That is the question that a number of famous people, scientists, philosophers, with a couple of theologians and a popular writer thrown in, deal with in little essays at this link.
Unsurprisingly, among the atheists, and some others, the most careful ones give the less certain answers to the question. Peter Atkins, one of the better known professional atheist-"skeptics" in Britain is probably closest to Jerry Coyne in both lack of nuance and dogmatic insistence that a belief that the universe has purpose is some kind of character flaw, a weakness, a failure of a tacitly claimed morality and something to be disdained if not despised. I don't think that any of those who answered yes is as unnuanced and, frankly, arrogant and dismissive terms though you can find those who are, they aren't held up as havning much intellectual status. Having heard Atkins in debate before, that's no surprise at all. And he shares Coyne's arrogant nastiness as well as his inability to maintain any kind of integrity in his claims. For example, here's how he finishes
I regard the existence of this extraordinary universe as having a wonderful, awesome grandeur. It hangs there in all its glory, wholly and completely useless. To project onto it our human-inspired notions of purpose would, to my mind, sully and diminish it.
He says as he projects his human-inspired notions of purposelessness on the universe, even as he also projects such human notions as:
a. The quality of being extraordinary. Can the scientistic-fundamentalist universe be held to be extraordinary, since everything in that imagined universe proceeds and exists at nothing but the level of the ordinary workings of natural law? I am pretty confident that Atkins would hold, in other contexts, in arguments about other things that nothing which is extraordinary, in the sense of the most unordinary of things which science can detect, can be held to exist.
b. Wonderfulness, it certainly takes an animal if not a specifically human mind to wonder and wonder is a sense experience projected onto the universe, no less the atheist one than the one in Psalm 19.
c. Awesome grandeur, well, the concept describes both a human emotional state and any notion of grandeur is as incompatible with Atkins materialist scientism as the idea that anything in the regular operations of the natural universe can be held to be extraordinary. As one of Britains' more well known professional pseudo-skeptics, he's supposed to be officially opposed to anything that is extraordinary. Grandeur could mean nothing more than the pedestrian difference in scale between Peter Atkins and the universe. See also, again, Psalm 19.
There is more to it than Atkins, of course there are good arguments made against and for the question, but, to the point I made yesterday, it is one that science can't deal with. As someone who has recently slammed Lawrence Krauss, he gets to that point right away when he quotes Carl Sagan (another who can't be called one of my favorites) that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, even as he holds that it is unlikely that the universe has any purpose. I don't know if Krauss, who seems to be less reasonable on such question these days, the more well known as a professional atheist he becomes, would say the same thing today but what he said when this was published wasn't either unreasonable or geared to be offensive.
In thinking about writing about this, I realized that it would take a long series of posts to deal with it and unlike those I've done on other questions dealing with the written record and history, there would be no conclusive answer to the question. In the end it is a matter of belief and a willingness to be persuaded. And I just don't have the time for that right now. I will say that if the universe has a purpose, it seems to me extremely unlikely that human beings would be able to fathom it as more than an intimation. Our best tools for studying the physical universe, science, certainly can't even begin to get a hold of it.
In one of his lecture-essays on the question of universal salvation David Bentley Hart talks about the idea found in some theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa that the purpose of creation wouldn't be fulfilled until the end of the universe when all of existence will be reconciled with God. I don't think it's limited to sentient creatures but I don't have the time to look up references. That's an idea that Western thought, I believe, especially, under the influence of Augustine doesn't seem to hold with but I've learned from reading Gregory of Nyssa and the other Eastern theologians that they generally didn't hold views on such things without having good arguments to back them up. In those they have with Augustine, I find the Eastern theologians to be more persuasive. I can't claim that the emotional response of a Jerry Coyne or a Peter Atkins is the product of a reaction against Western theological thinking on such questions but, then, I can't rule that out, either. I can point out that they seem to be incapable of holding that the universe has no purpose in a way that doesn't betray their emotional need for it to have a purpose in the most human of terms, whether or not they get to say that they're right and their opponents are wrong. They don't seem to be able to escape the very human propensity to believe with all their heart that that matters to the universe that they're right and their opponents are wrong.
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