Purpose in the Universe: The moral and metaphysical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism

by Tim Mulgan

Two familiar worldviews dominate Western materialist atheism and the benevolent God of the Abrahamic faiths. Tim Mulgan explores a third way. Ananthropocentric Purposivism claims that there is a cosmic purpose, but human beings are irrelevant to it. Purpose in the Universe develops a philosophical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism that it is at least as strong as the case for either theism or atheism. The book borrows traditional theistarguments to defend a cosmic purpose. These include cosmological, teleological, ontological, meta-ethical, and mystical arguments. It then borrows traditional atheist arguments to reject a human-centred purpose. These include arguments based on evil, diversity, and the scale of the universe. Mulgan alsohighlights connections between morality and metaphysics, arguing that evaluative premises play a crucial and underappreciated role in metaphysical debates about the existence of God, and Ananthropocentric Purposivism mutually supports an austere consequentialist morality based on objective values. He concludes that, by drawing on a range of secular and religious ethical traditions, a non-human-centred cosmic purpose can ground a distinctive human morality. Our moral practices, our view of themoral universe, and our moral theory are all transformed if we shift from the familiar choice between a universe without meaning and a universe where humans matter to the less self-aggrandising thought that, while it is about something, the universe is not about us.

Genres: Philosophy

443 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Adam Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because I was interested in (1) ways to ground morality and (2) an introduction to philosophy of religion that defended a concrete position (always better than a neutral survey). I got both of these things. Mulgan convinced me that grounding morality is part of a wider question of grounding value: morality is just one kind of interpersonal value, but there are more, and among the most striking are values to do with the nature of the universe.

This book aims to sketch a third way between atheism and a benevolent god. It takes the best arguments from both, combining theism’s metaphysical power and atheism’s recognition of our insignificance and less-than-perfect lives.

My favourite chapter was on the cosmological argument. I had forgotten the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing which had once occupied me as a teenager. An argument that I had never considered was axiarchism which Mulgan explains as accepting “as a brute fact that objective values are directly efficacious. This universe exists because it is good—and for this fact there is no further explanation.” (96) When I first saw the argument for this position, I laughed, but eventually had to concede that there is nothing metaphysically excessive about this position especially if you grant there are non-natural values. This chapter was fun and reminded me of the creativity that happens in philosophy.

My second favourite chapter was on teleological arguments. This quote explains the chapters central question well: “Science has certainly taught us that the universe is mathematical, and perhaps provides our clearest evidence that it is intelligible. If the universe is ever understood by human beings, science will play a key role. But can science explain why the universe is mathematical, intelligible, or understood? Can science explain the preconditions of its own success? (106)

The discussion of consequentialism towards the end of the book was great example of getting contemporary moral philosophy to talk to more ancient religious questions. For example, the relation between value and god is not limited to divine commands (and vulnerable to euthophro) but other possibilities exist such as goodness being resemblance to god. Mulgan uses this resemblance relation to think about the implications of his third way position for human morality.

This book was academic and perhaps cross referenced itself a little much but the writing was always clear and relevant to the book's aims.

Overall, it didn’t change my atheist mind but it did remind me of the creativity of philosophical argument.

[Jean-françois Virey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This school year has been particularly blessed for me. After Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, Russell Powell's Contingency and Convergence and Darwin's The Origin of Species, Tim Mulgan's Purpose in the Universe is the fourth big, dense book to bring my reflection on topics that really matter to me to a whole new level.

What Mulgan does in this book is basically to take both theistic and atheistic arguments seriously (modern philosophers usually only do the latter), and shape a third way (or fourth way, if you count axiarchism, which he discusses at various points) that acknowledges the power of both the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments for God and the arguments from evil and from religious diversity against God, coming up with with what he calls "ananthropic purposivism", which is basically a form of theism (though Mulgan won't admit it) in which you (and your fellow humans) are below God's radar and totally undeserving of his consideration (which also unfortunately goes for all the other animals on the planet, because of the argument from evil.) God may care about and wish to communicate with some genuinely rational and ethically superior species (let's call them Vulcans, for they well might be extraterrestrials), but the most we can hope is to eavesdrop on whatever he may have shown of himself for their benefit. Mulgan's third way enables him to "borrow" (he uses that verb a lot) from both atheistic and theistic traditions to create his own very elegant (but not exactly comfy) patchwork quilt.

The book is the kind of philosophy I am desperate for. It asks important ("cosmic") questions and actually tries to solve them, using all too neglected resources from millenia of philosophy, including Anselm's ontological argument (discussed in one of the best chapters of the book) and even John Duns Scot's divine command theory (and Linda Zagzebski's divine motivation theory.)

One thing that made the book very appealing to me was that Mulgan's metaethics is just like mine. He is a realist, a cognitivist, a non-naturalist and an ethical intuitionist. As for his preferred ethical system, consequentialism, he has made me much less refractory to it, in part because of his metaethical commitments, and mostly because he espouses what he calls "objective list theory" (OTL, one of the numerous abbreviations in the book), a form of value pluralism which is very close to my own favorite (or "least worst") ethical system: Grisez and Finnis's new natural law ethics (Finnis even gets mentioned in this connection, on page 362.)

Mulgan has great things to say not only about the ontological argument (which left me rather cold until I read what he has to say about it) but about the fine-tuning argument. One thing he points out for instance is that "the more facts [such as life, consciousness, intelligence, etc.] we can explain given the way things are, the more remarkable it seems that things are that way" (p101.) In other words, a thoroughly Darwinian and science-compatible worldview like mine actually lends more support to the fine-tuning argument than, say, the worldview of an "intelligent designer", in which matter cannot come up by itself with all these endless forms most beautiful, and is in need of some divine tinkering. His discussion of the problem of evil, one of the most technical and challenging parts of the book (at forty hyperdense pages), is very sophisticated and made me realise the problems with a Molinist explanation for God's choice of this world (rather than some other possible world), though I'm not sure he uses the word "Molinism".

Some of the things I think Mulgan could do to improve his theory would include the following:
- he does not seem to have a problem with the idea of an actual infinite set, which is why he does not find the Kalam argument convincing and accepts the idea of a "best possible world"; I think he is definitely wrong here.
- he believes that the purpose of the universe is to generate these superrational beings who will actually "get it"; but that makes the purpose of the universe vain because of its infinite circular regress: finally, a species arises that can understand the purpose of the universe, which was to generate them with their ability to understand the purpose of the universe. At least the Christian story of a loving God wanting to be loved back is much more appealing. Love has that way of making your life meaningful (as even I, who have not given the emotion much importance and have been rather unfortunate in the relationships department, am forced to acknowledge after experiencing two years of intense cat love.)
- given that his theory is "ananthropocentric", he should try to connect more with other non-anthropocentric ethics, like the ecocentrism of deep-ecology, or the sentiocentrism of animal ethics (though what might be called his ratiocentric elitism bodes ill for the importance of even less rational creatures than we.)
- his worldview, though perfectly compatible with Darwinism, is bizarrely un-Darwinian in some respects. For instance, in his discussion of possible worlds in the chapter on the argument from evil he talks of God "creating F" or "F*" (possible free agents, pages 237-8.) But God cannot (and does not) pick and choose individuals. He has set in motion this whole evolutionary scheme of things, and we are what we are because of all the contingencies (and convergences...) of our evolutionary history (and of course, our social determinisms and our own self-defining choices.) I am only very remotely (and only partially) God's creation.
- he might be too optimistic about some alien race being more rational and ethical than us (he does mention alternative options, like angels or advanced AIs, but I think his bet is on Vulcans), though maybe with a billion-year headstart (and supposing they never bumped into planetery limits as we are currently doing), they are conceivable. As evolutionary theory suggests, and Daryl P. Domning has convinced me, any alien species is bound to be biologically selfish (Domning coined the phrase "Original Selfishness" as a replacement for Original Sin), and therefore just as ethically challenged as we are. Moreover, alien brains, being the product of billions of years of struggle for survival, are unlikely to be the perfect Vulcan brains that we like to fantasise about (as the abundant literature on evolutionary debunking arguments reminds us), and might share some of our most obvious cognitive biases.
- sometimes, his arguments for the cosmic negligibility of humans seem motivated by a kind of curmudgeonly misanthropy; I too share Mulgan's low opinion of the species (as a whole, though it is redeemed by a few individuals, many of them Aspies), but in the name of fighting against "caprice" (his name for our self-serving and self-aggrandising tendencies), we might be falling into the opposite error of excessive self-loathing.

Mulgan's book is the best book I have read so far on natural theology, and I've been warmly recommending it to my students ever since I was about halfway through it. I hope I'll find the time to read more books by Mulgan in the near future (I've already ordered three more), as well as some of the very interesting titles in his bibliography.

I'm still in the glow of how good this reading experience was.

[Masnoon Majeed · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an extensively researched well thought-out book that shows that while evidence and argument for an anthropocentric God remain weak, the arguments for an atheist universe are still lacking. The third way, a non-anthropocentric cosmic force can help explain the mysteries of our universe, at least in a theoretically viable way, as such they should not be discounted. This book has made me appreciate mysticism even more and made me appreciate how there are many questions that linger on about our existence. It probably has not changed my opinions but has made me rethink my beliefs, and perhaps be open to surprises that might emerge… maybe in my lifetime, maybe not.

Having said that a major weakness of the book was its expansiveness. It reads more like a PhD thesis than a book as the author tries to cover so much ground in one book. The main argument of the book could have been written in less than 300 pages, and the main points shared with the readers. His tangents only helped clarify some of the points at times were redundant to the main argument, and detracted the reader from the main point.