Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

180 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP
consecutive coin-tosses without a loss!" You then arrange for your dupes to
meet, pairwise, until you have a final winner. (You never let the contestants
discuss your relation to them, and you kiss off the 1,02 3 losers along the way
with some sotto voce gibe to the effect that they were pretty gullible to
believe your claim about being Mephistopheles!) The winner—and there
must be one—will certainly have been given evidence of being a Chosen
One, but if he falls for it, this is simply an illusion of what we might call
retrospective myopia. The winner doesn't see that the situation was structured
so that somebody simply had to be the lucky one—and he just happened
to be it.
Now if the universe were structured in such a way that an infinity of
different "laws of physics" got tried out in the fullness of time, we would be
succumbing to the same temptation were we to draw any conclusions about
the laws of nature being prepared especially for us. This is not an argument
for the conclusion that the universe is, or must be, so structured, but just for
the more modest conclusion that no feature of the observable "laws of
nature" could be invulnerable to this alternative, deflationary interpretation.
Once these ever more speculative, ever more attenuated Darwinian hypotheses
are formulated, they serve—in classic Darwinian fashion—to diminish
by small steps the explanatory task facing us. All that is left over in
need of explanation at this point is a certain perceived elegance or wonderfulness
in the observed laws of physics. If you doubt that the hypothesis
of an infinity of variant universes could actually explain this elegance, you
should reflect that this has at least as much claim to being a non-questionbegging
explanation as any traditional alternative; by the time God has been
depersonalized to the point of being some abstract and timeless principle of
beauty or goodness, it is hard to see how the existence of God could explain
anything. What would be asserted by the "explanation" that was not already
given in the description of the wonderful phenomenon to be explained?
Darwin began his attack on the Cosmic Pyramid in the middle: Give me
Order, and time, and I will explain Design. We have now seen how the
downward path of universal acid flows: if we give his successors Chaos (in
the old-fashioned sense of pure meaningless randomness), and eternity, they
will explain Order—the very Order needed to account for the Design. Does
utter Chaos in turn need an explanation? What is there left to explain? Some
people think there is still one leftover "why" question: Why is there
something rather than nothing? Opinions differ on whether the question
makes any intelligible demand at all. 10 If it does, the answer "Because God
Eternal Recurrence—Life Without Foundations? 181
exists" is probably as good an answer as any, but look at its competition:
"Why not?"
4. ETERNAL RECURRENCE—LIFE WITHOUT FOUNDATIONS?
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable
of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without
providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science
has put us in a position of having to live without foundations. It was
shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our
historical position—and no end to it is in sight—is that of having to
philosophize without 'foundations'.
—HIIARY PUTNAM 1987, p. 29
The sense that the meaning of the universe had evaporated was what
seemed to escape those who welcomed Darwin as a benefactor of
mankind. Nietzsche considered that evolution presented a correct picture
of the world, but that it was a disastrous picture. His philosophy
was an attempt to produce a new world-picture which took Darwinism
into account but was not nullified by it.
—R. J. HOLLINGDALE 1965, p. 90
In the wake of Darwin's publication of Origin of Species, Friedrich
Nietzsche rediscovered what Hume had already toyed with: the idea that an
eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation—chaotic, pointless shuffling
of matter and law—would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution
through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives. This
idea of eternal recurrence became a cornerstone of his nihilism, and thus part
of the foundation of what became existentialism.
The idea that what is happening now has all happened before must be as
old as the dejd-vu phenomenon that so often inspires superstitious versions of
it. Cyclical cosmogonies are not uncommon in the catalogue of human
cultures. But when Nietzsche hit upon a version of Hume's—and John
Archibald Wheeler's—vision, he took it to be much more than an amusing
thought experiment or an elaboration of ancient superstitions. He thought—at
least for a while—he had stumbled upon a scientific proof of
10. For an engaging examination of the question, see ch. 2 of Robert Nozick's Philosophical
Explanation. Nozick offers several different candidate answers, all of them admittedly
bizarre, but notes, disarmingly. "The question cuts so deep, however, that any
approach that stands a chance of yielding an answer will look extremely weird. Someone
who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn't understand the question" (Nozick
1981, p. 116).