discussant pointed to Ridley's account of how Hong Kong became a place of free trade.  Sir Harry Pottinger, Hong Kong's first Governor in 1843, promoted free trade.  Then, in the 1960s, Sir John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, resumed this experiment in free trade (233-34).  So here we see how top-down administrators can create the open space for bottom-up emergence of order.

Despite these four lines of criticism, it seemed that most of the discussants at this Liberty Fund agreed that the evolutionary science of the cosmos, culture, and mind can support classical liberalism.

The Straussian Denial of Evolutionary Lucretian Liberalism: Comments on John Colman's Book

I will soon be leaving for Tucson, Arizona, where I will be directing a Liberty Fund conference on "Lucretius, Evolutionary Morality, and Spontaneous Order."  We will be staying at the beautiful Loews Ventana Canyon Resort.  Our six discussion sessions will center on readings selected from three books--Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, Matt Ridley's The Evolution of Everything, and David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin's Big History: Between Nothing and Everything.

Going to a Liberty Fund conference is one of the great joys of my life. I get to sit around a table with 14 very smart people talking about texts that raise deep questions about the historical, philosophic, scientific, theological, and psychological implications of human liberty.

In this case, we will talk about how Lucretius's atomist science of nature might support a natural history of the evolution of everything, and of how human morality, politics, religion, and mind might fit within that Big History.

In particular, I am interested in the possibility of understanding Lucretius as a premodern forerunner of modern evolutionary liberalism.  I have written many posts on various aspects of this thought--some of them can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I foresee that many (maybe most) of the participants will disagree with me.  In particular, I know that John Colman-the author of Lucretius as the Theorist of Political Life--disagrees with me, because his book advances a Straussian interpretation of Lucretius as an ancient political philosopher who was mistakenly appropriated by modern political philosophers to serve their modern project for progress through political enlightenment and technological science.

Prior to Machiavelli, the Straussians assume, the ancient political philosophers saw the philosophic life as the only naturally good life, and they saw that contemplative life of the few people devoted to the truth as opposed to the social life of the many based on common moral, political, and religious opinions that cannot survive rational questioning.  But beginning with Machiavelli, modern political philosophers have sought to close the gap between philosophy and the city by promoting a modern liberal social order in which there is freedom of thought and religious toleration, and philosophy is turned towards natural science and technology that gives human beings a mastery of nature that is popular because it makes the life of the multitude more secure and prosperous than it has ever been.

If one accepts this stark Straussian separation between ancients and moderns, then one must be surprised that so many modern philosophers have been deeply influenced by Lucretius, which has been confirmed by much of the recent scholarship on the history of Lucretius's influence.  Colman admits that the long list of modern philosophers influenced by Lucretius includes Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bayle, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, D'Holbach, and Helvetius; and he also admits that these were true philosophers living the contemplative life.  But still Colman argues that Lucretius was not a modern thinker at all, and therefore the modern philosophers influenced by Lucretius were mistaken in that they did not understand Lucretius's true teaching.

Colman says nothing about the most obvious objection to his reasoning--the implausibility of his assumptions that Lucretius was unable to write his book so as to convey his true teaching to his philosophic readers, that all of his early modern philosophic readers were unable to correctly identify his teaching, and that for the first time in history some Straussian scholars have recently uncovered the true teaching that Lucretius failed to convey to his earlier philosophic readers.

Moreover, Colman says nothing about the fact that even Leo Strauss suggested some disagreement with these assumptions.  In Strauss's book Liberalism: Ancient & Modern, the central chapter and the longest chapter is his "Notes on Lucretius," thus implying that the Epicureanism of Lucretius anticipates modern liberalism.  In the Preface of the book, Strauss noted the modernity of ancient Epicureanism:

"The most extensive discussion is devoted to Lucretius' poem.  In that poem, not to say in Epicureanism generally, premodern thought seems to come closer to modern thought than anywhere else.  No premodern writer seems to have been as deeply moved as Lucretius was by the thought that nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable.  Apart from this, it may suffice here to refer to Kant's presentation of Epicureanism as identical with the spirit of modern natural science prior to the subjection of that science to the critique of pure reason" (viii).

And yet, Strauss worried about the sadness of this Epicurean teaching--that the world that we love is not eternal, because every world is mortal within the eternal universe of atoms in motion.  He identified this as "the most terrible truth" (85, 100, 135).  He thought that philosophers can live with this truth with a tranquil mind.  But most human beings cannot.  And consequently most human beings can find peace of mind only through the pleasing delusion of a religious belief that the world of human concern is supported by a loving intelligent designer.

Although Colman refers repeatedly to Strauss's study of Lucretius, he never refers to this remark about the modernity of ancient Epicureanism.  What Colman does say implies that Strauss was just wrong in seeing Epicurus and Lucretius as coming close to modern thought.

For example, Colman argues that while Francis Bacon seemed to be influenced by Lucretius, Bacon was mistaken in his reading of Lucretius, and he failed to see how his teaching contradicted the teaching of Lucretius.   According to Colman, Bacon rejected Lucretius's teaching that the philosophic life was the highest life: "Bacon's judgment about the fruitlessness of classical philosophy precluded him from praising the delight in knowledge for its own sake" (141).  Unlike Lucretius, Colman  claims, Bacon promoted the advancement of technological knowledge that could lead to the human mastery of nature for the relief of the human estate.  Bacon sought to overcome the limits of nature through technological power.  By contrast, Lucretius taught "the impossibility of overcoming natural necessity and chance through political and technological means" (141).

There are three problems with Colman's reasoning here.  The first problem is that far from rejecting the Lucretian claim that philosophic knowledge is the highest life, Bacon repeatedly affirmed that a life of pursuing and contemplating truth is "the sovereign good of human nature" (2002, 342).  He argued for a union of contemplation and action, so that neither is subordinated to the other (2002, 148-150, 155, 167, 222, 439).

The second problem is that contrary to Colman's claim that Bacon saw human technological power as unlimited by nature, Bacon was clear that human creation is always limited by nature.  Only God can create ex nihilo or destroy in nihilo (2002, 190-91).  Human beings command Nature only by obeying her.  "All that man can do to achieve results is to bring natural bodies together and take them apart; Nature does the rest internally" (2000, 33).

The third problem is that Lucretius agrees with Bacon in seeing the importance of technological progress in human evolutionary history, which is most fully set out in Book 5 of On the Nature of Things (5.925-1455), where he recounts the history of discoveries and inventions such as the use of fire, language, and farming.  Colman recognizes this (104-113).  But then he asserts: "According to Lucretius, man's technological and artistic productions are no match for the power of nature.  Thus the account of the development of the arts that concluded Book V is corrected by the finale of Book VI, which speaks of natural cataclysms and plague" (139).  Here Colman is referring to the account of the horrible suffering caused by the plague in Athens, which is how Lucretius ends his book.

Colman doesn't explain how Lucretius's account of the plague "corrects" his account of technological progress in Book 5.  Presumably, Colman's suggestion is that the suffering of the Athenians in the plague "corrects" any belief that human beings can ever have such absolute power over nature as to be protected from all the natural causes of suffering.  But neither Lucretius nor Bacon ever claim that human beings can have such absolute power over nature.  Rather, their claim is that improvements in the human knowledge of natural causes can increase human power for the relief of the human estate, but without ever achieving absolute power, which would require absolute knowledge.

Colman notes that following Thucydides' account of the plague, Lucretius observes that medical doctors were of no use because they were ignorant of the natural causes of the disease.  But Colman is silent about Lucretius's explanation of diseases such as plagues as caused by germs (or "seeds") that are invisible to ordinary human vision (6.30, 665, 1090-1131).  Thus, Lucretius was the first philosopher to suggest the germ theory of diseases.  And by suggesting this just before his account of the plague, he suggests to his careful readers the thought that once scientists identify the germs that cause plagues, human beings can increase their power to protect themselves against such diseases.  This is exactly what Bacon had in mind.  And as I have indicated in a previous post (here), the medical science of how microscopic bacteria and viruses cause diseases like the plague have helped to improve human health, and this has become one of the great benefits of the modern Liberal Enlightenment.

So can the Straussian scholars recognize that in this and other ways the Liberal Enlightenment has succeeded?  It's not clear.  Generally, Strauss and his followers insist that liberalism must fail because it denies the natural fact of the contradiction between social order and philosophic truth, so that every social order must be closed to any philosophic or scientific enlightenment.  A crucial consequence of this natural fact is the necessity and desirability of esoteric writing: philosophers or scientists seeking the truth about nature must write and speak in such a way as to hide their true teaching from the multitude of people who would be harmed by this teaching.

But recently some Straussian scholars have conceded that the Liberal Enlightenment has become so successful that esoteric writing is no longer necessary or desirable.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), Arthur Melzer has shown that Strauss was right about the importance of esoteric writing up to about two hundred years ago.  But Melzer has also indicated that esoteric writing began to disappear around 1800, and today most of us in the modern liberal open societies regard esoteric writing as neither necessary nor desirable, because Liberal Enlightenment has succeeded.  If this is so, then Strauss was wrong about the necessary failure of the modern project.

In his best-selling book on Lucretius as the creator of modernity (The Swerve), Stephen Greenblatt proclaimed: "We are all Epicureans now."  One evident manifestation of this is that Lucretius's teaching of the atomist science of the cosmos as a spontaneous natural order unguided by any divine design has become the popular cosmology for our societies today, and in the open societies today there is no attempt to suppress this teaching as subversive to social and religious order.

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."

In 1980, that was the first line spoken by Carl Sagan beginning his thirteen-part television series Cosmos, which became one of the most-watched series around the world for the Public Broadcasting System.  The book Cosmos became one of the most popular science books ever written.  It was a comprehensive presentation of how modern scientists understand the natural history of the universe over 14 billion years.  Sagan was clear in his rejection of any conception of the universe as requiring divinely intelligent design.  In the 2013 edition of Cosmos, Ann Druyan (Sagan's wife) pointed to the significance of the opening line: "Some religious fundamentalists found that first line offensive.  To them it was a shot across the bow that Carl was out to steal their thunder.  They were on to something."

In 1996, Sagan wrote another best-selling book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  One of his epigrams in the book was from Lucretius: "As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror."

In 2014, Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, hosted the television successor to Sagan's Cosmos, which was entitled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.  The book tied to the television series--Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution--has only one epigram, which is a quotation from Lucretius: "The world has persisted many a long year, having once been set going in the appropriate motions.  From these everything else follows."  Tyson used the same epigram for his 2017 book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.  He has become one of the most widely-read authors of popular science books.

So why aren't these Lucretian scientist-philosophers like Sagan and Tyson being persecuted?  Or why hasn't the fear of persecution forced them to write esoterically?  Isn't the answer clear--the success of the Liberal Enlightenment allows for the popular promulgation of Lucretian natural philosophy without any fear that this will subvert the social order?

Modern liberalism has created more public freedom of speech for teaching Lucretian science than ever before in history.  And yet even in the ancient polytheistic world of Greece and Rome, Epicurus and Lucretius were remarkably free in openly teaching what they thought.  Epicureanism became one of the most popular philosophical movements in the ancient world, even though it was widely identified as atheistic, and the Epicureans were boldly provocative in their public teaching.

In fact they were so bold in their teaching that we might doubt that they were esoteric writers.  Even Colman concedes: "The early modern philosophers were attracted to Lucretius also because they saw in him an unwillingness to make the kind of concessions that the Platonic Socrates or Aristotle had made to the religious opinions of the city.  This may explain why Lucretius does not mention either Plato or Aristotle when discussing his philosophic forbearers and limits himself to a few pre-Socratics" (133).

It was not until the Christian Church took political and cultural power over the world that Epicureanism was suppressed, and the books of Epicurus and Lucretius were banned.  The Church could accommodate the teachings of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, which were absorbed into Christian theology and philosophy.  But the Church could not tolerate Epicureanism in any form.  It was not until a copy of Lucretius's book was found hidden away in a German monastery in 1417 that modern readers finally had access to Lucretius after a thousand years of suppression.  The book was placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

This suggests that there was more freedom of speech for philosophers in the ancient world--at least for Epicurean philosophers--than Strauss was willing to admit.  In a previous post, I have argued that there was far more freedom of thought for philosophers in Athens than the Straussian scholars have recognized.

REFERENCES

Bacon, Francis. 2000. The New Organon. Eds. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bacon, Francis. 2002. The Major Works. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Colman, John. 2012. Lucretius as Theorist of Political Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sagan, Carl. 1996. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  New York: Ballantine Books.

Sagan, Carl. 2013. Cosmos. New York: Ballantine Books.

Strauss, Leo. 1968. Liberalism Ancient & Modern.  New York: Basic Books.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse, and Donald Goldsmith. 2004. Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution. New York: Norton.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse. 2017. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. New York: Norton.

The Moral Science of the Winter Solstice

                                                The Winter Solstice Sunset at Stonehenge

Today is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  The winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year.  This occurs when one of the Earth's poles has its maximum tilt from the Sun.

Around the world there are religious rituals associated with the winter solstice.  The pagan Scandinavian and Germanic people of northern Europe celebrated a midwinter holiday called Yule.  Many Christmas traditions--such as the Christmas tree, the Christmas wreath, and the Yule log--arose from the Yule customs.  These religious rites sacralize the importance of the Sun as the source of life.

The modern cosmological and biological sciences recognize and explain the truth of this.  All of life on Earth including human life depends on the energy of the Sun as captured through photosynthesis on Earth.  If the Earth were not revolving around the Sun at just the right distance, and if the physical and chemical conditions on Earth did not permit photosynthesis, life as we know it would be impossible.

This also teaches us that for billions of years in the past, there was no life.  And for billions of years in the future, once photosynthesis has shut down, and the Sun has faded, there will be no life in the cosmos.

There is a moral teaching here--that the human good has no eternal cosmic support, because the human good arises from the momentary conditions of human life on Earth, which cannot exist forever.  The cosmos does not care for or about us.

This is what Leo Strauss identified as "the most terrible truth" of evolutionary science in Lucretius.

Some of these ideas have been developed in posts here, here, and here.

Leo Strauss, Esoteric Writing, and "The Most Terrible Truth" of Evolution

                                  Leo Strauss with Persecution and the Art of Writing

At the Claremont Institute's American Mind website, Glenn Ellmers and J. Eric Wise have replied to my recent post on "Strauss, Darwin, and the Pursuit of Comprehensive Natural Science," which was a response to an earlier essay of theirs.  The fundamental question in this discussion is why the scholars in the tradition of Leo Strauss have failed to take seriously modern natural science in the pursuit of a comprehensive science of the whole.

The answer to this question, I suggest, is that Strauss and his followers believe that science--particularly, Lucretian atomism and Darwinian evolution--teaches "the most terrible truth," and that those few philosophers or scientists who can bear this terrible truth must hide this truth from the great multitude of human beings who would be harmed by it.

According to Strauss, the premodern philosophers believed that "the gulf separating 'the wise' and 'the vulgar' was a basic fact of human nature," and that "public communication of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times" ("Persecution and the Art of Writing," 34).  That's why premodern philosophers wrote esoterically to protect the vulgar from those harmful truths discovered by the philosophic few.

When a writer has a deeply disturbing message that he wants to transmit to his philosophic readers while hiding it from his vulgar readers, Strauss suggested, there are various techniques available to him.  One is to hide his most unpopular views by putting them at the center of his text, because readers tend to pay more attention to the beginning and ending of what they read than to the middle.

In Strauss's Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), the central chapter--and the longest chapter--is a commentary on Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.  The exact center of the book is page 135, where Strauss concludes his study of Lucretius by explaining "the most terrible truth."  Strauss saw Lucretius as the exponent of "liberalism ancient and modern," because Lucretius was the one premodern thinker who came closest to modern liberal thought, particularly as based on modern natural science.  The central insight of Lucretius's argument is that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (LAM, viii).  Lucretius proves the mortality of the world as a product of emergent evolution from atoms in motion: "the world is one of the many arrangements of atoms which in a very long time came about through the furious clashes of the blind atoms without the intervention of an ordering mind or a peaceful agreement between the atoms; and once it has come about, it preserves itself for a long time" (123).  Since the world is not the product of an ordering mind, the world is not teleological, although it contains intelligent species--particularly, human beings--that have evolved to be teleological in their natural striving to satisfy their natural desires (125-26).  Since the world is not intelligently designed by a divinely providential mind, the world is indifferent to human beings and thus provides no cosmic support for human purposes.  Moreover, while the world is enduring, it is not eternal.  The world and everything in it--including the human species and all other species of life--will eventually collapse into the ceaseless motion of atoms that will then produce another world.  This is, Strauss believed, "the most terrible truth."

Notice that this terrible truth assumes atheism--the universe is not ordered by a providential Creator.  In his published writing, Strauss always said that reason could not refute revelation.  That was his exoteric teaching.  But in writing that was not published until after his death--particularly, his lecture on "Reason and Revelation" at Hartford Theological Seminary--he stated his esoteric teaching that reason had actually refuted revelation.  In that same lecture, he referred to the truth of Darwin's science of evolution as part of reason's refutation of the Bible.

Atheism is a terrible truth for most human beings because they are terrified by the thought that the universe is not permanently or eternally hospitable to human life--that the cosmic conditions for the possibility of human life arise only for a brief moment.  Think about photosynthesis, for example.  As is true for the history of all life, the history of human life depends on the photosynthetic flow of energy from the Sun through the biosphere of the Earth.  Photosynthesis was impossible until about 2.4 billion years ago, when photosynthetic cyanobacteria began to raise the level of oxygen.  All complex life as we know it depends on this atmospheric oxygen, and also on the right levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  When these conditions disappear--perhaps a billion years in the future--life on Earth will be impossible.

Farther off into the future, the Sun will burn out.  And then, even farther off, the Universe will continue to expand until it becomes a dark, cold place filled only with black holes and stray subatomic particles.

Most of us need esoteric writing to protect us from this "most terrible truth" that everything we care about must die in a lifeless universe that does not care about or for us.

Ellmers and Wise seem to deny this in affirming cosmic teleology.  "We can see," they write, "the reasonableness of an order for which intelligence is immanent and which thus tends, permanently, to produce a creature that thinks as it does.  Cosmic teleology has thus in a way not been denied by modern science, but it has, unwittingly, been affirmed."  "Permanently"?

Some Straussians--like Arthur Melzer in his book on esoteric writing--have suggested that esotericism is no longer necessary or desirable, because the success of liberalism and the scientific enlightenment in achieving open societies allows us to see now that scientific or philosophic truth is no threat to social order or human happiness.  Liberal social order can be based on the scientific truth of moral anthropology without any need for the noble lie of a moral cosmology that prevailed in traditional societies of the past. Now we can see that the "most terrible truth" is not so terrible after all.

But if this is so--that liberalism's success denies the need for esoteric writing--then this would deny Strauss's central claim that the philosophic life and the vulgar life must always be in deep conflict, so that the public communication of philosophic or scientific truth can never be possible or desirable.

Some of my posts on Strauss and the "most terrible truth" of science are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Some of my posts on Strauss's atheism and esoteric writing are here, here, here. and here.

One of my posts on the esoteric atheism of the American Founders can be found here.

A Thousand Posts (8)

2016
I have often argued for the evolution of a Darwinian liberalism that was first expressed by John Locke and Adam Smith, although there are precursors in the liberal thinkers of ancient Athens and in Lucretius of ancient Rome.  But it might be objected that the English word "liberalism" as a term for a political position did not appear until the 1820s in England.

In January, I wrote a post on the evolutionary origins of the word "liberalism."  The use of the adjective "liberal" in its political sense derived from Adam Smith's language in The Wealth of Nations, where Smith identified "the liberal system of free exportation and free importation," and where he spoke of "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice."  Smith's description of the "liberal system" suggests that it coincides with what he calls the "system of natural liberty," because in both cases, he speaks of a man's freedom "to pursue his own interest his own way." 

Later, in Great Britain, the English noun "liberalism" was coined to refer to this Smithian understanding of "liberal" thought.  The earliest use of "liberalism" that I have noticed is by Alexander von Humboldt in a letter to Thomas Jefferson on May 24, 1804, in which Humboldt writes: "Your writings, your actions, and the liberalism of your ideas have inspired me from my earliest youth."

Although Smith does not use the word "evolution," his account of the "liberal system" does have an evolutionary character to it.  Hayek noticed this and developed it in his account of the liberal idea of "spontaneous evolution" or "spontaneous order."  Smith's system of natural liberty is a spontaneous order that evolves from the bottom-up rather than being designed from the top-down.  It is a natural evolutionary order in that it arises from the natural desire of all individuals to better their condition, which leads to wealth and prosperity whenever the laws secure to individuals the liberty to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

In the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer elaborated the principle of equal liberty as fundamental for liberalism, and he presented it as part of a cosmic evolution of order in which the whole history of the Universe could be seen as an evolution from simplicity to complexity.  Modern evolutionary classical liberalism is rooted in the tradition of Spencer, and the recent work of those like Matt Ridley, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker confirms Spencer's rational optimism about the evolutionary progressive trend across history towards increasing liberty and declining violence (see my post in March 2014).

In August, I wrote posts on Deirdre McCloskey's argument--elaborated in three books--that modern classical liberalism first arose as part of the "Bourgeois Revaluation" that elevated the "bourgeois virtues."  She embraces an evolutionary theory of bourgeois liberalism that is similar to the evolutionary account of liberalism that has been defended by Jonathan Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Paul Rubin, and me (in various writings as well as on this blog).

The basic idea, as McCloskey says, is that bourgeois liberalism is "reinstating a pre-agricultural equality" by establishing an equal dignity and liberty for ordinary people--including an "equality of genuine comfort"--that restores the equal autonomy of individuals enjoyed in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years until the establishment of rigid class hierarchies in agrarian societies. 

As I have argued in some earlier posts, this is a restatement of Locke's argument for liberalism as the restoration of the natural liberty and equality that hunter-gatherers had in the "state of nature."  Locke's account of the state of nature depended on the reports of Europeans about the foraging life of native Americans.  "In the beginning," Locke declared, "all the world was America."  Now, after two centuries of scientific studies of the foraging way of life, we can confirm Locke's account of the state of nature as mostly right.  And we can see that the modern liberal ideas of equality, liberty, and dignity can be understood as appealing to that evolved human nature as shaped in the hunter-gatherer bands of our evolutionary ancestors.

And yet, one might object that, as Hayek claimed in his evolutionary account of liberalism, the liberalism of the Great Society--of the extended order of exchange in which millions of people can cooperate anonymously for their mutual benefit--requires a repression of the natural instincts shaped by life in ancient families and small bands.

But, as I have argued in many posts, Hayek is mistaken in his belief that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a completely socialist or collectivist order with no individual autonomy, and therefore our evolved human nature must be suppressed if we are to live in a free society of autonomous individuals who trade with one another for mutual benefit.  In fact, as McCloskey indicates, there is plenty of evidence for long-distance trading networks among our ancient foraging ancestors.  Even Hayek himself sometimes concedes that there is evidence for ancient trading. 

In October, I wrote a post on some speeches on "Socialism and Human Nature" at the Cato Institute by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jonathan Haidt.  They indicated that Hayek was partly right in that socialist sharing within families and small bands was one of the evolved instinctive rules of cooperation for foragers, but he was partly wrong in failing to see how the evolved instinctive rules of social exchange and resistance to oppressive dominance could be evoked by modern liberal culture.

Haidt declared: "We evolved to do tribalism and trade."  Living within families and small groups, we are collectivists in evoking the social instincts of our foraging mind.  But in the extended order of markets, we are traders in evoking the foraging instincts for social exchange.  The expansion of trading networks over the past five thousand years and the explosive expansion over the past two hundred years have been cultural extensions of the innate propensities for trade.

We are also libertarians in evoking "liberty/oppression" as one of the moral foundations of our evolved human nature, Haidt argued.  Here he appealed to Christopher Boehm's account of how foragers protect their autonomy as free individuals by resistance to the dominance behavior of those who might become bullies or tyrants.  If this is part of our evolved human nature, as Boehm claims, then this would show how Smith's "system of natural liberty" could be rooted in our innate instincts. If this is so, then the bourgeois liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

Some anthropologists have objected to looking at hunter-gatherers as models of evolved human nature.  Surely, there is so much variability in the lives of the foraging bands of the past 200 years studied by anthropologists that we cannot generalize about them.  Nor can we assume that their lives are the same as the lives of our ancient prehistoric foraging ancestors.  That's the argument of Robert Kelly in The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, which was the subject of a post in September.

And yet, far from denying human nature, Kelly's book is actually organized around an implicit theory of human nature that is evident in the topics of chapters 3-9 of the book: (3) Foraging and Subsistence, (4) Mobility, (5) Technology, (6) Sharing, Exchange, and Land Tenure, (7) Group Size and Demography, (8) Men, Women, and Foraging, (9) Nonegalitarian Hunting-Gatherers.  Why does he assume that these are the most important topics?  Because they are natural human desires or needs that any human society must satisfy in some manner?  If so, then why can't we judge liberal societies by how well they satisfy those natural desires? 

One of the best surveys of the evidence for these natural desires as grounded in evolved human nature is Stephen Sanderson's Human Nature and the Evolution of Society.  In April and May, I wrote a series of posts on Sanderson's book showing the ways in which he supports my argument for the meaning and purpose of life in 20 natural desires. In particular, Sanderson suggests that capitalist social orders might satisfy the naturally evolved propensities for reciprocal exchange; and he cites Cosmides and Tooby as supporting this in a way that suggests that even they see capitalist social orders as satisfying some evolved propensities of human nature.

Sanderson has suggested that my list of twenty natural desires should be altered to include the natural desire for ethnic identity.  I am not persuaded by his argument, which he derives from Pierre van den Berghe and Frank Salter, that ethnic affiliation is an evolutionary adaptation, in that those who favor their ethnic community over others are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests.  Some of the alt-right supporters of Trump have criticized me for not recognizing the evolved natural desire for ethnic genetic identity.

I am persuaded that evolved human nature is inclined to tribal thinking, so that we naturally categorize people as us and them, and we naturally favor our group over others.  And while the social conditions of life have often predisposed people to make this in-group/out-group division along racial and ethnic lines, there is no evidence that this predisposition is an innate adaptation of the human mind. 

On the contrary, there is lots of evidence that while we are innately inclined to look for cues of coalitional affiliation, the content of those cues depends on social learning; and people in multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies can be taught to be cooperative without regard for racial or ethnic boundaries.  In fact, Frank Salter implicitly concedes the truth of this point when he laments that ethnic nepotism is not instinctive, and therefore serving ethnic genetic interests requires artificial cultural strategies devised by modern scientific reasoning, and that no ethnic state has ever succeeded in securing an adaptive ethnic group strategy.  I wrote a post on this in May.

A closely related issue is whether evolutionary psychology can explain the demographic transition (rising wealth linked to declining birth rates).  I see the demographic transition as a natural expression of the prudent flexibility of human beings in adapting their parental desires to changing ecological circumstances.  Because of the natural variability in human temperament, some human beings will choose to be childless.  But most human beings in all societies will have a strong natural desire to care for children.  In the socioeconomic circumstances of modern industrialized and technologically advanced societies, parents will want to have small families, so that they can invest resources in their own education, in their careers, and in the education of a few children, and so that those children can become socially successful adults.  Most parents will desire to have no more than two or three children, and where mortality rates are low, this will be enough to sustain current population levels.  I wrote a post on this in March.

In a liberal society, much of our economic life is organized through social exchange in markets that arise as spontaneous orders without central planning.  But in a small family, the parents can have sufficient knowledge of the needs and capacities of their children and sufficient incentives to care properly for their children, so that parents can deliberately plan the organization of their family to achieve the shared ends of the family.  This explains why abolishing the family is impossible: without the family organized around parental care of children, it's unlikely that anyone would have the knowledge and incentives to do as well as parents do in caring for their children.  So while Hayek believes that spontaneous order is the best way to manage an economy, he also believes that deliberate organization is the best way to manage a family. 

Steven Horwitz has written a book about the importance of family life for a Hayekian classical liberalism.  I wrote a post on Horwitz's book in October.

Horwitz shows how in modern life in liberal societies, we must live in two different worlds with different rules.  On the one hand, we live in families and other organizations (like firms and community groups) based on intimate, face-to-face relationships of moral concern for one another.  On the other hand, we live in the extended order of anonymous exchange in complex market economies based on impersonal rules. 

Socialists have argued that our social world would be more just if it were organized like a large family, so that everyone treated one another as brothers and sisters.  But Hayek insisted that this attempt to turn the spontaneous order of the market into the deliberate organization of a family must fail in ways that will destroy the extended order of impersonal exchange that makes modern economic life possible.

The success of a liberal social order depends on the socialization of children in the family so that they learn the social norms and habits of a liberal society, in which people must live in two worlds at once, without applying the rules of one world to the other.  Children must learn the bourgeois virtues necessary for living in a bourgeois liberal society.

With the full expression of bourgeois society in Europe and North America in the 19th century, many bohemian artists and intellectuals reacted with bitter scorn for the bourgeois life.  Gustave Flaubert, for example, showed us how Emma Bovary was forced to have two adulterous affairs and then commit suicide as a heroic protest against the bourgeois mediocrity of her husband Charles.  In a letter to George Sand, Flaubert proclaimed: "Axiom: Hatred of the Bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue."

Steven Smith quotes this in his chapter on Madame Bovary in his new book Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. I wrote posts on Smith's book in September.  Smith is a Straussian, and the influence of Leo Strauss permeates his book, including a chapter on Strauss.  According to Smith, Strauss "fulfills the office of the philosopher to the highest degree."

Like most Straussians, Smith scorns bourgeois liberalism because, they insist, it lacks the human excellence, the heroic nobility, and the transcendent longings of life in the premodern world.  As is characteristic of the Straussians, Smith presents his argument through textual interpretations of some books.  As is also characteristic of the Straussians, he almost never looks at any of the empirical evidence that might sustain or deny the claims of the authors he interprets.  He ignores the empirical evidence surveyed by Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, and others that shows the economic, moral, and intellectual progress achieved in bourgeois societies.

Smith also ignores the fact that even his own account of Ben Franklin as the American model of the bourgeois man contradicts the claims of the antibourgeois writers.  Smith is silent about how McCloskey can look to Franklin as displaying the bourgeois virtues.

Human nature sets the standard for the human good.  By nature the generic goods characterize the human species.  By nature the individualized goods characterize human individuals. The virtue of prudence is required for judging what is best for each individual because of the uniqueness of each individual.

Actually, all animals show individual diversity in their personalities, and thus animal biologists must study the unique personalities of animals in their life history.  As is the case for human beings, we must study not only the generic nature of each animal species and the cultural history of each animal group, but also the individual history of each animal.  A biopolitical science of political animals must move at all three levels.  I wrote a post on this in June.

A bourgeois liberal society conforms best to human nature, because a liberal open society will secure both natural liberty and natural virtue--the liberty of individuals to develop those moral and intellectual virtues that express that ranking of the generic goods of human nature that constitutes the best life for those individuals.  In such a free society, someone like Strauss, who "fulfills the office of philosopher to the highest degree," will be free to live the philosophic life in friendship with other philosophers; and the rest of us will be free to live other kinds of life that best conform to our individual propensities and talents.

Smith concludes his book by declaring that "the narrative of progress is no longer sustainable."  He believes this is true because antibourgeois intellectuals have said that it is true.  He never reflects on the fact that this contradicts the reality of the life that most of us live today in bourgeois liberal societies.  Because of market freedom, cultural pluralism, and the bourgeois virtues, our life today is generally more peaceful, more just, and richer in both material and spiritual goods than has ever been the case for human beings at any previous time in history.  Does Smith really believe that that is not progress?

In November and December, I wrote a series of posts surveying the empirical evidence of global human progress due to the influence of bourgeois liberal ideas and institutions.  Human life today is better than it has ever been in human history, because we enjoy the benefits of two centuries of human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment.  Our time is the best of all times that human beings have ever known.

And yet most human beings around the world deny this.  In surveys asking people whether the world is getting better, most people (94% in the United States, 96% in Great Britain and Germany) say no.  Many of those Americans who believe everything is getting worse voted for Donald Trump, because he appealed to their fear that America and the whole world are in decline, and because he persuaded them that only the leadership of a strongman can save them.

This popular pessimism is contradicted by empirical data that shows more human progress in the past two hundred years than at any time in previous human history.  The Earth today sustains more human lives (over 7 billion) than ever before in history.  Moreover, those lives on average are longer and healthier than has ever been the case.  Life is also more peaceful.  Life shows more equality of opportunity.  Life also shows more freedom--both economic freedom and personal freedom.  Prior to 1800, almost all human beings lived in grinding poverty and mind-numbing ignorance.  Today, only a very few people around the world live in absolute poverty, and most people are literate and have been educated far beyond the level attained by most people in history.  Data collected by various international organizations provides empirical evidence for all of these claims about human progress from the Liberal Enlightenment.

Smith and other Straussians would probably respond to this by arguing that this ignores what they like to call "the problem of the bourgeois":  bourgeois liberalism does improve the material conditions of life for almost everyone--life is healthier, wealthier, and freer--but it does not satisfy the human soul's transcendent longings for heroic excellence, particularly the intellectual excellence of the philosophic life.

But this seems hardly plausible if one notices how a proponent of bourgeois liberalism like Adam Smith defends the "wise and virtuous man" as the standard of moral and intellectual perfection as manifested in the life of philosophic friends. (See my posts in August and September of 2016 and August of 2012.)  He observes that the division of labor in a commercial society allows for the intellectual commerce of philosophers "whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything."  He presents the life of David Hume as showing how a commercial society provides the conditions for the philosophic life--a life that in Hume's case approached "as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."

This language echoes the end of Plato's Phaedo.  Describing the death of Socrates, Phaedo observes: "Such was the end of our friend, who was, as we may say, of all those of his time whom we have known, the best and wisest and most just man."  Thus, Smith is suggesting that Hume shows how a Socratic life of philosophic inquiry is possible in a modern commercial society.

Moreover, Smith saw his account of virtue as compatible with Aristotle's teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics.  This has led Ryan Hanley and other Smith scholars to interpret Smith as an Aristotelian virtue ethicist.  My explanation of this is that Smith's commercial liberalism coincides most closely with Aristotle's teaching about friendship and philosophy in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which also happens to be one of the sections of Aristotle's moral and political writing that shows a propensity to liberalism, while also showing many references to his biology.

Aristotle thus manifested the liberalism of ancient Athens, which has recently been brought into view by classical scholars like Josiah Ober.  (See my post in September.)  Like McCloskey and Douglass North, Ober sees the evolution of liberalism as moving through three stages.  In the foraging bands of the Paleolithic, hunter-gatherers lived as equally free in their autonomy, because anyone who attempted dominance over others would be punished by others in the band enforcing customary norms of resistance to dominance.

Then, in the agrarian states that came with agricultural settlements, social hierarchy and exploitation of non-elites by elites arose as the prevalent form of order--"natural states" as North calls them.  But occasionally, after the collapse of these exploitative hierarchical orders, societies could fall back into the norms of rough egalitarianism that prevailed in the prehistoric foraging societies, which showed the human capacity for decentralized cooperation, which had evolved in the foraging environments of evolutionary adaptation.  This is what happened in ancient Greece, after the collapse of the Late Bronze-Age-Mycenaean kingdoms (around 1177 BCE), and the Greeks moved from palace-centered regimes to citizen-centered regimes.  Athens became an "open access society."  But even so, such citizen-centered democratic regimes were rare in the premodern world. 

It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that liberal democratic open access regimes became prominent in the world.  Unlike the natural states, these modern open access regimes show greater adaptive flexibility, which leads to economic, social, and cultural flourishing, because such regimes are rooted in the naturally evolved human capacities for decentralized cooperation.  Through a Darwinian cultural evolution, liberal social orders have emerged as more adaptive than the alternatives.

Ober is persuasive in surveying the evidence against the common assumption of many scholars that ancient Greece was poor and experienced little or no economic growth. In fact, Greece in the classical era (the 5th and 4th centuries BCE) had rates of growth in both consumption and population that were much higher than the premodern normal and higher than any other period in Greek history until the middle of the 20th century.  Ober offers a Northian institutional explanation for this: "Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs."

Ober notes that Athens allowed philosophical schools (like those of Plato and Aristotle) to organize themselves as voluntary associations in which philosophers could pursue the philosophic life in friendship with others, and thus the open access order of Athens applied to ideas as well as market exchanges.

Even Plato in The Republic recognizes that democracy is the only regime that secures the freedom that allows people like Socrates to study philosophy, and thus "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live."  Some readers of The Republic have seen this as Plato's endorsement of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in some other posts, this shows the Aristotelian liberalism of philosophic friendship in a free society that Smith and Hume saw as emerging in the modern commercial society of Scotland in the 18th century.

This evolutionary classical liberalism can be rooted in a universal history of cosmic evolution like that originally presented by Herbert Spencer and recently presented by Eric Chaisson, David Christian, Fred Spier, and others under the term Big History.  I have written a long series of posts on this--in June 2008, March 2014, and January-March and June-July 2016.    I have also written some posts on the ancient Epicurean history of cosmic evolution as presented by Lucretius--in January and June 2012, and November 2015.

Chaisson is an astrophysicist who sees the entire history of the Universe from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago to the present as showing an evolution from simplicity to complexity that passes through eight epochs: the Particle Epoch, the Galactic Epoch, the Stellar Epoch, the Planetary Epoch, the Chemical Epoch, the Biological Epoch, the Cultural Epoch, and the Future Epoch.

Ever since the emergence of human self-conscious awareness, human beings have wondered about how the world came to be, how humans came to be, and how the human place in the world illuminates the meaning of human life.  To answer their questions, human beings have told themselves myths about cosmic history, and generally these myths have appealed to religious beliefs about the powers of supernatural beings. 

Chaisson says that his story of cosmic evolution is also a "cultural myth" (Epic, 426).  But it's a scientific myth that does not rely on beliefs about supernatural beings or philosophical speculation, because modern science as it began in the Renaissance can achieve true knowledge through the scientific method of gathering relevant data, formulating theories, and then testing those theories through rigorous observation and experimental testing and rejecting those theories that fail to be empirically confirmed.  Without mentioning Karl Popper, Chaisson assumes Popper's standard of falsifiability for science: a theory is not truly scientific if it is not in principle empirically testable, and a theory is falsified when it's empirical predictions fail.

I wonder whether this is true, or whether any science of cosmic evolution must confront the ultimate limits to science in facing fundamental mysteries of nature that are not open to observational or experimental study.  Herbert Spencer set forth a scientific account of cosmic evolution that is very similar to Chaisson's.  Like Chaisson, Spencer saw a cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, which could be explained through natural laws.  But unlike Chaisson, Spencer thought that increasing scientific knowledge reveals "the ultimate mystery of things," and thus provides "a firmer basis to all true Religion."  Modern science shows the power of the human intellect in explaining everything that comes within the range of human experience.  But it also shows the weakness of the human intellect in dealing with all that transcends human experience.

What happened before the Big Bang?  Are black holes real?  Is the universe that we see only one of an infinite number of universes?  Are such questions answerable through observation and experimentation?  Or do such questions arise from our symbolic imaginations about things that are forever beyond the range of human experience?

We must consider the possibility that the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

We must also consider the possibility that the Epic of Cosmic Evolution will not give human beings a privileged position, and that it will predict a future in which human beings and all other forms of life are gone forever, which will confirm the suspicion that the universe does not care for or about us.  Can human beings live with that?  This is what Strauss identified in the science of Lucretius as "the most terrible truth."  Will human beings inevitably turn to religious myths that deny this truth in affirming that it's all about us?

Chaisson agrees that the empirical evidence of the cosmic evolution of complexity as measured by energy rate density shows that human brains and human cultures are some of the most complex systems in the Universe.  And yet he sees no empirical evidence that cosmic evolution follows some grand design leading up to human life as having some privileged position.  While we can hope that the human species will endure into the near future, the empirical evidence of how ordered systems evolve and of the rare conditions required for human life make it clear that human life is unlikely to last for long, and that the eventual death of the Sun will bring earthly life to an end.

In Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2014), David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin argue that the scientific origin story of Big History can "give us a powerful sense of meaning," and if this new origin story is taught to high school students around the world, this could provide us with a shared global understanding of our human place in the universe that could help us confront the greatest threats to human existence on earth today--such as nuclear war and global warming. 

Bill Gates has supported their project for providing material for high school teachers to teach Big History.  So that, while previously children were taught the religious origin stories of their various societies, which explained the cosmic meaning of their lives within their social order, the new scientifically grounded Big History can teach children around the world an origin story that depends on scientific evidence rather than religious faith, and which can sustain a global ethics comprehensible to human beings in all societies, who otherwise disagree in their religious beliefs.

By contrast, some scientists today claim that science and religion are compatible, and that the modern scientific understanding of the cosmos, and of the human place within the cosmos, supports the cosmic teleology of the theistic origin stories.  For example, Owen Gingerich is Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and he argues that a scientific history of the cosmos shows evidence of divine purposefulness, because the physical and chemical constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned for the emergence of a world hospitable to intelligent life.  Thus, science can sustain a cosmic teleology in which human life gains meaning as the fulfillment of God's purposes.

To reach this conclusion, however, Gingerich's view of cosmic history must stop at the present moment, with human intelligent life dominant over the Earth, and thus he refuses to reflect on the cosmic future and the likelihood that in the distant future all life will almost certainly be extinguished, because in that case we might as well conclude that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for eternal death.

If we could look at the entire history of the cosmos, we might see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, would seem to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it would seem that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

Many other prominent scientists have made claims like Gingerich about how the fine-tuning of the universe supports a theistic view of human life as the fulfillment of divine purposefulness.  This is a new version of the old argument from design (first stated by Plato)--that if nature looks like it has been intelligently designed, then this must point to a divinely intelligent designer.

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin do not mention such scientific theism as an alternative to their position.  Although they do not explicitly say so, they imply that modern science must be atheistic.  They certainly make it clear that the Biblical origin story must be rejected as false.

My position falls somewhere in between Gingerich and the Big History folks.  I agree with Gingerich that modern science does not dictate atheism, because scientific answers to questions about how things work fall short of answering questions about why they work that way, which are the questions that open up the possibility of divine purposefulness.  Questions about first causes point to the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that cannot itself be explained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of nature as the final ground of explanation.  To the question of why nature exists, or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers.  Either we say this is a brute fact of our experience: that's just the way it is! Or we move beyond nature to nature's God as the creator of nature, but then we cannot explain why God is the way He is.  In looking for an ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.

If we could imagine ourselves somehow--billions of years into the future--being there to observe the end of all life and the approaching darkness of cosmic death, we might say: Well, it was good while it lasted.