Hi Neptune N,
I like the fact that you’ve posed a philosphocal/religious question in the ‘Science & Mathematics > Astronomy & Space’ section. I found the first six answers unsatisfactory, so FWIW, here’s my two cents.
“Usefulness” is a human value judgement, dependant on the existence of one or more sentient beings, for whom the entity in question may (or may not) prove useful. For instance, a twig of the right size may be a useful tool for:
• a chimpanzee, to extract tasty termites from their nest, or
• a New Caledonian crow, to dislodge nutritious wood-boring beetle grubs from rotting tree trunks, or
• an Australian aboriginal artist, to use to apply pigment to a dot painting
But the Great Wall of China, or the Andes mountain range, is of no use whatsoever to these beings. And while the former was constructed by people for whom in served a purpose and proved useful, the latter is a consequence of the geological forces of nature – the subduction of the Nazca and Antarctic oceanic tectonic plates below the continental South American plate. And while we could say that the Andes mountains are useful to the species of plants, animals, and people who have adapted to live within their ecological niches, such use is consequent to and contingent upon the mountains coming into existence in the first place; it’s NOT that the mountains were purposefully brought into being to prove useful for those species, because natural geological mountain-building forces are necessarily purposeless and undirected.
So too with our vast universe – the natural cosmological laws that have governed the way in which it has expanded and developed the structures which we observe in it today are also necessarily purposeless and undirected. Or as renowned cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is fond of saying, “Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.” [1]
So our universe is not an object which can prove useful to an individual, like a twig, or and artefact designed and built by people for a useful purpose, like a defensive boundary wall. Our universe is a product of a set of natural physical laws, a highly energetic starting condition, and 13.72 billion years of natural law-governed expansion and structuring, which has resulted in the evolution of conscious beings who can ask big questions of each other, such as, “Yes, but what is it all FOR!!?” An inference of such a question is an Intelligent Designer with a purpose in mind for creating our universe – but inventing such gods and their associated creation myths is as old as human consciousness, and a reification in the heavens of our purposeful agency on Earth. God(s) are evidence-free fictional characters, whereas scientific cosmology is grounded in solid evidence, from observations and experiments, and congruent with particle physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy.
I like the fact that you’ve posed a philosphocal/religious question in the ‘Science & Mathematics > Astronomy & Space’ section. I found the first six answers unsatisfactory, so FWIW, here’s my two cents.
“Usefulness” is a human value judgement, dependant on the existence of one or more sentient beings, for whom the entity in question may (or may not) prove useful. For instance, a twig of the right size may be a useful tool for:
• a chimpanzee, to extract tasty termites from their nest, or
• a New Caledonian crow, to dislodge nutritious wood-boring beetle grubs from rotting tree trunks, or
• an Australian aboriginal artist, to use to apply pigment to a dot painting
But the Great Wall of China, or the Andes mountain range, is of no use whatsoever to these beings. And while the former was constructed by people for whom in served a purpose and proved useful, the latter is a consequence of the geological forces of nature – the subduction of the Nazca and Antarctic oceanic tectonic plates below the continental South American plate. And while we could say that the Andes mountains are useful to the species of plants, animals, and people who have adapted to live within their ecological niches, such use is consequent to and contingent upon the mountains coming into existence in the first place; it’s NOT that the mountains were purposefully brought into being to prove useful for those species, because natural geological mountain-building forces are necessarily purposeless and undirected.
So too with our vast universe – the natural cosmological laws that have governed the way in which it has expanded and developed the structures which we observe in it today are also necessarily purposeless and undirected. Or as renowned cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is fond of saying, “Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.” [1]
So our universe is not an object which can prove useful to an individual, like a twig, or and artefact designed and built by people for a useful purpose, like a defensive boundary wall. Our universe is a product of a set of natural physical laws, a highly energetic starting condition, and 13.72 billion years of natural law-governed expansion and structuring, which has resulted in the evolution of conscious beings who can ask big questions of each other, such as, “Yes, but what is it all FOR!!?” An inference of such a question is an Intelligent Designer with a purpose in mind for creating our universe – but inventing such gods and their associated creation myths is as old as human consciousness, and a reification in the heavens of our purposeful agency on Earth. God(s) are evidence-free fictional characters, whereas scientific cosmology is grounded in solid evidence, from observations and experiments, and congruent with particle physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy.
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