Cosmic Purpose Research Articles

Meaning, purpose, and narrative

AbstractAccording to many philosophers, “the meaning of life” refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our lives in a particular way—in terms of a unified life narrative—can supply us with many of those benefits. We might lose little if there is no such thing as the meaning of life, since there is still something that can provide much of what is valuable about it.

Ashvamedha Yagya in the Vedas

The Ashvamedha Yagya has been hailed as the monarch of rituals in the Indian tradition. Since Vedic times, the Ashvamedha holds a distinguished position among sacrificial rites. The horse symbolizes power. In the Shatapatha Brahmana, potent entities such as the nation, Indra, and the Sun are metaphorically portrayed as horses. The term 'Medha' is synonymous with 'Yagya'. The Nighantu texts provide 15 synonyms for Yagya, one of which is 'Medha'. In the comprehensive meaning of Ashvamedha, in Vedic rhetoric, 'Medha' signifies the awakening of intellect or wisdom. Delving into the philosophical significance of Ashvamedha in scriptural contexts is imperative to grasp this invaluable heritage. This research paper endeavors to understand Ashvamedha in the backdrop of Vedic literature, particularly by deciphering the meanings of the mantras presented in the Vedas. In Rigveda 5/27/4, Ashvamedha signifies the ultimate truth or reality; in Rigveda 5/27/5, it symbolizes the flow of creative power and the bliss represented by the essence of Soma; and in Rigveda 8/68/15 and 8/68/16, Ashvamedha is said to lead to the attainment of strength and the flow of life force. Ashvamedha leads to the enhancement of our intellect, meaning the awakening of wisdom, through which a human is established in the Supreme. The Vedas tell us that the purification of human consciousness through Ashvamedha - the awakening of wisdom - is the reward of Ashvamedha, and that the worship (Medha) of the divine power flow (Ashva) is the expansive, cosmic purpose of Ashvamedha.

The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious Naturalism

The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious Naturalism

Metaphysical teleology in Islam From the cosmic purpose to the perfect human

This article aims to present the Metaphysical teleology in Islam; Metaphysical teleology is one of the Greek philosophical ideas that were adopted by some schools of Islamic thought to delineate the relationship between divinity and man, or between it and the world. What I mean by metaphysical teleology is to say that there is an ultimate purpose that governs the relationship of divinity to man or to the world, and that this ultimate purpose has a metaphysical existence independent of the divine will, and that; in addition, a kind of necessity or necessity is exercised upon it. The maxim of metaphysical teleology goes back to Greek philosophy, especially Plato in his theory known as the miṯhal and specifically the example of good and right and its role in being a model for the Platonic universe maker to follow in shaping the world. From Plato to Aristotle and his theory of the four causes, especially the final cause, to the Stoics and their belief in divine providence, these ideas were transmitted to Muslims through their early contact with Hellenistic thought, so that this kind of thinking appears in some schools of Islamic thought, from theologians, philosophers and Sufi philosophers.

ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE AND PHILOSOPHY OF COSMISM: ONTOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS

Introduction. The anthropic principle is one of the principles of modern cosmology around which, from the last decades of the XXth century and so far, constantly occur ideological discussions, not only scientific, but also philosophical. Aim and tasks: The paper studies metaphysical aspects of cosmological and philosophical discussions over the Cosmos understanding as a “human-sized” world system in the context of “strong” anthropic principle. The author, besides, draws on the theoretical views of the philosophers of Russian cosmism, namely V. Vernadsky, K. Tsiolkovsky, A. Chizhevsky. Tasks: to analyze philosophical-ontological and moral-ethical aspects of the role of man and consciousness in the development of matter. Research methods: Philosophical analysis is carried out on the basis of the materialist approach and the principles of dialectics. The procedure of critical comprehension of the given concepts and estimations is applied. Results. The expediency in the anthropic picture of the world is argued not to be correlated with the anthropocentrism and idealistic teleology. At the same time, the naturalism views of evolutionists over the essence of consciousness and man is criticized. The author does not agree with the reducing of consciousness to the cerebral material activity, on the one hand, and of the consciousness hypostatization, its ontologization, on the other. Also grounds that the essence of intelligent life is based on purposeful character of activity and on freedom from natural determinism in its development. Moral and ethical imperatives of human activity in its earthly and cosmic purpose are analyzed as well. Discussion. The author believes that the development of an anthropic picture of the world drives science to the adoption of humanitarian concepts. The human life is determined not only in scientific and technical activity, but also in a moral along broad sense. The development of science and technology within of immoral social and political landmarks of a person can ruinously affect both human affairs on Earth and space ones. Conclusion. The metaphysics of the anthropic cosmic principle and the ideas of Russian anthropocosmist philosophers form a single field of theoretical reflection. On the author opinion, modern ideas in quantum cosmology about the role of an observer in the Universe and the ethic's orientations of Russian cosmic philosophy converge in natural-philosophical hypothesis of E. Ilyenkov.

KAGAWA'S COSMIC PURPOSE AND MODERNIZATION IN JAPAN

AbstractKagawa Tyohiko (1888–1960), who was a well known Christian leader and social reformer, is re‐evaluated from the perspective of a public philosophy, and as an example of the possibilities for collaboration and conflict between science and the religious humanities in East Asia. His last book, Cosmic Purpose, which appears to be a kind of natural theology, is analyzed from the perspective of the hidden topic of human evil. By considering Kagawa's deep religious sensibility and conscience, the book can be interpreted to reflect on the wrong directionality selected by modern Japan's leaders that resulted in the tragic war.

Cosmic Purpose and Human Consciousness

Cosmic Purpose and Human Consciousness

Ernan McMullin’s Thought on Science and Theology: An Appreciation

AbstractThe thought of Ernan McMullin on the relationship between science and theology can be summarized with a word that he himself used: consonance. We briefly describe this epistemological proposal, and we show a concrete instance of its application by way of a short analysis of one of McMullin’s interdisciplinary works, “Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution.” With the help of the authoritative comment that William Stoeger has made on this paper, we sketch McMullin’s effort to find a consonance between two different claims: the theological one – humans expected – and the evolutionary one – humans unexpected. In this case, consonance is reached by recurring to the classic Augustinian notion of the atemporality of God. We then show how McMullin’s way of interpreting consonance affects the question of the viability of a natural theology in a scientifically informed era. In fact, his distrust of various kinds of natural theology is another crucial aspect of his epistemological framework for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Astroecology, cosmo-ecology, and the future of life

Astroecology concerns the relations between life and space resources, and cosmo-ecology extrapolates these relations to cosmological scales. Experimental astroecology can quantify the amounts of life that can be derived from space resources. For this purpose, soluble carbon and electrolyte nutrients were measured in asteroid/meteorite materials. Microorganisms and plant cultures were observed to grow on these materials, whose fertilities are similar to productive agricultural soils. Based on measured nutrient contents, the 10<sup>22</sup> kg carbonaceous asteroids can yield 10<sup>18</sup> kg biomass with N and P as limiting nutrients (compared with the estimated 10<sup>15</sup> kg biomass on Earth). These data quantify the amounts of life that can be derived from asteroids in terms of time-integrated biomass [<em>BIOTA</em><sub>int</sub> = biomass (kg) × lifetime (years)], as 10<sup>27</sup> kg-years during the next billion years of the Solar System (a thousand times the 10<sup>24</sup> kg-years to date). The 10<sup>26</sup> kg cometary materials can yield biota 10 000 times still larger. In the galaxy, potential future life can be estimated based on stellar luminosities. For example, the Sun will develop into a white dwarf star whose 10<sup>15</sup> W luminosity can sustain a <em>BIOTA</em><sub>int</sub> of 10<sup>34</sup> kg-years over 10<sup>20</sup> years. The 10<sup>12</sup> main sequence and white and red dwarf stars can sustain 10<sup>46</sup> kg-years of <em>BIOTA</em><sub>int</sub> in the galaxy and 10<sup>57</sup> kg-years in the universe. Life has great potentials in space, but the probability of present extraterrestrial life may be incomputable because of biological and ecological complexities. However, we can establish and expand life in space with present technology, by seeding new young solar systems. Microbial representatives of our life-form can be launched by solar sails to new planetary systems, including extremophiles suited to diverse new environments, autotrophs and heterotrophs to continually form and recycle biomolecules, and simple multicellulars to jump-start higher evolution. These programs can be motivated by life-centered biotic ethics that seek to secure and propagate life. In space, life can develop immense populations and diverse new branches. Some may develop into intelligent species that can expand life further in the galaxy, giving our human endeavors a cosmic purpose.

ERNAN MCMULLIN ON CONTINGENCY, COSMIC PURPOSE, AND THE ATEMPORALITY OF THE CREATOR

AbstractThis article reviews, and offers supportive reflections on, the main points of Ernan McMullin's provocative 1998 article, “Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution,’’ reprinted in this issue of Zygon. In it he addresses the important science‐theology issue of how the Creator's purpose and intention to assure the emergence of human beings is consonant with the radical contingency of the evolutionary process. After discussing cosmic and biological evolution and critically summarizing recent solutions to this question by Keith Ward, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, Alvin Plantinga, and others, who presuppose in different ways that God is subject to time, McMullin compellingly argues for the traditional position, that God is unconditioned by time, and this enables God to work purposefully through contingency, randomness, and chance just as easily as through law‐like regularity.

Cosmic Purpose and the Question of a Personal God

Purported evidence for purposeful divine action in the cosmos may appear to warrant describing God as personal, as Swinburne proposes. In this paper, however, I argue that the primary understanding of what is meant by a person is formed by the experience of ‘I’ – ‘you’ or second-person relatedness, a mode of relation with God that is not part of natural theology. moreover, even among human beings, the recognition of purposeful agency does not invariably lead to the attribution of personhood in the usual sense. ‘Person’ is therefore a misleading term to use of God on the evidence of cosmic purpose alone in the absence of suitable revelation.

LIFE‐CENTERED ETHICS, AND THE HUMAN FUTURE IN SPACE

In the future, human destiny may depend on our ethics. In particular, biotechnology and expansion in space can transform life, raising profound questions. Guidance may be found in Life-centered ethics, as biotic ethics that value the basic patterns of organic gene/protein life, and as panbiotic ethics that always seek to expand life. These life-centered principles can be based on scientific insights into the unique place of life in nature, and the biological unity of all life. Belonging to life then implies a human purpose: to safeguard and propagate life. Expansion in space will advance this purpose but will also raise basic questions. Should we expand all life or only intelligent life? Should we aim to create populations of trillions? Should we seed other solar systems? How far can we change but still preserve the human species, and life itself? The future of all life may be in our hands, and it can depend on our guiding ethics whether life will fulfil its full potentials. Given such profound powers, life-centered ethics can best secure future generations. Our descendants may then understand nature more deeply, and seek to extend life indefinitely. In that future, our human existence can find a cosmic purpose.

The Importance of Religious Orientation and Purpose in Life for Dying Well: Evidence from Three Case Studies

ABSTRACT As older adults approach the end of their lives, it is not uncommon to find a decrease in subjective well-being. However, a number of studies have indicated that elders with an intrinsic rather than extrinsic religious orientation often are able to keep a high level of subjective well-being even if they are close to death. In a previous quantitative study, only intrinsic religiosity was indirectly and positively related to subjective well-being in a sample of 103 relatively healthy older adults and 19 hospice patients (aged 61 +), mediated by shared spiritual activities and purpose in life. Extrinsic religiosity, by contrast, was indirectly and negatively related to subjective well-being. To explore in greater depth how religious orientation might influence subjective well-being at the end of life, we used the method of objective hermeneutics to examine semi-structured qualitative interviews with three older male hospice patients (aged 79, 80, and 98) on religion/spirituality and attitudes about death and dying. Results of the analyses revealed that the intrinsically religious respondent maintained his sense of cosmic purpose in life, which continued to be a source of satisfaction for him, unaffected by his terminal illness. The two extrinsically religious respondents, however, did not find solace in their religion and, hence, were unable to cope with their physical and emotional dependence and vulnerability. The findings suggest that an intrinsic religious orientation is most likely to be related to a cosmic sense of purpose in life, which facilitates subjective well-being even in the face of death.

Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world

Religion plays a powerful role in the formation of scientific theories. By comparing the goals and practice of robotics and artificial intelligence in the US and Japan, differences between the two countries can be traced to their religious environments. Christian expectations of cosmic purpose and hope for salvation in purified, unearthly bodies leads to US researchers' preference for artificial intelligence over humanoid robots, a desire to see cosmic meaning in the development of that intelligence, and salvation of human minds in virtual, non-biological bodies. In Japan, robots, which have been the subjects of ritual consecrations and religious transcendence, participate in a fundamental sanctity of the natural world. A positive outlook on being human promotes a preference for humanoid robots and a future in which robots serve human beings, who do not forsake their bodies for virtual lives. Divergent scientific strategies cannot be separated from the religious worlds of their practitioners.

Cosmology of Mind

In Il’enkov’s “Cosmology of mind,” written in his younger days in the tradition of Spinoza and Engels, the thinking mind appears as a necessary attribute of matter. Like all other main forms of matter in motion, the mind has its cosmic purpose and predestination. Il’enkov argued that it has to close the beginning and the end of the Big Cycle in order to return the dying Universe to its fiery youth. Il’enkov believed that this is the sole way to save the Universe from “thermal death” following the inevitable increase in entropy.

John F. Haught (ed.), Science and Religion in Search of Cosmic Purpose

John F. Haught (ed.), Science and Religion in Search of Cosmic Purpose

Science and religion in search of cosmic purpose

Science and religion in search of cosmic purpose

Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution

Some understand the evolutionary process as more or less predictable; others stress its contingency. I argue that both Christian evolutionists who have assumed that the purposes of the Creator can be realized only through more or less predictable processes as well as those who infer from the contingency of the evolutionary process to the lack of purpose in the universe generally, are mistaken if the Creator escapes from the limits imposed on the creature by temporality, as the traditional Augustinian account supposes. The notion of “purpose” must itself be reinterpreted in such a case. It makes no difference whether the appearance of Homo sapiens is the inevitable result of a steady process of complexification stretching over billions of years, or whether it comes about through a series of coincidences that would have made it entirely unpredictable from the (causal) human standpoint. Either way, the outcome is of God's making, and from the biblical standpoint may appear as part of God's plan.

The Danner Thesis and Public Choice Theory: A Review Essay

Peter Danner's Getting and Spending (1944) is intended as textbook for courses in economics/ethics. However, in the process of providing instruction for undergraduates, Danner expounds deep level, original thesis concerning the nature and significance of economic activity and the moral legitimacy of market economy. The purpose of this essay is, first, to provide concise restatement of the Danner thesis and then to show how his justification for market institutions compares with that produced by public choice theory as the latter is set forth by Victor Vanberg (1994). To begin with Danner to bring his readers to the realization that there is unique, foundational cognitive/causal force at work elusively but effectively in the mundane affairs to daily economic life. When you buy loaf of bread, so he seeks to show, fundamental, primal intuition stirs toward articulation in the depths of the human soul. An economic transaction allows the human person to and with reflection to acknowledge unique dimension of the relationship with his Creator. Danner's core thesis has to do with understanding the ground and implication of this unique dimension. The key decision making economic agent is identified as the human person. Each the unique creation of loving God (p. 4), distinguished from the rest of nature by the capacity for self judgement, the human person encounters in the depth of his being primal urge toward the transcendent - toward truth to be known, good to be done, beauty to be created. For such creature, freedom - the ability to move one's self toward perfection by way of knowledge and choice - is understood as the means required ... for human beings to realize their good and achieve their purposes (p. 7). Within community of such free persons economic activity originates not in the pleasure-maximizing efforts of confirmed egotists (as in neoclassical economics) but rather in much deeper primal cognitive event Danner refers to as the Value experience (p. 84). Such an registers in human consciousness the realization, the immediate that potential action is Good, deserving of execution. Such perception triggers the interaction of knowledge and desire. However, for embodied human persons - angels don't have the problem - the espousal of cultural and moral values requires the use of scarce material resources. To fuel the thrust toward transcendence food is required for the body, stone and brass for the sculpture, wealth for the practice of liberality. Success in this grand communal endeavor requires not only that material resources be used in accord with the connection between cause and effect discerned by instrumental reason. To achieve the cosmic purpose of economic activity it is also necessary - and here is the core of the Danner thesis - that multiple purpose, fungible resources be used efficiently - so as to maximize the ratio of useful output to scarce input. The ineluctable fact of resource scarcity, so he affirms in summary statement, imposes a mandate ... on every individual, family business, government agency and non-profit institution to strive for (p. 212). Danner thus has lesson for the social economist. In the preoccupation with efficiency in resource use neoclassical welfare economics is right, but in its reliance on utilitarianism and assumptions of egoism, for the wrong reasons. As an economic agent the human person is bound by special ethical imperative - the moral obligation to avoid waste, to contribute to communal efficiency in the use of resources. The significance of the efficiency imperative is reinforced as Danner invokes line of psychological/moral analysis that recalls Aristotle on ethics, Aquinas on natural law. In determined rejection of all forms of ethical relativism, he stoutly insists that the human value - the realization that there is good out there to be affirmed by human free choice - mirrors but does not establish the object's Goodness. …

Environmental Ethics and the Question of Cosmic Purpose

Environmental Ethics and the Question of Cosmic Purpose