This is a draft article. I put it up here so I could receive comments and criticism.

Is the universe rational?

To believers in God, our universe must look like it is a product of intelligence. Sometimes this leads to varieties of creationism, such as the current “Intelligent Design” movement. But advocates of divine design need not object to evolution. They can argue that intelligence manifests itself at a deeper level. Some say that we live in a rational universe: the world is intelligible, and this can only be due to intelligence and purpose pervading the structure of reality. Our very ability to reason and do science signifies the existence of a God.

The idea that the universe is rational invites all kinds of mystical and metaphysical reflections, by scientists and philosophers as well as theologians. For example, Albert Einstein said that “a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.” Einstein made it clear that this led him toward a Spinoza-like pantheism, rather than a personal God.[1] Still, his sentiments are much more at home in a theological way of thinking, compared to any scientific naturalism.

Indeed, the notion that the universe is rational can be fashioned into a handy atheist-bashing tool. Conservative Catholic intellectual Michael Novak argues against the “new atheists” by presenting a picture of a universe suffused by an intelligence that underlies the intelligibility of all things. He tells a story about his daughter who found atheism “in the air” when she went to college:

Yet it didn’t take my daughter long to see through the pretenses of atheism. In the first place, the fundamental doctrine seemed to be that everything that is, came to be by chance and natural selection. In other words, at bottom, everything is irrational, chancy, without purpose or ultimate intelligibility. What got to her most was the affectation of professors pretending that everything is ultimately absurd, while in more proximate matters putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation. She decided that atheists could not accept the implications of their own metaphysical commitments. While denying the principle of rationality “all the way down,” they wished to cling to all the rationalities on the surface of things.[2]

Novak thinks that we live in a rational universe, so that denying a rational Mind at the bottom of it all is a fatal flaw of atheism. Novak’s version of intelligent design does not challenge the practice of science, though he remains suspicious about the more ambitious claims associated with Darwinian evolution. Indeed, Novak accepts seemingly chance elements and apparent contingency in creation. His God is an Artist, not an Engineer.

This is an attractive view, appealing to our intellectual desire that everything should ultimately make sense, even if we only dimly apprehend this in our current state of ignorance. Still, though thinkers such as Novak prefer to argue at the level of armchair metaphysics, talking about the fundamental nature of the universe inevitably raises questions about physics. And from the perspective of physics today, with all due deference to Einstein, the idea of a rational universe looks odd.

Now, there is certainly a sense of order one can get from physics; indeed, physicists will often use words like “elegant” to describe the symmetries of our most fundamental theories. But this is an impersonal order, for which “rational” is an overly anthropomorphic description. It is not much better than saying the universe is hungry.

More important, where the question of God is concerned, the most significant theme in modern physics is the sheer randomness that surfaces in our most fundamental theories. Einstein, insisting on a rational universe, never reconciled himself to quantum mechanics with its irreducible randomness. He got it wrong—our universe is a game of dice. But even this does not get to the heart of the matter. The deep symmetries and elegant order revealed in physics today are inseparable from randomness. The most basic laws of physics tell us what kind of dice we roll to generate our universe and our history.[3]

The randomness that appears in science is not just a quirk confined to fundamental physics. It is, in fact, the best source of novelty—the raw material for the creativity we find in Darwinian evolution and human brains. And randomness certainly does not mean the universe is a formless and incomphrehensible chaos. Precisely because individual random events are completely unpredictable, we obtain sharp statistical predictability in a world with large numbers of particles and events.

If the universe is as we describe it in current physics, then, calling it rational or irrational stretches a metaphor beyond any legitimate use. It really is like arguing over whether the universe is hungry or satisfied.

But then, the claim that the universe is rational is not entirely about physics. It is also about the nature of reason. A conservative Catholic such as Novak conceives of reason in a way that hearkens back to Aristotle and Plato, by way of Aquinas. In this venerable philosophical tradition, reason—we should really capitalize it and say Reason—has transcendent qualities. Reason is a divine power, a way to revelations of eternal metaphysical truths. And if Reason has more earthly applications as well, this is because transcendent Reason is fitted, by design, to the inherent intelligibility of nature.

Such views still find echoes, sometimes even in physics, when mathematical Platonists talk about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. But again, such mystifications of reason are out of step with modern science. Platonism validates our intuitions about the solidity of mathematical truths, but it is useless in explaining what flesh-and-blood mathematicians and theoretical physicists actually do.[4] If there are causally impotent Platonic realities, our knowledge of them has to come our way by some kind of revelation, even if this is dressed up as a deliverance of Reason. But we have a much better prospect of understanding mathematics and physics if we pay attention to how communities of mathematicians and physicists construct their knowledge, and how their brains actually embody reason.

Many of the reasons that make Platonic conceptions of mind implausible come from progress in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. After all, intelligent design, whether it explicitly opposes evolution or not, is more fundamentally a claim about intelligence, about our minds. And intelligence is increasingly understood within the natural world of rules and randomness, as described by physics.[5] Certainly, scientific naturalists have yet another God of the gaps to contend with, since a fully satisfying scientific understanding of human minds is still distant. But what we have learned so far goes against the notion of universe-pervading rationality.

None of this means that ideas of transcendent Reason or the rationality of the universe are about to go out of fashion. They have been integral to the philosophical tradition, woven deeply into the humanities, and they still affect how scientists conceive of the very act of doing science. Rejecting them in favor of a naturalistic conception of ourselves and the universe is not easy.

It is not even easy for humanists and nonbelievers. After all, we often conceive of ourselves not just as favoring reason over faith, but as letting reason shaping our lives comprehensively. We reason not just to figure out the life cycle of stars, but also to establish moral values. So notions of transcendent Reason can creep into our thinking, especially if we go in search of universal moral truths transcending human interests and agreements. But transcendent Reason belongs more properly to philosophical theism, to Islamic or Catholic high culture, rather than a tradition critical of supernatural beliefs.

Science-minded nonbelievers are often accused of making a fetish of reason. Perhaps we should more clearly point out that we are the ones defending a more modest view of human reason. We should be the ones expressing skepticism about a rational universe.