The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [22]
There are several such outstanding problems that physics faces. Among the empirical ones are the problems of “dark matter” and “dark energy”; the universe is expanding much faster than it would if all the matter and energy in it were the stuff we can currently detect. In fact, its actual rate of expansion could only be driven by many times more matter and energy than our instruments can locate. This is a big problem for experimental physicists and for astronomers. Then there is the huge theoretical problem: the two best theories in physics, the ones most accurate in their predictions—general relativity and quantum mechanics—are incompatible. They disagree on such basic matters as what happens when two particles come into contact. No one has yet figured out a more general theory that will combine the strengths of both theories.
No matter how physics eventually deals with these problems, there are two things we can be sure of. In solving them, physics will not give up the second law. And it will not give up the ban on purpose or design. That goes for the universe, the multiverse, or whatever gave rise to them. It also holds for anything it may discover more fundamental than fermions and bosons. Physics’ long track record of successes is the strongest argument for the exclusion of purpose or design from its account of reality.
The banishment of purpose and the operation of the second law go together to a certain extent. A purpose is some goal or an end out there in the future for which events taking place earlier are a means of some kind, and these earlier events occur at least in part because they are a means to their ends. The second part—that the purpose or goal is part of what brings about its means—is crucial to anything being a purpose. It’s hard to see how there could be purposes or teleology in a physical universe governed by the second law. To begin with, the second law tells us that the universe is headed to complete disorder. For the universe as a whole, the only end state is its heat death. It will be a flat, energyless jumble of patternlessness, at which everything will be a uniform temperature—probably somewhere near 273 degrees below zero Celsius. No purpose or goal can be secured permanently under such circumstances. Besides, if purposes were things out there in the future guiding processes in the past, we’d have another asymmetry competing with the second law’s asymmetry: purposes out there in the distant future and none back there at the beginning of things. That asymmetry is something else physics won’t allow without at least as good an explanation as the second law has. What is worse, unless every future goal is somehow paid for by an increase in entropy in its neighborhood, its existence would violate the second law itself. And if it looks like some purposeful arrangement is paid for by net entropy increase, then maybe the whole process, one part of which looks like a purpose, is really just a well-disguised but purely physical process. (Hold that thought till we turn to biology.)
We might be able to avoid the incompatibility of teleology with the second law if those future states—the ends toward which physical processes are supposed be the means—could somehow be “written into” the past. “Writing” a purpose or future goal into the past is how designs work. The future state thus has a great deal to do with explaining the earlier means that bring it about. That’s what qualifies it as a purpose. Then there could be physical processes that are “directed” by these earlier designs to achieve the designs. That way there could be future purposes bringing about past events as their means. An imaginative idea, but the only way this could happen is if there really were, out there in space, free-floating designs for the future, thoughts about how things were going to be arranged and how to organize the means to bring them about. These free-floating thoughts have to control physical processes to attain their aims—a sort of psychokinesis, spoon bending on a cosmic scale. But that wouldn’t be enough. For there to