On the Place and Purpose of Humankind in the Cosmos

On the Place and Purpose of Humankind in the Cosmos Timothy Kearns (bio) I The visible horizon of the universe is a giant ball 93 billion light years across, we are told, and a tapered funnel extending 13.7 billion years into the past. The universe began dark and so hot that photons were not in the visible range. The star we orbit and the planet we live on are the only ones we know of that possess or can support any variety of living things. It is not clear how living things came to be on this planet, much less what it is that directed the growth and change of the species and communities and landforms down to our time. It is not as if we have no idea about these, of course, but only that we have far more questions about them than we have answers. Furthermore, contemporary cosmologists do not agree on whether or how or when the universe will end, nor on what the state will be of our universe at its end.1 This is the current state of our knowledge of the universe. A common reaction to any description like this is to wonder whether human life is meaningless or without purpose, whether the cosmos is so vast in time and space and in the variety and heterogeneity of life that there is, in principle, nothing that could be a definite purpose for human life. But is this reaction justified? End Page 70 Let us restate the common reaction as a question: given what we know about the universe, especially its size and temporal extent and its vast heterogeneity, can we conclude that there is no place or purpose or meaning for human life in such a cosmos? The average person in our time might either respond that we can draw that conclusion or at least that the vastness of the universe suggests that we can. Philosophers will point out that mere size or extent of time tells us nothing about purpose or meaning. Philosophers will therefore say that the question is not well formed, which is true. But philosophers will also admit at the very least that immense size and vast extent of time make it harder for us to tell something's purpose or meaning. The question "Is the universe's size evidence that human life has no purpose?" can be answered, "No." But that alone does not satisfy. The reason is that the question itself has raised a more general one, and that is this: What is the purpose or meaning of human life in the natural world as we understand it now, a world whose vastness and heterogeneity has been increasingly revealed to us by the accelerating accumulation of knowledge in the late modern world? There is at present no systematic answer to this question. My goal in this paper is to provide one, an answer from inside the broadly classical philosophical tradition.2 This task is urgent in our time because of the progressive loss of meaning across many cultures, especially in those dominated by science and technology. For Catholics, this task is even more important and urgent, because only through resolving it can we hope to regain a sense for the cosmos as a whole, for creation as proceeding from God, for creation as a manifestation and witness of his transcendent glory, and for the world as a pathway that leads us beyond itself to the One who made it.3 This is what has been lost since the wave of discoveries about nature and the universe that began in the fifteenth century and has only accelerated in our own day.4 The loss of the sense of creation as cosmos can only lead to a sense of creation as chaos. But this is not what Revelation shows the world to be. Revelation is clear that the order and beauty of the world can be known from the things that are made and that God himself can be End Page 71 known from that order. If that is true, then we do not need to look at the world with only the eyes of faith to see...