Mark’s Reviews > The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself > Status Update

Consciousness and thought can emerge from purely physical origins. They do not necessarily require that they were "created" via an intentional external force. Science cannot yet fully explain how they work, but their evolutionary origins can be described.

"Purpose" need not be a priori. Naturalism can explain how life evolves what might appear as purpose and design. These are useful terms in discussions but not present in a strictly physical sense. Various design arguments for theism exist, but all are weak. No hypothesis for God allows testability and falsification. Even the physical fine-tuning argument cannot test what happens if the constants are different.

What the Second Law of Thermodynamics really says. How entropy is essential from the universe as we know it, the origin of life, and evolution. How intelligent design and designer are less plausible than abiogenesis and evolution in explaining how biology exists today.

Can the mind and consciousness be explained? Descartes suggested a dualism in which the soul, separate from the body and operating in a different sphere, caused physical actions, but nothing in science leaves room for such an entity. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia also had concerns about dualism and questioned Descartes on it, who never gave a satisfactory response.

Why does the universe exist? Its existence without an external cause is perfectly plausible within known physical laws. Why the cosmological argument for God fails. The answer to "why?" may never be known. Theists claim to have answers. But are such answers satisfactory? Perhaps not.

The effective theory of the everyday world. Because of Core Theory, we can make confident statements about what are and aren't true about the everyday world around us and with which we interact. We will likely gain deeper and more detailed knowledge, but have confidence that the Core Theory will remain valid in its effective domain.

We can be confident that at this time we have a complete inventory of what makes up observable reality that affect our daily lives.

The Core Theory: how a universal quantum wave function is able to explain all that we currently know about physics.

How does quantum mechanics explain reality? It is just one universal wave function, according to the Everrett model. It involves entanglement and multiple "worlds" and universes that are simple already there.