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A
compromise between this Neoplatonic explanation for the cosmos and belief in a
divine designer can be found in Spinoza’s world - picture, for which
Einstein expressed admiration. On my understanding of his difficult writings,
Spinoza believes that the cosmos exists because this is ethically required,
which provides a reason for calling the cosmos “God”. However, it is also true
that God is an immensely knowledgeable mind and that there exists nothing
outside this mind. How can that be so?
The answer is that the divine mind contemplates everything worth
knowing, including what a universe would be like if obedient to the laws which
our universe obeys, and how it would feel to be each of the conscious beings in
such a universe. Now, says Spinoza, the divine mind’s contemplation of this just is the reality of our universe and
of every conscious being in it. Your own knowledge of precisely what it feels
like to be you is simply God’s contemplating exactly how it must feel to be
somebody with precisely your properties
- such as, perhaps, the property
of not believing a word Spinoza says.
Spinoza
seems to have viewed the cosmos as obedient throughout to a single set of laws.
This strikes me as unfortunate. If the divine mind really did contemplate
everything worth knowing, then presumably it would contemplate all the details
of many beautiful, grand universes obeying laws that were very different from
those of our universe, even to the extent of being laws incompatible with the
evolution of life of any kind. Perhaps infinitely many universes would exist in
the divine thought (which is, remember, where Spinoza thinks that you and I and
all our surroundings exist). Yet even so, there could be limits to how far the
divine thought ranged. The divine mind might not be cluttered with thoughts
about absolutely all facts, including facts concerning all the messy forms
which universes could take if they obeyed no laws whatever. We might regard all
the universes that God thought about as universes selected for being thought about because each obeyed laws of some
sort. In view of their being in this way selected, we might even speak of their
law - controlled structures as “instances of divine design”. It would,
however, be Brandon Carter’s observational
selection which then ensured that the universe studied by human physicists
was a universe whose laws permitted the evolution of intelligent living beings.
Contributed by: Dr. John Leslie
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