From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth:

I look out to the far reaches of the universe, an overwhelming vastness of galaxies and spaces seemingly without end, and I am weak with wonder. When I learn how fundamental forces of the atom explain the origins and structure of the cosmos, I am overwhelmed by the unity of small and large. It is said that “how” questions belong to the realm of science, but “why” questions do not. Yet startling new connections, never thought possible, offer radical powers of explanation.
Do “why” questions belong to science? What about the biggest “why” of them all: Why the cosmos?
For perspective, astronomer Owen Gingerich says that “from the point of view of history, the Copernican revolution [to the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the sun and stars around the Earth] made people begin to question the whole idea that they were in a very small and highly significant place, a closed world with God and the angels just beyond the shell of stars. The Copernican principle is that we are not unique, but just a relatively minor place on a small planet circulating around an ordinary star, one of billions in the Milky Way galaxy, which itself is one of billions of galaxies beyond that.”
Gingerich continues: “When I was teaching at the American University of Beirut, a student came to me and said, ‘Learning that the universe is so vast and we are so insignificant is destroying my faith.’ Many people get this chilling fear. I look at it differently. If we lived in a much smaller universe, one that was not nearly so old, from what we know about cosmology, it would have collapsed long since. We’re in this incredibly large universe, yet the human brain is the single most complex object that we’re aware of. [Physicist] John Wheeler once told me that the universe is like this gigantic plant whose sole purpose is to produce, after some time, one small, beautiful flower. So you can’t say that just because the universe is so vast, we are so insignificant.”
Gingerich is awed by the universe and believes in God. Fair enough; that’s his view. But he is careful not to use the former to prove the latter. I respect that.
It’s out of fashion for leading scientists to believe in God. There are sufficient physical explanations, most say, and no evidence of anything else.
Ray Kurzweil’s deep vision of the future, gazing through the long lens of accelerating technology, is literally cosmic. If he’s on the right track, he could change our very concept of the cosmos.
“I’ve come to the question of what will happen to the universe, its destiny, in a different way,” Kurzweil says. “Generally, the universe is examined as if it were some simple machine, and when we understand the mechanics of that machine—the dark energy, dark matter, its expanding or contracting, its getting colder or hotter—we will know all there is to know. It’s as if the future of the universe is all going to play out without any influence of intelligence.”
He goes on: “What’s the role of intelligence? Is it just a little bit of froth that darts in and out of the stars but does not play a role in the destiny of the universe? That’s not my view. We can see already that, certainly on a global scale on earth, human intelligence has commanded reality. We don’t just have rivers flowing where they want—we can divert them if we want. We can move mountains. We can really change natural processes through the force of our intelligence, as manifested in technology.”
Kurzweil then applies his vision of “exponential technological growth,” whose profound implications he has explored more than anyone else. The result, he famously claims, will be humanity “commanding the solar system and then the galaxy and ultimately the universe, well before these ultimate destiny questions come to matter.”
But isn’t changing the destiny of the universe untold orders of magnitude larger than changing the direction of a river? It’s hard to imagine any sentient creature influencing the tides of the cosmos.
“[A century ago] it’d be hard to imagine a sentient creature jumping to the moon, as we’ve already done,” Kurzweil says. “Cosmic scale is the result of the exponential progression of technology. Right now, we’re doubling the power of information technology every year. That rate is itself accelerating. Intelligence is very powerful. It is the most powerful force that we are aware of. Intelligence can overcome [supposed] natural limits—not through any kind of magic, but just by figuring ways to manipulate forces at finer and finer scales so that, ultimately, what seem to be natural limits can be superseded.”
He continues casually: “It won’t take that long for us to do this at a solar-system scale and then a galaxy-wide scale. Ultimately, we will turn the universe into a large mind that is trillions of trillions of times greater than all of human intelligence today. Our progeny can decide the destiny of the universe. Whatever our goals will be then, we can engineer the cosmos into the form that fulfills them.”
What about the fact that every cosmologist believes that the universe will end in either ice or fire? That our universe will effectively end either in expansion, dispersion, and evaporation (so that the temperature will be almost absolute zero) or in an ultimate big crunch collapse (so that the temperature will be infinitely high)? Cosmologists may differ on which, either ice or fire (ice being the current favorite due to the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe), but every cosmologist predicts utter destruction of all that exists in our universe by one or the other.
Kurzweil has a short response: “All these future theories treat intelligence as irrelevant. And they’re ignoring the fact that intelligence is expanding exponentially.”
Kurzweil turns my head, compels new vistas. Just suppose he is right—that intelligence can so transform the universe, converting it into a “large mind” unimaginably greater than all of human intelligences. What could that mean? Could such ultimate cosmic outcomes answer ultimate cosmic “whys”?
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist unafraid of the “big questions” (he is scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, or FQXi), thinks that the universe is a mathematical object, not just as a description, but in reality. And mathematical objects, like the cube or dodecahedron or sphere or a vector space, “clearly exist outside of space and time,” he says. “Mathematical objects are clearly not created, ever. The cube wasn’t created 14 billion years ago, right? And yet you still feel that it exists in the sense that it’s not like we invented the cube. The whole idea that there could be a cube is very not arbitrary. What’s so beautiful about these mathematical objects is that they exist outside of space and time. There’s no time element, so they never needed to pop into existence.”
He continues: “Our entire physical universe can be thought of as a four-dimension space-time, with time as the fourth dimension, as Einstein pointed out. This means that we just have another four-dimensional shape here, which could then exist without ever being created outside of space and time. If this is true, it would mean that the universe really is a completely mathematical object.”
Tegmark sounds quite normal. His ideas are anything but. Our universe is a mathematical object, he says. It’s what we are. What’s more, all consistent mathematical systems exist—as universes or quasi-universes, somewhere.
Mathematics as undiscriminating creator? I like the thinking, but I don’t quite buy the thought.
I cannot shake a lifelong fascination with theism. So I ask John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist turned Anglican priest, to reflect on the cosmos.
“The most astonishing thing about cosmic history from the big bang to the present day,” Polkinghorne says, “has been the emergence of human beings here on earth—self-conscious beings. In us, the universe became aware of itself, and that, I think, was something that was unforeseeable before it happened. And then, as a byproduct, science emerged so that human beings would be able to understand a great deal about the universe.”
He continues: “Thus, the coming to be of human life, of self-conscious life, of God-conscious life on earth is a very important part of cosmic history. I don’t want to say it’s the unique and only purpose of the universe because there may be little green men out there and God will have purposes for them. But essentially, I think the universe exists as something separate from God—but able to know God and freely to enter into a relationship with God. God’s purpose is to have beings who can accept the divine love and positively and thoroughly relate to it.”
Questions regarding the meaning and purpose of the universe, Polkinghorne says, “are precisely the questions that science tends to bracket out. Science deals with questions of how things happen, the processes of the world, not questions of why things happen.”
Then he adds, “Sometimes scientists pretend to address ‘why’ questions—which is when they become ‘scientistic,’ thinking that science has all the answers to all the questions that are sensible to ask or worth asking.”
Polkinghorne calls himself “a passionate believer in the unity of knowledge and the singleness of truth,” and he sees his scientific experience and his religious experience as being “different dimensions of a search for truth.”
He explains: “I certainly don’t want to be a priest on Sundays and a physicist on Mondays. I want to be both on both days. And this binocular vision, which the scientific eye and the religious eye give me, enables me to see farther and deeper than I could with either eye on its own.”
But can traditional theology withstand contemporary astronomy?
Steven Dick, NASA’s chief historian, has a theology—“cosmo-theology”—but it’s certainly not traditional. “Cosmo-theology is simply a theology that takes what we know about the universe into account,” Dick says. “Most theologies do not do that.”
What does he mean by taking the universe into account? “First of all,” he says, “the immense size of the universe—billions and billions of light-years in diameter. That’s a huge change in human understanding from when theologies were developed thousands of years ago.”
He continues: “Next, one needs to consider that we humans are no longer central in the universe in a geographical sense. We are on the outer arms of our own Milky Way galaxy, which itself is not in any way central. Also, if there is extraterrestrial life, we would not be in any way biologically central. It’s very likely that we are not at the apex in the great chain of being. Maybe we’re somewhere in the middle or even at the lower end.”
As for God, Dick is unambiguous: “With modern science, one could well argue that we have no real need for the supernatural anymore. There may well still be a psychological need for God. Human history shows that many people need a God, irrespective of whether or not a God exists. I say, if we’re going to have a God, why not have a natural God rather than a supernatural God? It’s possible that advanced beings, natural beings, have tinkered with the constants of the universe in such a way as to fine-tune it for life. If you consider beings millions or billions of years old, maybe that’s what they do—they construct universes. That’s more appealing than a supernatural being. And that’s what cosmo-theology does. It really pays attention to what we know about the universe. I always remember what Arthur C. Clarke said: ‘Any faith that can’t survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.’”
The search for meaning and purpose is humanity’s never-ending quest. So, why the cosmos? I categorize possible answers.
First, is there an answer? Perhaps the cosmos is a brute fact, and that’s all, as Bertrand Russell said so bluntly.
Next, if there is an answer, does the answer reside inside or outside the cosmos?
If inside, could there be some self-generating, self-organizing principle, as cosmologist Paul Davies says? “I don’t want to shove the meaning or the purpose into some outside agency which exists for no reason at all, whether it’s a set of laws or a super-being like a God,” Davies argues.
If outside, consider four why-the-cosmos options:

1) A force or principle?
2) A mathematical system?
3) An impersonal god of deism?
4) A conscious-personal being who is the creator?

And if it’s the last, is it a natural conscious-personal being (such as a super-intelligence in another universe) who created our universe in reality or as a simulation? Or something supernatural like the traditional God of human religion?
I find myself agreeing with Davies, at least in this one respect: “One reaches similar ridiculous conclusions with almost every explanation for why the universe is as it is,” he says. “They all, ultimately, if you push them to the end, lead to a point where you think, ‘Well, hang on a moment. Can we really believe that?’”
Bottom line, here’s what I believe. “Why the cosmos?” will be answered only by something self-existent. It could be self-generating nature, always-there mathematics, diverse supernatural gods. Only something whose essence is its existence, I’d guess, can bring us closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Owen Gingerich, Ray Kurzweil, Max Tegmark, John Polkinghorne, and Steven Dick in “Why the Cosmos?”—the 13th episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (52nd in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

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