How To Be An Agnostic
But for him it is but a suggestive metaphor, one that points to
what we don’t know as much as what we do. Further, he recog-
nises that Platonism is not a conclusive answer to the effective-
ness of mathematics. It raises all sorts of problems about how the
Platonic world interacts with the natural world, for example.
Consciousness and emergence
A third looks at things differently again, and it has to do with
a newer concept in modern physics, that of emergence. Paul
Davies is the cosmologist I associate with this option and for
him the key issue is not the success of mathematics, but the
existence of self-consciousness in the cosmos. It is, after all,
what makes it possible to talk about meaningfulness in physics
at all. At least one structure has arisen within the universe,
namely the human brain, which can observe the universe, and
attempt to understand it and itself. Moreover, that structure has
a self-conscious purpose. ‘It seems to me that there is a genuine
scheme of things – the universe is “about” something,’ he con-
cludes in his book, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe
Just Right for Life? ‘So we are perhaps not after all such nobodies.
We are not for nothing,’ concurs the playwright Michael Frayn
in his book, signifi cantly entitled The Human Touch.
Let me say a little more about how Davies arrives at such a
conclusion. He fi rst notes how striking what is commonly known
as the fi ne-tuning of the universe is, that is, how it’s right for life.
The most dramatic example of this is the apparent fi ne-tuning of
the dark energy. This is something that even atheistic physicists
like Weinberg fi nd extraordinary. What it boils down to is the
notion that this stuff called dark energy appears right to about
one part in 10 to the power of 123 or 124. This is phenomenally
unlikely. It represents the equivalent chance of tossing a coin and
getting 400 heads in a row. Or, if all the atoms in the known uni-
verse were coins, and each fl ipped billions of times a second, the
age of the universe might just about allow one atom to have pro-
duced 360 in a row by now. It’s a tuning that needs explaining.