Friday, March 12, 2021

Science's Irrelevance To Existentialism

For one reason or another, atheists and mainstream Christian apologists sometimes bring up the topic of the destruction of the universe as if it is of grand importance to whether objective values exist.  Atheists might say that the finite life of the universe (as if its end is logically certain as opposed to probabilistically suggested) gives temporary human lives existential significance and urgency, while some theists treat the end of the physical universe as if this is what leads to nihilism on an atheistic framework.  Both of these stances regard the universe as of deep existential significance when this is not the case at all.  It is actually not particularly noteworthy in a scientific existentialist sense because logical and ultimate metaphysical truths, not science, are more immediately relevant to issues of meaning.  In fact, a deeper truth about the concept of the universe ceasing to exist is that such an end is actually irrelevant to the issue of whether or not existence has any meaning!

Why should anyone care?  There is no objective reason to care--not in a strictly logical sense or in the sense of scientific or Biblical evidence.  It is not that the death of the universe might have existential significance or relate to the possibility of objective meaning even though such a thing cannot be proven, but that the existence or nonexistence of the universe has no bearing on existential matters at all on its own.  In fact, the whole of science itself is a red herring to core issues of existentialism, epistemology, and metaphysics.  Subjective desires for meaning are matters of introspection that have no inherent connection to awareness of the universe, and the concept of objective meaning is philosophically connected to specific kinds of theism.

So what if the universe will end at some future point?  So what if the universe will last forever?  Although scientific and Biblical evidence both favor the first of the two possibilities, the former suggesting an eventual degradation of the cosmos and the latter predicting at least a grand destruction and rebuilding of the cosmos, the existence or nonexistence of objective meaning does not come down to how long the physical world will persist.  Existential significance of an objective kind would transcend the world of matter; existential feelings of fulfillment on a subjective level are inherently meaningless on their own because they have no connection to whether objective meaning does or does not exist.

If life is objectively meaningless, even a future-eternal universe cannot change that fact.  If life is objectively meaningful, the looming end of the universe would not change that fact.  The irrelevance of the universe's existence would not even have to be thought about or brought up at all in this context except to dismiss it as a red herring, and even then it would not even necessarily be thought of unless someone else mentioned it!  Of course, most people merely believe that there is an external world because there seems to be one, meaning that they do not know how to even prove that matter itself exists in the first place--though such a thing is entirely possible, albeit very specific to the point of being almost unheard of from non-rationalists [1].  The belief that the end of the universe has existential ramifications for human life in the sense of significance, therefore, is an unprovable assumption based on an unnecessary assumption that a world exists.

Theists who think that scientific evidence for an eventual end of the cosmos is somehow relevant to the logical fact that the existence of a deity with a moral nature is the only way for meaning to exist are delusional.  So, too, are atheists who think that the existence of a material world has anything to do with some cosmic meaning except as a mere background issue.  It does not follow from something lasting forever that it therefore has or does not have meaning, and it does not follow from something being temporary that it has or does not have meaning.  The universe itself has no grand status on its own.  Inevitably, any meaning or purpose (and the two are distinct) reduces down to an issue of theism, yet even the provable existence of an uncaused cause [2] does not automatically mean that cosmic significance, or existential meaning, exists.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html

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