From Russell Stannard, emeritus professor of physics at Open University:

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Those are the words of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes. He goes on to dismiss human life as “a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents.”
It is not difficult to appreciate how one might arrive at such a gloomy assessment. Take, for example, the size of the universe. It takes 13.7 billion years for light to reach us from the farthest depths of space, even though it travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. Are we really expected to believe that God designed it as a home for humans? A case of over-design perhaps?
Most places in the universe are hostile to life. The depths of space are incredibly cold. The most prominent objects in the sky, the sun and the other stars, are balls of fire and thus not suitable places to find life. For the great majority of the history of the universe, there was no intelligent life. After the stars have exhausted their fuel, there comes the Heat Death of the universe—an infinity of time when there will again be no life. Hence the view that life is but a fleeting, accidental byproduct of no significance. Or is it?
Suppose you were put in charge of making a universe. You have freedom to choose the laws of nature and the conditions under which your imaginary universe operates. The aim is to produce a universe that is tailor-made for the development of life—the kind of universe a sensible God would have created if it were really intended primarily as a home for life.
Let us assume you start off your universe with a big bang. All the galaxies of stars are to be receding from each other in the aftermath of that great explosion. The first decision is how violent to make your big bang. You might feel, for example, that the actual big bang was somewhat excessive if the aim was simply to produce some life forms. How about something more discreet? It turns out that if you make the violence of your big bang somewhat less—only a little less—then the mutual gravity operating between the galaxies will get such a secure grip that the galaxies will slow down to a halt, and will thereafter be brought together in a big crunch. Moreover, this will happen in less time than the 13.7 billion years it took for us humans to appear on the scene in the actual universe. So, turn the wick down, and you will get no intelligent life.
All right, you might say, I’ll turn the wick up a little. I’ll make my big bang more violent than the actual one. What happens now is that the gases come out of the big bang so fast that they do not have time to collect together to form embryo stars before they are dispersed into the depths of space. Since there are no stars, you get no life. In fact, it turns out that as far as the big bang’s violence is concerned, the window of opportunity is exceedingly narrow. If you are to get life in your universe, the thrust must be just right—and that is what our actual universe has managed to do.
The next point to consider is the force of gravity. How strong will it be in your imaginary universe? If you make it a little weaker than it actually is, you will collect gas together after the big bang. It will squash down, but there will not be enough of it to produce a temperature rise sufficient to light the nuclear fires. No stars, no life.
On the other hand, you must be careful not to have your gravity too strong. If it is, you will get only very massive types of stars. These burn exceedingly fast and last for only 1 million years. For evolution to produce intelligent life on a nearby planet, you must have a steady source of energy for 5,000 million years; you need a medium-sized star like the sun. Indeed, when you come to think of it, the sun is a remarkable phenomenon. After all, what is a star? It is a nuclear bomb going off slowly. Have you any idea how difficult that is to achieve? The amazing thing is that the sun manages this. The secret is the way the force of gravity in the sun conspires to feed the new fuel into the nuclear furnace at the center of the star. It does so at just the right rate for the nuclear fires (governed by the nuclear force, an entirely different force from that of gravity) to consume it at a steady rate extending over a period of 10 billion years.
So, in order for there to be life, the force of gravity—like the thrust of the big bang—must lie within a very narrow range of possible values. And the gravity of the actual universe does just that.
Next, you must turn your attention to the materials from which you wish to build the bodies of living creatures. This is no small matter. After all, what have you got coming from your big bang? The two lightest gases—hydrogen and helium—and precious little besides. And it has to be that way. Remember, we need a violent big bang to stop the universe from collapsing back in on itself prematurely. And because of that violence, only the lightest nuclei could survive the collisions occurring at that time, anything bigger getting smashed up again soon after its formation.
But you cannot make interesting objects like human bodies out of just hydrogen and helium. So the extra nuclei—those that go to making up the 92 different elements found on Earth—must be manufactured somehow after the big bang. That’s where the stars have another important role to play. Not only do they provide a steady source of warmth to energize the processes of evolution, but they also first serve as furnaces for fusing light nuclei into the heavy ones that will later be needed for producing the bodies of the evolving creatures.
But this process is far from straightforward. Perhaps the most important atom in the making of life is carbon. In a sense, it is an especially “sticky” kind of atom, very good at cementing together the large molecules of biological interest. But forming a nucleus of carbon is by no means easy. Essentially, it consists of fusing three helium nuclei together—which is as unlikely as having three moving snooker balls collide simultaneously. It involves something called a “nuclear resonance,” and the occurrence of this resonance is so highly fortuitous that its discoverer, one-time atheist Fred Hoyle, was moved to declare that “a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics.”
So, we have our precious carbon. A collision between some of these carbon nuclei and further helium nuclei yields oxygen—another vital ingredient for life—and so on. Thus, you must be sure to incorporate a fortuitous nuclear resonance in your imaginary universe.
Does this mean that the stage is now set for evolution to take over and convert these raw materials into human beings?
Not so. You have your materials, but where are they? They are in the center of a star at a temperature of about 10 million degrees. Hardly an environment conducive to life. The materials have to be got out. But how?
What happens in the actual universe is that a proportion of the newly synthesized material is ejected by supernova explosions. These occur when massive stars—several times the mass of our sun—run out of fuel. They suddenly collapse in on themselves. But that raises a problem. How can an implosion produce and explosion? This was a conundrum that exercised the minds of astrophysicists for many years.
The mechanism turned out to be the strangest imaginable. The material is blasted out by neutrinos. Neutrinos are famous for hardly ever interacting with anything. One could pass a neutrino through the center of the Earth to Australia 100 billion times before it had a 50:50 chance of hitting anything. Neutrinos are incredibly slippery. How fortunate they were not any more slippery than they are.
There are many other conditions that had to be satisfied in order for there to be intelligent life anywhere within the universe. The sum total of these “coincidences” goes under the name “the anthropic principle.”
We are faced with the simple fact that the universe, far from being hostile to life as Weinberg would have us believe, has seemingly bent over backward to accommodate life. As the physicist Freeman Dyson has put it, “The universe knew we were coming.”
The mysterious appropriateness of the universe for the evolution of life is something that calls for explanation. There are two main possibilities.
The first is to assert that our universe is not alone. There are a great many universes—perhaps an infinite number of them—and they are all run on different lines with their own laws of nature. The vast majority of them have no life in them because one or other of the conditions were not met. In a few, perhaps in only the one, all the conditions happen by chance to be satisfied and life was able to get a hold. The probability of a universe being of this type is small, but because there are so many attempts, it is no longer surprising that it should have happened. We, being a form of life ourselves, must of course find ourselves in one of these freak universes.
This is a suggestion that has been put forward by some scientists, but that does not make it a scientific explanation. For one thing, the other universes are not part of our universe and so, by definition, cannot be contacted. There is no way to prove or disprove their existence.
The second alternative is simply to accept that the universe is a put-up job; it was designed for life, and the designer is God. Now, one always gets a little bit worried over arguments in favor of the existence of God based on “design.” The original argument from design held that everything about our bodies, and those of other animals, is so beautifully fitted to fulfill its function that it must have been designed that way—the designer being God—and therefore you must believe in God. The rug was pulled from under that argument by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection— at least in terms of it being a knockdown proof of God’s existence, one aimed at convincing the skeptic.
So it is that I would urge caution on those religious believers tempted to make too much of this new argument from design, this time based on physics and cosmology. One can neither prove nor disprove God on the basis of such reasoning. All one can say is that if one already believes in God on other grounds—say, on the basis of religious experience—then the simplest explanation might be in terms of a Designer God. For religious believers, such an explanation introduces no fresh assumptions over and above what one already accepts as the explanation of other features of one’s life.
Not that the alternative suggestion, the many-universes argument, is necessarily to be regarded as an atheistic theory. Certainly, it will be the theory favored by atheists. But it could well be that the God who used evolution by natural selection as the means for making intelligent creatures like ourselves (and a whole host of other interesting animals along the way) might well have used the same scatter-gun approach to make not only our life-friendly universe, but a whole host of other interesting universes—universes that carry no life, but could nevertheless be appreciated by God.

Russell Stannard appears with Sir Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind, Alexander Vilenkin, Lee Smolin, and Roger Penrose in “Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?” the 35th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

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

Science and religion have been battling—forever it seems, certainly as long as science has affected human thinking. The struggle carries deep significance. Some say that religion is superstition and science should eliminate it, the sooner the better. Others say religion is reality and science should glorify the God that created it, the sooner the better. Worldviews are at stake. As the battle rages, meaning and purpose, if any, hang in the balance.
Between science and religion, many call for harmony. Yet there seems, today, only more cacophony. I like that! With science and religion, I do not like artificial harmony or phony accord. I do not like to be placated or fooled. If there’s truth to be found—especially on matters of ultimate concern—I go for conflict. Give me rough argument over smooth talk.
Because I sense in myself a will to believe, I start with Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher and skeptic and the author of “Breaking the Spell,” which claims religion to be a “natural phenomenon.”
“People want to believe in God,” Dennett says. “They even believe they believe in God. They are tremendously impressed with the fantastic wonderfulness of the universe. And wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of recipient for our gratitude? And I feel that as much as anybody. I wish there were somebody to thank. And there’s nobody to thank. But if you think there’s got to be, then you have a motive for trying to identify something as God. And, if you’re a scientist, it’s likely not going to be a traditional God. It’s going to be something not unlike Spinoza’s God, which near as I can tell, is just nature itself.” Dennett adds, “Do I worship nature? Well, almost. I wouldn’t pray to nature. I wouldn’t expect nature to work miracles for me. But I stand in awe and respect of the natural world and delighted to be here, full of gratitude. And because I can’t thank God, I just thank ‘goodness.’”
I give to Dennett the common hope-for-harmony routine—that because the goals and methodologies of science and religion are so different, they can co-exist.
“I don’t buy it,” Dennett asserts. “There’s truth, and then there’s everything else. There’s poetry, there’s art, there’s fantasy—but they aren’t two different kinds of truth. There isn’t scientific truth and emotional truth. No, there’s truth. And scientific method is the best method we’ve come up with for getting at the truth. I’d want to know how theology aims at the truth without following in the footsteps of science.”
To Dennett, truth is accessed only through science. Other nonscientific knowledge may be interesting, but it is not truth in the same sense.
I agree, but could truth in a different sense reflect reality of a different kind? How would a scientist who believes in God frame the argument?
Owen Gingerich, an emeritus astronomer and historian of science at Harvard University, believes in God. To Gingerich, a major issue in science and religion is “God’s actions in the world. Did God plan it perfectly in the first instance and let it run without meddling, or is God continually nudging it?” He believes that “many people have problems with evolution because they feel it’s eliminating God in the sense that they would like to have God in there each step of the way bringing it about. What I suspect is that many people feel that if they lose that [kind of Godly intervention], then they will equally lose the possibility of God interacting very strongly in the world.” For example, “much prayer assumes that God can be persuaded to do something that if you do not ask might not happen.”
The scientific view, obviously, is that God isn’t doing such intervening. “Now that’s a metaphysical assumption on the part of the scientists,” Gingerich says, “because science can’t prove that this kind of interaction does not happen, particularly as 20th-century science developed quantum theory, the uncertainty principle, chaos theory, and the like.” In his view, “theology can be a very demanding and serious intellectual discipline, even though the general metaphysics of scientists doesn’t give it a place at the table.” For scientists to exclude theology, Gingerich insists, is their own “kind of leap of faith,” which scientists have made in their interpretive process, but which “is not fundamentally a part of science itself.”
This is the core confrontation, and I love it. On the one hand, is the scientific worldview the absolute and only standard for assessing truth in the world? Or, on the other hand, does it, too, require “a leap of faith”? In other words, is a strictly scientific worldview self-referential and circular in its reasoning?
My head says the former; my heart, the latter. Maybe my head needs some help—and I know where to find my potential helper: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my alma mater. Marvin Minsky, the legendary pioneer of artificial intelligence, is not known to be shy about entering the science-religion debate.
To get Minsky started (it doesn’t take much), I ask him whether it is efficacious for scientists to seek harmony between science and theology.
Minsky gives me a look and calls religion “an amazing phenomenon for thousands of years” that is a “psychologically wonderful device.” But he’s just warming up.
“Take all the questions you can’t answer and give them a name,” says Minsky. “So somebody says, ‘Well, God did that.’ And the right question to then ask is, ‘Well, how does God work?’ And [believers] regard that as rude. So there’s something strange about theology. It’s a system of thinking which teaches you not to ask questions. And so it’s incompatible with science.
“The trouble with religion,” Minsky continues, “is it picks particular things and says, ‘Don’t think about this.’ ‘Don’t change that.’ ‘Abide by this Book.’ And that’s very convenient. It saves a lot of time. At any period, if there are questions science can’t yet answer, why knock yourself out? I regard religion as a wonderful way to save people’s time.”
Minsky believes that if religion would not have impeded science for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, humanity would be far advanced, even in dramatically extending human life. “I think death will go away,” Minsky opines. “But we don’t need to pray for it. We need to work for it.” Not yet finished, Minsky adds, “If we look at religion as fossilized old beliefs, some of which may have been useful, that’s fine. But I can’t see serious discussions of theological ideas because they’re all nutty. Unless you say how God works, saying that God exists doesn’t explain anything.”
Minsky is fierce. Good for him. Religion as an excuse to avoid hard questions? Based on the history of religion, he makes a good argument.
But from the foibles or fallacies of human religion, does anything really follow about a Creator God?
I sway forth and back. Perhaps I need someone who hears harmonies between science and religion.
Francisco Ayala is a distinguished authority on evolution and a former Dominican priest who has thought deeply about the science-religion interaction. While he criticizes “intelligent design,” he believes in God. When it comes to how science and religion work, he says, “the difference is radical.” In science, Ayala states, “it is always possible to reject something that was accepted in the past—based on observation or experiment. In religion, we are dealing with different matters. Religion depends on revelation and religious experience. They are not subject to rejection by observation or experiment.”
But religion and science need not be in contradiction, he says, “They’re different [kinds of] truths,” he states. “For the religious believer, no scientific discovery, no matter how well-established, is going to challenge his or her strong faith.”
Ayala waxes eloquent on how the discoveries and marvels of science can be a benefit to religion by showing the complexity, diversity, and majesty of physical existence. Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, he says, “the beauty of life is very inspiring,” adding “I think people of faith should gain an inspiration by looking at the world of life and that should inspire them to think more of God and to love God.” To see the presence of God in the world, he says, “that is religion.”
According to Ayala, science can neither prove nor disprove God. But it can show a magnificently diverse world of living things that inspires awe and reverence.
How might religion work with specific sciences? I ask Wentzel van Huyssteen, a theologian and expert on human origins.
“It would be easy to construct a situation where there would be a permanent, eternal conflict between science and religion,” van Huyssteen says. “The strategies are so different. But if one moves up a step from religion and science in general to specific theology and specific sciences, then it becomes more tangible and we can say, OK, here we have a specific kind of theology and a specific kind of science—say, psychology, paleoanthropology, cosmology. And then it becomes possible to see how these very different strategies can be brought closer to each other by asking what is it that we do that could be somewhat similar?”
Van Huyssteen refers to his own expertise. “Take the issue of human uniqueness, which is a term used in both theology and science,” he says. “If one follows this kind of topic, then it becomes clearer how to diffuse a conflict. At some point, one may still reach a point, a point of no return, where each side may want to divert. But if one sticks to the more generic terminology of science and religion, then it’s either a duet or a duel.”
Admonishing theologians to “show that the disciplines we are practicing are philosophically sound,” van Huyssteen states that theologians have a “huge epistemic obligation to show that in thinking about this domain of religion, we can foster interdisciplinary conversations.” Van Huyssteen makes a distinction between the common practice of religion and the academic study of theology, which he says can complement science.
Paul Davies, a cosmologist and director of Beyond: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, is respected by both scientists and theologians. Not moved by flattery, he often disagrees with both sides.
“Science and religion start from opposite poles,” Davies says. “Science begins on the basis that all knowledge is provisional, it must be testable, that we put forward hypothesis about the world and we change our minds if experiments show that we are wrong. [Most] religions start with an act of faith, that there are certain things which are true and must be accepted to be true and they are not testable. And the question is, do science and religion meet somewhere in the middle so that they could be mutually productive?
“What tends to happen,” he continues, “is that the science informs religion more than the other way around.” He has a concrete example that impressed him. “There has been a long tradition of theological inquiry into the nature of time and God’s relation to time,” he says. “One can see the problem immediately. Here we have this notion of a being who is supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and ‘perfect,’ who nevertheless at some particular moment made up his mind to have a universe and, snap, there appeared the universe. If this [creation] was such a good idea, why didn’t God make it ‘earlier’ or ‘before’? An answer goes back to Augustine, who said that the world was made with time and not in time. In other words, he took God right outside of time.”
By taking God outside of time, Davies explains, one problem went away, but it was replaced by another problem: namely, that “if God is a truly timeless being—eternal in the sense of being outside of time altogether—then what meaning could one attach to things like prayer and God interacting in history? Can one make any sense of an atemporal God—a God who is outside of time—entering into history in any sort of meaningful way? Well, there was no real answer to that, and theologians have debated these issues for centuries. But now along comes physics. Einstein showed that time is not some sort of arena in which the drama of nature is acted out. Space and time are not just there as the stage on which the play of the world takes place. Space and time are part of the cast; that is, space and time are part of physics just as much as matter and force, and that if you believe the universe came into existence with a big bang, then space and time could have come into existence with a big bang as well. Just as Augustine said: The world was made with time and not in time.
“So physics tells us that time is part of the physical universe,” Davies concludes. “So if you want to have a God who is somehow responsible for this physical universe, then this God has to be outside of time—and physics supports the notion of a timeless being. So that’s one concrete way, I think, in which science can inform theology.”
As for the traditional personal God, Davies says, “it may be that we simply have to accept that these thousands of years of tradition of a guardian-angel type of God, a personal being with whom one can have a personal relationship, and who will look after us and make sure nothing dreadful will happen … maybe we just have to let that go and find inspiration from science and from what we find at the scientific frontier. It’s not [as some scientists would say], a cold, meaningless, heartless universe in which human beings have no place. I think we have a place. It’s not a central place. We’re not the pinnacle of creation. We’re not at the center of the universe, but we have a role nevertheless, and that is enough to sustain me.”
Science is not going to be a substitute for religion, Davies says, “but it can provide a framework of ideas in which there can be a genuine spiritual dimension without having to go back to the guardian-angel God.”
OK, it’s my time to get personal. Here’s what I think (circa mid-2009; I, for one, should always date my belief system assertions).
That the universe is majestic, all agree. That God is the reason, all do not. Some scientists say there’s no need for God. Others say that science is perfectly consistent with a creator. Still others find meaning in the (assumed) fundamental nature of mind or consciousness without a traditional God. That mystery remains, all agree.
Whether science and religion conflict depends on one’s definition of science. If science is a truthful and growing body of knowledge about the physical world, then science, by this definition, has nothing to say about anything that is not part of the physical world. Science would have to be neutral—radically neutral—about religion, with science and religion operating, quite literally, in different domains. (In no way, however, would this stance validate religion as an independent avenue to apprehend reality.)
On the other hand, if science is defined as a method of critical thinking that is the only path to absolute truth, then science, so defined, is the mortal enemy of religion because all religions’ claims about God will fail the standard scientific-method tests of experimentation and repeatability.
What about the religious claim that science describes a world consistent with a supreme creator?
Here I will be precise. If it turns out that there is a God, then it would have made sense to read into the world the evidence of God’s handiwork. However, it still would not follow that science can ever be used in the first place to justify the existence of such a God.
There is unremitting tension between science and religion—and to me, that’s good to get … closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Daniel Dennett, Owen Gingerich, Marvin Minsky, Francisco Ayala, Wentzel van Huyssteen, and Paul Davies in “Do Science & Religion Conflict?” the 34th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

From V.V. Raman, emeritus professor of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology:

Someone was once asked: “How come there is only one science, but there are so many religions?” The answer that was given: Because there can be only one right answer to a question, but there can many wrong ones. This flippant reply may satisfy atheists and those who attach little importance to religions, but it cannot be taken seriously, given that religions have played such a major role in culture and civilization. It is difficult to accept, but over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of intelligent people have been persuaded by the truths of religion.
And yet, given that there are so many religions, it is legitimate to ask: “(How) can many religions all be true?” The answer to this question depends on the meaning of the word “true” in the context of religion.
Truth, as commonly understood, is an attribute one associates with facts and other elements that have tangible existence. With this meaning, it is logically impossible for different religions, adhering to different and often mutually contradicting doctrines and dogmas, to all be true. Not all the colors of the rainbow can be white.
However, it is important to realize that there are truths that touch the core of our being, that bring meaning and relevance to existence, that reveal hidden dimensions of the human condition. The truths of literature and art, in music and myths—and religion—belong to this category. These endopotent truths are not more true or less true than the facts and laws that undergird the physical universe (exopotent truths); they are truths of an altogether different category. Endopotent truths have greater value to individuals, communities, and cultures than the equations of quantum mechanics, the existence of quarks and leptons, or the big-bang origin of the physical universe.
Endopotent truths are multivalued; they can be manifest in multiple modes—as the Vedic hymns to ancient sage-poets in India, as the Commandments conveyed to Moses, as the enlightened utterances of the Buddha and Mahavira, as the sermon Jesus gave on the Mount, as the revelations to the Prophet Muhammad, as the syncretic insights of Guru Nanak. Indeed, there are many religions, and they can all be true in this sense, just as every interpretation of a great poem or work of art has validity for the keen student, just as every piece of music is equally music.
But it is important to realize that all truths have both positive and negative impact potentials, depending on the actions and attitudes they enable (exopotent) and inspire (endopotent) us to.
With both religion and science, then, what is important is not so much to inquire about their truth content in the conventional sense (which will invariably lead to confrontation and mutual disrespect, if not contempt and belligerence), but to be concerned about their potential impacts. Any religion that leads to positive actions and attitudes, such as caring, compassion, and ecstatic spiritual experience, is desirable, and any religion that engenders hate, hurt, and persecution is not. Likewise, any science that leads to an improvement in human health and the human condition is preferable to one that can be used for destruction and devastation.

V.V. Raman appears with Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Arthur Hyman, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Ananda Guruge in “Can Many Religions All Be True?” the 33rd episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

From John Leslie, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph:

As well as such things as stones, the real world contains qualities of things: For instance, a particular stone is red. Now, many philosophers insist that though qualities REALLY EXIST, they aren’t themselves REAL THINGS. To be a real thing, they declare, a whatnot has to be able to exist all by itself, at least in theory. The redness of the stone couldn’t exist all by itself, without the stone, could it? To call it a real thing is misuse of the English language.
However, such verbal hairsplitting doesn’t interest ordinary folk. Ordinary language, therefore, takes no firm stand on the real-thing-ness of qualities. Mr. Dunce, for example, is foolish, really foolish. Question: Is his foolishness a REAL THING, or is it instead just A REALITY? Please yourself! How to use English here is entirely up to you. That’s the only answer the question ought to get.
Here, though, is a more interesting question: Was Plato right? In addition to the world of things like stones, is there a realm of abstract realities? Are there real whatnots that don’t depend for their reality on the existence of concrete objects such as galaxies, stones, atoms, or you and me?
Answer: Plato was right. There are infinitely many abstract realities. There is, for example, the reality that two and two make four. I take this to mean that—genuinely, which of course makes it A REALITY—IF there were to exist any two sets of two things (for instance, galaxies), THEN there would exist four things. This IFFY-THENNY affair doesn’t derive its reality from the existence of any concrete objects such as galaxies or humans who count them. What if all such objects suddenly vanished? In the resulting emptiness, it would still be a reality that IF any two sets of two galaxies ever were to exist, THEN there would be four galaxies. This reality inhabits the Platonic realm.
The Platonic realm contains infinitely many mathematical realities. Also, infinitely many realities of being possible, where this means being what might, without contradiction, enter into an actual, concrete situation. A trillion apples, for example, would involve no contradiction. Those apples wouldn’t be as absurd as round squares. The Platonic realm contains infinitely many possible apples. Infinitely many possible dragons, too, if they’d not be like round squares either.
Further, the Platonic realm contains infinitely many IFFY-THENNY realities of good and evil. For instance, it’s presumably real that IF there were to exist a trillion intelligent and happy beings, THEN this would be a good state of affairs.
Shouldn’t we say, though, that being a Platonic reality doesn’t make a whatnot into AN EXISTING THING? Despite the vagueness of the word “thing,” this could be wise. It could help make the point that the contents of the Platonic realm are in a way none too important. Breaking a vase could be cause for weeping. The Platonic realm contains infinitely many broken vases, but no tears need be shed over them. Almost all of them will forever remain merely possible vases, “unactualized” Platonic realities, whatnots that are non-things or at least shouldn’t be called existing things.
Maybe Plato’s writings aren’t very clear or very right on these matters. They can give the impression that the actual vases in our universe are in part illusory because they lack the eternal, unconditional reality of mathematical facts or of The Perfect Vase, which, inhabiting the Platonic realm, is a far more valuable component of Reality than any actual vase. Maybe Plato turns in his grave when I describe the Platonic realm as filled just with possibilities plus consequences that would accompany any actualization of those possibilities.
Consider the reality that red is nearer to orange than to yellow. I take this to be the reality that IF any red objects, orange objects, and yellow objects were to exist, THEN the red ones would be nearer in color to the orange ones than to the yellow ones. A reincarnated Plato might shrink from such IFs and THENs. He might yearn for non-IFFY whatnots called The Form of Redness and The Form of Yellowness, with The Form of Orangeness situated somehow in between them. However, that looks a mistake.
I like to say, though, that I’m a follower of Plato. Above all, I think Book Six of his Republic right in suggesting that the reason why our universe exists is simply that its existence is good. You could express the point as follows: As an eternal and unconditional reality, the existence of any universe like ours would be a good affair, the satisfaction of a requirement that can be called “ethical.” Now, this may well be why our universe exists.
Dealing with all goods and evils, Ethics extends well beyond Morality, which deals only with good and evil actions. An eternal, unconditional, universe-creating requirement couldn’t possibly be a MORAL requirement. Moral requirements are merely needs for people to behave in various ways. Their reality isn’t unconditional since they could exist only when at least one concrete object—at least one person—had already arrived on the scene. In contrast, the ETHICAL requirement that there exist a good universe doesn’t depend on the arrival of any person or thing. It’s simply a requirement that’s fortunately satisfied if a good universe exists, and that unfortunately fails to be satisfied if there’s no such universe. Call it an “axiological” requirement if you want, but it can be preferable to avoid such philosophically coined words. So long as you don’t treat “ethical” as always only another way of saying “moral,” “ethical” can do the job nicely.
In many places, but in most detail in my book Infinite Minds, I’ve argued that there’s no absurdity in the idea that an ethical requirement is responsible for the existence of our universe. It would make no sense to say that the reality that two and two make four, or redness, or loathsomeness, had created a universe. In contrast, the ethical requiredness of that universe could be in the right ballpark because ethical requirements are requirements for things to exist.
All the same, it can be difficult to sell the idea that one such requirement did create our universe. For a start, there’s the knee-jerk objection, “Only concrete objects ever create anything. An omnipotent divine Person could create everything apart from himself, but first he’d have to exist for some reason unknown. Some reason, anyway, having nothing to do with the abstraction that his existence would be something good. We all know that abstract realities exert no power!”
“Sez who?” could be the best reply to this objection. It’s a thoroughly question-begging objection, isn’t it? And don’t many theologians write that God is an abstract creative principle, not any kind of person? IF a universe of a certain type existed, THEN a requirement would be satisfied—now, why couldn’t this be a reality that created a universe? Why would it be obviously preferable to suppose that the big bang simply happened to happen? How could it be more than just question-begging to protest that the requirement in question would be “only ethical”?
More forceful is the following objection: Many reasonable folk consider our universe rather an unpleasant affair, perhaps actually worse than a blank. How could “being ethically required” explain anything so disappointing?
The answer, I suggest, lies in picturing our universe as immensely interesting, tremendously complex, yet at the same time unified in its existence. Its parts simply couldn’t exist each in isolation from the others. In that respect, they are in the same boat as the redness of the stone. Unity despite complexity characterizes minds, and our universe is mental through and through. The patterns of its events are simply patterns in an infinite mind, a mind that contemplates everything that’s worth contemplating. It contemplates not only those patterns, but the patterns of many other universes as well: perhaps infinitely many. It contemplates them eternally.
This may strike you as a strange picture. Still, it can seem compatible with what physicists say.
First, physicists say they investigate the patterns into which events fall. They aren’t trying to discover whether those patterns exist inside some super-gigantic computer or in an infinite mind that contemplates them. No possible physical experiment could settle such questions.
Second, quantum physicists often suggest that the events of our universe are so much tangled up with one another that they couldn’t exist each in isolation from the rest. They seem to occur inside a single Existent that stretches across billions of light-years.
Third, relativity theory suggests that all the successive events in our universe exist side by side and eternally in an interesting sense. As Einstein put it, the universe would seem to have “a four-dimensional existence” so that the distant past and the far future are just as much existent as the present. True, they aren’t existing in our NOW. But neither, when a man’s in California, is New York existing in his HERE.
Fourth, many physicists have concluded that our universe is only one among countless universes, all of them equally real. Here are patterns that an infinite mind could find worth contemplating.
According to my world-picture, what things really exist? Please remember that ordinary talk about “things” commits us to very little. Do I say that our universe consists of hugely many real things? Or, since I’m picturing an infinite but unified mind as generating all of the universe’s patterns just by thinking about them, must I instead be declaring that the whole shebang involves only a single real thing, the mind in question? Please yourself, for all that’s at stake is how you personally want to use the words “single real thing.” Just don’t accuse me of denying that individual stones, trees, birds, humans, can be real things! They could be worth calling real things, say I and says Ordinary Language, even if they are simply patterns in an infinite mind. The idea that every real thing must in theory be able to exist all by itself isn’t forced on us by Standard English.
Have I joined the pantheists? Do I think that our universe is, if not God, then at least part of God? Talk of an infinite mind that carries the universe’s patterns could certainly sound like God-talk. And the suggestion that this mind exists for a Platonic reason, namely, that its existence is good, could sound like God-talk also. The theory that why God exists is that God’s existence is supremely worthwhile—mayn’t that even be fairly standard theology? Still, the word “God” tends to carry a great deal of religious baggage that I reject. Do I believe in God? Unclear question!
Does only one infinite mind exist? No, there are infinitely many. You can never have too many good things, not even when each of them is infinitely good.
Could immortal souls exist? That depends on what you mean. An infinite mind inside which your mind existed might well not stop thinking about your experiences at the point where your life on Earth ended. It might think of them as continuing onward, no longer controlled by Earth’s physical laws. This would give your mind one of the three kinds of immortality discussed in my most recent book, Immortality Defended.

John Leslie appears with Roger Penrose, Peter van Inwagen, John Searle, Huston Smith, and William Lane Craig in “What Things Really Exist?” the 32nd episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.