A Hospitable Universe

Subtitled 'addressing ethical and spiritual concerns in light of recent scientific discoveries', this book is a tour de force in the scope of its treatment of physics, emergence, Darwinism, consciousness and the idea of a bio-friendly universe. The main thrust is to go beyond the implicitly nihilistic scientific philosophy described by Nietzsche in Collapsing Cosmological Values: a world lacking any purpose, the fracture between a mechanical and indifferent world and a human being that feels and suffers, and disbelief in any transcendent reality. The authors argue that contemporary science revises this picture with the anthropic principle and the emergent pattern in evolution towards complexity and consciousness, as initially proposed by Teilhard de Chardin; for them this also includes top-down causation. The picture they develop is a form of religious naturalism with consciousness still defined as a biological phenomenon. In common with other emergentists they make no mention of the evidence that consciousness might be more than a biological phenomenon, which allows them to maintain non-reductive physicalism – the third element of Nietzsche's nihilism is retained – disbelief in any transcendent reality. The only immortality they envisage is the immortality of past events and deeds in the mind of God.