Aboutness, Autonomy, and the Missing Option X: Dr. Craig Responds to Davies and Qureshi-Hurst

Kevin Harris: Bill, you had an exchange recently with Emily Qureshi-Hurst. Now there's a video of her in dialogue with astrophysicist Paul Davies on Justin Brierley's channel. You've quoted Davies several times in your work. He's well respected.

Dr. Craig: Yes, indeed. One of his early works, when he was going under the name P. C. W. Davies, was entitled The Physics of Time Asymmetry, and it was about the arrow of time and the thermodynamic properties of the universe as a whole. Very helpful to me in my early work on the kalam cosmological argument. Since then, he's become a very popular science writer, publishing numerous popular-level books on science and delving into religion as well. He wrote a book called God and the New Physics, in which he explored the relevance of physics for the existence of God.

Kevin Harris: By the way, I can't help but bring up your dialogue with Emily. I'm obviously intrigued by the look on her face when you suggested that she was misunderstanding relativity theory. Were you being too hard on her, Bill? What was her misunderstanding? What was your impression of that exchange?

Dr. Craig: Well, I think that I could have eased into it better. I think I should have said something like this: "Now, this may come as something of a shock, but..." and that would prepare for my remark. Or to say, "Now, I don't mean this to be insulting, but..." and that would have kind of prepared the ground. But as it was, I just said, "I think you're confused," which was perhaps too abrupt.

Kevin Harris: Well, maybe, maybe not. People sometimes like the direct approach, and you have a limited time. You just kind of have to—we don't need to be walking on eggshells around each other as much as we can. But overall, it was a good exchange.

Dr. Craig: Yes.

Kevin Harris: Okay, let's look at some clips then. In this first clip, Justin Brierley asked Davies to summarize what he thinks is Qureshi-Hurst's overall view on purpose in the universe. Here it is.

Justin Brierley: I wonder whether, firstly, Paul, you could have a go at summarizing what you roughly think Emily's position is on this big question of purpose in the universe, and then we'll see how Emily thinks you did, and she can nuance that.

Dr. Davies: Well, to contrast it with my own position, which is sort of romantic, really, I think that Emily doesn't deny that purpose is a useful concept, but it's almost entirely restricted, if not to human beings, at least to living organisms. And that any notion that there's something sort of bigger in the universe, probably you might be open-minded to it, but you don't see any evidence that the universe as a whole has any sort of purpose or meaning or any of these grander terms. Would that be right?

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: That's broadly right, yeah. I think in order to say that the universe has purpose, you're suggesting or implying that there's some purpose-giver, someone who's orchestrating that purpose on a grand cosmic scale.

Dr. Davies: It could be emergent, though, couldn't it? Come out of the system. It could be an intrinsic property of the system rather than imposed from the outside.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: It still seems to me that somebody would have had to have constructed it, because purpose seems to be agent-centric, and I don't see agency underlying things at the most fundamental level. So I don't want to say that we live in a purposeless, meaningless universe, but you're right to say I think that purpose is ultimately constructed by life, by consciousness. I don't think I'd want to restrict it to just human beings, even on Earth. I think there's purpose and meaning in animals as well. And if there's conscious alien life, which I imagine there probably is, then there's purpose and meaning there as well.

Kevin Harris: Okay, so in brief, she argued that purpose can't be a feature of the universe unless there's some purpose-giver behind it. Davies pushed back, suggesting purpose might be emergent, an intrinsic property of the system rather than something imposed from outside. Does she have a case, Bill? Do you think purpose can coherently be emergent, or does talk of purpose always smuggle in agency?

Dr. Craig: Well, here, I have to say I agree with Emily! I think she's right. I would say not only is purpose agent-centric, but that purpose cannot emerge in the way Davies suggests. What can emerge from the evolutionary process is a direction, but not a purpose.

So, for example, evolutionary biologists have noticed that the evolution of life on Earth is overall in the direction of increasing diversity and increasing complexity. But they would not say that, therefore, that is the purpose or the goal of the evolutionary process. That requires an external agent to set that goal. Purpose, or teleology, is an intentional property of an agent.

Now, on the other hand, I do think that her idea of subjective purpose is just illusory. This amounts to nothing more than human beings or extraterrestrials making up a purpose for the universe. And it's clear that the universe doesn't actually acquire a purpose just because I happen to give it one. I think this is obvious. Suppose you give the universe one purpose and I give it another one. Who's right? Well, neither one. The universe in itself remains purposeless regardless of the way in which we subjectively regard it.

Kevin Harris: And now it's Emily's turn, and she gives what she thinks is Davies' view on this topic. Here it is.

Justin Brierley: If you could try to summarize where you think roughly Paul falls on this question of purpose in the universe, Emily.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: So, as I understand it, you're not conventionally religious, as you've said. But you do see some kind of purpose, or I think the word you used earlier was teleology, in the universe. So there is some—my best understanding of what teleology is all about—there is some kind of end or goal to which the universe is directed. And, in a sense, the purpose of the universe might be driven towards that kind of goal. Is that about right?

Dr. Davies: Right. I struggle myself to articulate my position because I don't want it to give the impression that there's a preassigned goal and that we're all trapped and going down it along a railway track.

Kevin Harris: Davies elaborates in a moment, but notice he clarifies that teleology doesn't necessarily mean determinism. We're not trapped on a track, as he put it, in a deterministic universe. And that's interesting. Many materialist or atheist philosophers think that everything is mechanistically determined and we don't have free will and things like that.

Dr. Craig: Davies might be referring here to quantum indeterminacy rather than human free will. It might be that he thinks that the teleological end to which the universe is tending is not deterministic because of indeterminacy, but nevertheless it's real. He seems to affirm that there is a goal toward which the universe tends, and I do not see how that's possible unless there is a cosmic designer who has established such a goal. Otherwise, at best, as I say, you would get mere directionality, but you would not get a teleology or a goal or purpose.

Kevin Harris: Davies has spent his career struck by the intelligibility of the universe. He calls it astonishing in this next clip. Here it is.

Dr. Davies: For me, the most striking thing about being a scientist, about the way the universe is put together, is not just that it's ordered in a rational manner, but that it's intelligible to us. We come to understand the universe through this wonderful thing called science and the use of mathematics. The universe is not just sort of arbitrary or absurd. It's ordered in this intelligible manner, and I think it's truly astonishing that human beings can do it.

And because I'm a professional scientist, I'm surrounded by other scientists, and when I say, "Well, isn't it just stupendous that we can figure out what's going on inside a black hole, or the nature of matter and quantum physics and so on? It's just incredible." A lot of people would say, "Well, that's just what we're paid to do. That's our job. What's so amazing about it?"

But the fact we can do it—that the human mind, which has evolved, after all, just to survive in the proverbial jungle—there's nothing to say you've got to understand quantum field theory.

Justin Brierley: It's almost an extravagance, it feels like. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, Emily. Has that ever struck you as kind of strange, unusual, astonishing, in a sense, that we should have this capacity to be able to do this extraordinarily deep science and understanding of the universe?

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the evolutionary point is an interesting one. We've evolved to be able to navigate the world and survive in a particular set of conditions. And yet, through the development of human culture and intellectual history, we have been able to build on the discoveries of those who went before us and develop more and more sophisticated ways of understanding the world in a way that animals, who don't have a way to write things down or maybe don't have the sophisticated ways of thinking that we do, [can't].

But it seems like it's something to do with culture and history that has allowed us to build upon the work of each other in a way that I find astonishing. I also find what I've heard called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics quite astounding as well.

Kevin Harris: Well, that last line should get your attention, Bill: the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Davies calls our evolutionary journey that allows human beings to contemplate something like quantum mechanics astonishing, but he stops short of drawing a theistic conclusion, it seems.

Dr. Craig: I think there are two different arguments here, both of which I think have significant theistic implications.

The first argument is that argument of Eugene Wigner for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Why is it that mathematics is applicable to the physical phenomena? This is the argument that Emily picks up at the very close of that clip, and which I've defended as best explained by God's existence.

And then the second argument is the one that Davies is pressing about the capacity of the human mind. Isn't it extraordinary that the human mind, which has evolved simply out of the necessities of survival, should come to have such extravagant capacities to understand the mathematical structure of the universe?

I think these two arguments go hand in glove in support of a theistic perspective.

Kevin Harris: In this next clip, Davies explains why he avoids the word purpose when it comes to the universe.

Dr. Davies: So I see the universe as starting off with the Big Bang and nobody around. Then, through a long sequence of evolutionary steps, the emergence of complexity, of life and of mind, and then of comprehension, of which we are not necessarily the last word, but we are representative of comprehending beings.

I think that, for me, that is just not a happy accident. It's somehow built into what the universe is about. I don't like the word purpose, but I'm happy to say that the universe is about something.

Justin Brierley: Right. Why don't you like the word purpose? Because we've used a different word, teleology, and I've always thought they're somewhat equivalent. But what makes you nervous about the word?

Dr. Davies: Well, it's just because it's such a culturally loaded term. Humans have purposes, and that's all fine. Projecting that sort of human-like purpose onto nature, I think...

Justin Brierley: But there is something going on. There's a directionality, a sort of...

Dr. Davies: Yes, a link, I would say. It's a link between human existence and cosmic existence.

That sounds—I said "romantic" at the beginning. That sounds [like a] very strong statement.

Kevin Harris: I wish I had the accent of Justin Brierley! He's so good and smooth. My East Texas keeps kind of sneaking through from time to time.

But "the universe is about something." Is he using that right? Is aboutness a better or less loaded term than purpose?

Dr. Craig: No. I'm afraid this is confused.

Aboutness is what is called intentionality. My thoughts have intentionality, or aboutness. I can think about my summer vacation. I can think about my wife. But no physical object has aboutness. A chair or a desk is not about something else. Intentionality, or aboutness, requires a mind.

Similarly, you can't have teleology without purpose. You can have an end. The universe is tending toward some end. But that end is not a goal unless there is some sort of cosmic mind that has pre-established that goal toward which the universe tends.

Kevin Harris: Emily has a similar complaint in this next clip. Check this out.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: To me, teleology brings more religious connotations than purpose does. I typically hear the word teleology in philosophy associated with the teleological, or design, argument for the existence of God—looking at the world, discerning there some kind of order, purpose, complexity, beauty, and reasoning back to a designer who set that purpose.

I was interested to hear you use that phrase "built-in." You said this purpose is built into the universe, and my question is: if you don't believe in God, who's the builder?

Dr. Davies: Yes. This is where we need the X. That's what I was talking about.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: It's quite an important missing step.

Kevin Harris: Okay. The teleological argument. And in case someone missed it, Davies calls the missing option "X." In this interview, he talks about the options of intelligent agency, mindless mechanism, and then he says, "Perhaps X."

Any good candidates for X, Bill?

Dr. Craig: Yes. For someone who believes in a creator of the universe, the idea of purpose is unproblematic.

I think the reason that Emily is willing to talk about purpose rather than teleology is because she thinks of purpose wholly in subjective terms—that human persons can make up purposes for their lives and for the universe. These are not objective in the way teleology is.

So these two interlocutors, Emily and Davies, are floundering about how to express teleology or purpose without the missing step, X.

Kevin Harris: Emily gets into personal purpose versus a grand purpose. Here's the next clip.

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst: I think I would come down tentatively in favor of naturalism. But what I reject is the idea that that makes for a totally meaningless life.

I think we construct profound meaning and profound purpose in our own lives. In a way, I find that very liberating. We don't have, on my view, some overarching grand purpose set by some external rational being. We have the freedom to create meaning in our own lives and then follow those systems of meaning, engage in deep relationships with each other.

So I do see meaning and purpose as being emergent, perhaps in a different way from the way that you do—emergent within the human person, within the conscious, rational, free agent.

For me, it's a deeply meaningful way of seeing things, even if it's not meaningful in the sense of some grand cosmic purpose.

Kevin Harris: I hear that a lot, Bill. The need for a sense of autonomy. "I'm free to be me without the imposition of an all-powerful God."

Two questions that I have, and I'm sure you have several comments. But first, isn't this just a psychological consideration involving the extent to which one wants personal freedom and personal autonomy? Secondly, does the follower of Christ give up his autonomy or interest or sense of self?

Dr. Craig: We should not be fooled by her flowery language here. Emily is just talking about wholly subjective meaning and purpose. It's no different than saying that you can pretend that your life has meaning. You can make believe that the meaning of your life is to have deep and meaningful relationships. But, by the same token, you can make believe that the meaning of your life is to cleanse society of racial minorities, as in National Socialist Germany. There is no distinction between these two because there is no objective meaning or purpose to your life. It is all an illusion.