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be thoughts anywhere in the universe carrying around designs for the future, there are going to have be those Boltzmann brains all over the place, too. For one chunk of matter (say, a blueprint) to be a design for another chunk of matter (perhaps the house it is the blueprint of), there has already got to be a mind around to be the designer, the architect, to interpret the lines and squiggles. This is one point the famous “watchmaker” argument from design for God’s existence got right. No chunk of matter (lines and squiggles) can just by itself be about another chunk of matter (bricks and mortar, arranged house-wise), without a mind to interpret the first chunk of matter as being about the second chunk.

Now physics tells us that for most of the first 13.69 billion years of this universe, there was nothing but fermions, bosons, and the atoms being made out of them inside stars (nothing more complicated than uranium atoms). Minds (that is, brains) have to be made up of fermions and bosons. However, they are much more complicated arrangements of fermions and bosons than a uranium atom. No brains, no Boltzmann brains. Without even a single Boltzmann brain around at the beginning of the big bang or for the next several billion years, designs and purposes couldn’t get off the ground and do anything. If the only sapient life in the universe is ours, physics can’t invoke minds in its explanations of anything until matters have proceeded at least 13.69 billion years after the big bang. (Even if there were minds in the universe before we came into the picture, it wouldn’t help, as we’ll see in Chapters 8–10.)

Let’s be absolutely clear: no teleology, no purposes, goals, or ends. For that matter, no free-floating thoughts carrying around designs. Scientism cannot emphasize this self-denying ordinance of physics more strongly.

So, the answer to the persistent question, What is the purpose of the universe? is quite simply: There is none.

Why does our universe have the laws of nature and the physical parameters that make intelligent life possible? With an indefinitely large number of different universes being created all the time, some of them will just happen to have the mix of things and forces that brings us about. To demand any more of an answer than that is like winning a lottery and demanding to know why you won. Every ticket holder had the same chance. Someone had to win. It was you. End of story. (Stories again!)

EVEN IF WE accept physics’ explanation of reality and the absence of purpose in the physical facts, we might still wonder if the emergence of living, sentient, and even sometimes sapient creatures like us can put purpose into a universe otherwise devoid of meaning. Seeing whether life can do this in a universe otherwise devoid of purpose will require some biology, of course.

Biology is usually a lot more fun that physics. It’s a lot easier to understand, and there’s sex. But no one should get their hopes up that its answers will be any more accommodating to the wishful thinkers or mystery mongers among us. It turns out that Darwin banished real purposes from the realm of the living as thoroughly as Newton drove it out of physical reality.

Chapter 3

HOW PHYSICS

FAKES DESIGN

THE TEMPLETON FOUNDATION WAS CREATED BY John Templeton, a billionaire who managed international mutual funds. The foundation mainly supports academics and especially scientists who seek to reconcile religion with science. So the Templeton Foundation gives a single prize of 1,000,000 pounds sterling (a lot more than the Nobel Prize) every year to some worthy scientist or savant for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension . . . through insight, discovery, or practical works.” That worthy person usually turns out to be a physicist (almost never a biologist, for reasons that will become obvious) who has aided and abetted the reconciliation of science and God. Sometimes it’s done by trading on the present incomplete state of physics, other times by invoking quantum indeterminism, and in a few cases by appealing to unintelligible mysteries.