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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Cosmic Story Without Cosmic Purpose

How Evolution Can Be Told in the Scientific Vocabulary of the Twenty-First Century

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

There is a temptation, whenever we look at the history of the universe, to turn it into a story about where the universe is going. First there was matter, then stars, planets, life, consciousness, language, culture and eventually beings capable of reflecting upon the entire process. It is an extraordinarily compelling sequence, and it has inspired some of the grandest philosophical narratives of the modern era. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin interpreted it as a movement toward the Omega Point; Alfred North Whitehead developed a metaphysics of process, creativity and becoming; Ken Wilber transformed evolutionary development into an Integral cosmology driven partly by what he called Eros; and Brendan Graham Dempsey is now attempting to formulate a contemporary version of the cosmic evolutionary story in terms of information, learning, emergence and meaning. The danger is that once the sequence is seen as a whole, we are easily tempted to interpret it as a trajectory toward something. But there is another possibility. We can tell the cosmic story without assuming that the cosmos has a destination. We can preserve the grandeur of the sequence from the early universe to stars, chemistry, life, nervous systems, minds, language and culture without turning that sequence into evidence of a cosmic plan. Indeed, the scientific story may be more astonishing precisely because it requires no cosmic intention.

From the Big Bang to the first complexity

The modern cosmic story begins not with purpose but with expansion. Our best current cosmological models describe a universe approximately 13.8 billion years old. In its earliest stages it was extraordinarily hot and dense. As the universe expanded, it cooled, and during its first few minutes the conditions were suitable for the formation of mostly hydrogen and helium, together with small quantities of other light elements. Hundreds of thousands of years later, atoms could form, allowing radiation to travel freely. Over much longer periods, gravity amplified small variations in the distribution of matter, eventually producing stars and galaxies. Stars then became the great chemical factories of the cosmos. Through nuclear fusion and stellar death, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were produced and dispersed into space, making possible later generations of stars, planets and eventually the chemistry on which life depends.

Already this gives us something more interesting than the old image of a universe that simply becomes progressively more complex. The universe has a genuine history. Its present state depends upon its previous states, and later structures inherit possibilities from earlier cosmic conditions. Stars are not eternal objects inserted into an already finished universe; they form, evolve and die. The elements from which planets and organisms are constructed have a cosmic history of their own. In the literal sense, we really are made from ancient stellar material. Yet none of this requires us to say that the stars existed in order to make us. They simply evolved according to physical processes. Our existence is historically dependent upon them without being their predetermined purpose. That distinction should remain fundamental throughout the entire cosmic story. Historical dependence is not the same thing as teleological intention.

Evolution without foresight

The distinction becomes even more important when we reach biological evolution. Evolutionary biology does not require an evolutionary force pushing organisms upward. There is no scientific need to postulate an Eros, a cosmic appetite for complexity or an inherent drive toward consciousness. Heritable variation, differential reproduction, natural selection, developmental processes, ecological interaction and other evolutionary mechanisms are sufficient to generate extraordinary adaptive complexity. Evolution does not need to know where it is going. Mutation does not anticipate future environments, and selection does not formulate long-term goals. The fact that evolution can produce organisms with remarkable complexity does not mean that complexity was its objective.

This does not make evolution less remarkable. It makes it more remarkable. The eye does not need to have been intended in order to evolve; the human brain does not need to have been the target of evolution in order to emerge; and consciousness does not need to have been waiting at the end of evolutionary history for organisms capable of experiencing it to appear. This is perhaps the most important correction to the grand evolutionary narratives. The fact that something occurs late in evolutionary history does not mean that evolution was moving toward it. Humans are latecomers to the cosmic story. We are consequences of an enormous series of contingent processes, not conclusions that those processes were necessarily designed to reach.

Chemistry, self-organization and the origin of life

The origin of life remains one of the great unsolved problems of science, but contemporary research gives us a much richer vocabulary for discussing how chemistry might cross the threshold into biology. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics, self-assembly, autocatalytic reaction networks, compartmentalization, chemical selection and replication are among the concepts now used to investigate how increasingly organized chemical systems might arise and persist under suitable conditions. Research in systems chemistry, for example, examines how reaction networks and self-organizing chemical processes might produce properties associated with primitive forms of metabolism and reproduction.

This is a much better scientific vocabulary than saying that "matter wants to become life." Matter does not want anything. Under particular physical and chemical conditions, however, some arrangements of matter can maintain themselves, interact with their surroundings, reproduce or produce structures that are subject to selection. The transition we need to explain is therefore not a mysterious movement from dead matter toward an already imagined biological destination. It is the emergence of chemical systems with properties that make further evolutionary development possible. This distinction may appear subtle, but philosophically it is decisive. The first formulation contains a hidden purpose; the second asks us to identify mechanisms.

Thermodynamics does not need Eros

The same point applies to thermodynamics. The second law does not imply that everything must become simpler, nor does it prohibit the emergence of local organization and complexity. Open systems can maintain highly ordered structures by exchanging energy and matter with their surroundings. The scientifically interesting question is therefore not how evolution somehow "overcomes" entropy, but what kinds of organized structures can emerge and persist within a universe governed by thermodynamic constraints.

This matters for Dempsey's project because one of the attractions of his approach is the attempt to connect thermodynamics, information, learning and meaning into a single evolutionary narrative. That is potentially fruitful. But thermodynamic processes should not be made to carry more philosophical weight than the science warrants. Energy flows can help explain self-organization; self-organization can contribute to biological complexity; biological complexity can make cognition possible. None of these steps by itself demonstrates that the universe possesses an intrinsic tendency toward meaning. We do not need to say that the universe is "winding up" any more than we need to say that it is "trying" to produce life. We need to understand how physical constraints and energy flows make certain forms of organization possible and how those organizations are subsequently transformed by evolutionary processes.

Complexity is real, but complexity is not progress

This distinction also requires us to separate complexity from progress. The history of the universe contains spectacular examples of increasing complexity. Stars are more structurally elaborate than the primordial plasma from which they emerged. Living cells possess forms of organization vastly more intricate than the chemistry from which they arose. Nervous systems generate extraordinary capacities for information processing, and human civilizations contain enormous layers of technological, linguistic and institutional complexity. Yet complexity itself is not a moral category. A cancer is complex. A modern weapons system is complex. A bureaucracy can be highly complex. An ecosystem can be enormously complex. Complexity tells us something about organization and interdependence, but it does not tell us whether the resulting system is good, desirable, true or morally progressive.

This is one of the places where the scientific story should resist the temptation inherited from Teilhard and Wilber to translate "higher" automatically into "better." Evolution can generate greater capacities without guaranteeing that those capacities will be used wisely. A technologically sophisticated civilization can become more destructive rather than more enlightened. Increased differentiation can produce both freedom and alienation. Greater information-processing power can generate scientific knowledge, but it can also produce more sophisticated propaganda. Complexity is therefore an important descriptive concept, but it cannot by itself provide a theory of value.

From organisms to information-processing systems

The concept of information nevertheless becomes indispensable once we turn to living systems. Organisms do not merely exist in environments; they respond selectively to differences within those environments. A bacterium can respond to chemical gradients. A plant responds to light, water and other environmental conditions. An animal distinguishes predator from prey and adjusts its behavior accordingly. Nervous systems integrate information from multiple sensory channels and use it to guide action. With increasing neurological sophistication, organisms become capable of remembering, predicting, learning and constructing increasingly elaborate internal models of their environments.

Here Dempsey's emphasis on information becomes genuinely useful. There is a meaningful difference between information considered abstractly and information that makes a difference to the activity of an organism. The environment is not simply a collection of physical variables. For a living system, some differences matter and others do not. Food matters; predators matter; mates matter; temperature may matter; shelter may matter. The organism exists within a world of significance long before anything like human language or explicit philosophical reflection appears.

But we should be careful about the terminology. Information is not automatically meaning. A physical correlation does not automatically constitute a representation, and a causal relationship does not automatically constitute semantic aboutness. A more defensible evolutionary sequence would therefore move from physical differences and causal sensitivity toward biological significance, then increasingly sophisticated representation, cognition and eventually symbolic meaning. This preserves continuity without pretending that an electron possesses a primitive version of human understanding.

Life creates worlds of significance

This may be the most promising naturalistic foundation for a theory of meaning. With life, the environment becomes something more than a collection of physical conditions because the organism has needs and capacities that make some environmental states significant. A bacterium does not need a concept of food in order for nutrients to matter to it. An animal does not need a philosophical theory of danger in order to flee from a predator. A plant does not need a representation of sunlight in order for light to influence its development.

Meaning, in this preliminary sense, emerges when things can matter to something. That does not imply that the universe as a whole possesses meaning. It means that living systems have acquired a form of organization in which environmental differences can have significance for their continued activity. This is an important distinction because it allows us to preserve the continuity that Dempsey is rightly interested in without making the stronger claim that meaning is literally present throughout the physical universe. Meaning can have evolutionary roots without being a fundamental physical property.

From nervous systems to minds

The evolution of nervous systems dramatically expands this world of significance. Animals can remember previous experiences, anticipate events, navigate environments, learn from consequences, recognize individuals, cooperate with conspecifics and modify behavior on the basis of changing circumstances. At increasingly sophisticated levels of cognition, organisms can represent not merely what is immediately present but what might happen next. They can respond to possibilities as well as actualities.

At some point in this history, cognition becomes sufficiently sophisticated for organisms to construct increasingly complex models of themselves and their environments. This is where the question of meaning becomes much more recognizably human. The organism does not merely respond; it interprets. It does not simply react to the present; it can anticipate the future. Yet there is still no need to say that the universe itself is learning. Brains learn, organisms learn and populations evolve. Cultures accumulate information. The universe does not have to be a gigantic organism or a cosmic brain for these things to occur.

Culture becomes cumulative

The most dramatic transformation comes when information can be transmitted between individuals and across generations with sufficient fidelity and flexibility to accumulate. Human beings do not begin every generation from scratch. We inherit languages, tools, techniques, stories, institutions, concepts and technologies. Each generation can modify what it receives and pass the modified version onward. The result is cumulative culture, an evolutionary process in which acquired information can become an inheritance system alongside biological inheritance.

Contemporary research into cultural evolution examines the mechanisms through which knowledge and skills are socially transmitted, modified and accumulated. Processes such as social learning, imitation, teaching and increasingly sophisticated forms of communication allow cultural information to build upon previous generations rather than being repeatedly rediscovered. This changes the evolutionary situation dramatically. Biological evolution stores information primarily in genetic systems, whereas cultural evolution creates additional forms of inheritance through brains, languages, tools, writing, institutions and technologies.

This provides a scientifically respectable meaning for the phrase The Evolution of Meaning. Meaning itself can evolve because the systems that generate, transmit, evaluate and revise meanings can evolve. There is no need to say that meaning was present in the early universe in some primordial form. It is enough to recognize that the universe eventually produced systems capable of generating meanings and passing them between generations.

The symbolic universe

Language changes the situation again. An animal can respond to an environment, but human beings can describe environments that do not exist. We can speak about the distant past and the distant future, imagine alternative possibilities, formulate mathematical abstractions, construct fictional worlds and discuss entities that have never been observed. Language creates a symbolic dimension of reality in which human beings can coordinate behavior around shared representations.

This symbolic world is not therefore unreal. Money is symbolic, but it can determine whether people eat. Nations are symbolic communities, but their institutions can determine where people live. Laws are symbolic structures, but they can imprison people or protect their rights. Scientific theories are symbolic constructions, but they can successfully predict phenomena and enable technologies that would otherwise be impossible. Human beings consequently inhabit several overlapping levels of reality: physical, biological, psychological, social and symbolic. The higher levels depend upon the lower ones without being reducible to simple descriptions of them.

This is where a scientifically informed theory of emergence becomes particularly valuable. We do not have to choose between crude reductionism and mystical holism. We can recognize that new organizational levels possess properties and regularities that become meaningful only at those levels. A molecule is not merely an atom described more elaborately; a cell is not merely a collection of molecules; a mind is not merely a neuron; and a culture is not merely an individual. Each level depends upon lower levels while exhibiting patterns that require their own explanatory vocabulary.

The universe becomes knowable

Here we can recover one of Teilhard's most beautiful intuitions without accepting his teleology. The universe has produced beings capable of knowing the universe. Matter has become organized into systems capable of constructing models of matter. The same cosmic history that produced stars eventually produced nervous systems capable of discovering stellar nucleosynthesis. Human beings are not outside nature looking in from some metaphysical realm; we are one of nature's own products attempting to reconstruct the history of nature.

But this does not justify saying that the universe evolved in order to know itself. The distinction is crucial. We can say that the universe evolved organisms capable of knowing it without saying that the universe was aiming at self-knowledge. The first statement is a historical observation. The second is a teleological interpretation. The scientific story requires the first but not the second.

Science as cultural self-correction

The emergence of science represents another major transition in the evolution of meaning. Human beings are not merely capable of constructing interpretations of the world; they are capable of testing those interpretations against observations and deliberately organizing social practices around the detection of error. Scientific inquiry is therefore not simply another cultural meaning system. At its best, it is a cultural technology for correcting culturally produced beliefs.

This matters enormously for the cosmic story because cultural evolution does not automatically produce truth. Human beings are perfectly capable of transmitting false beliefs, irrational ideologies and destructive myths across generations. A belief can be socially cohesive without being true. A worldview can increase group solidarity while producing a disastrously distorted picture of reality. Evolutionary success and epistemic success are therefore not identical. A cultural system can survive because it is good at survival, not because its beliefs accurately describe the world.

Science provides a partial solution to this problem by institutionalizing error correction. Measurements can contradict expectations, experiments can fail, predictions can be tested, competing explanations can be compared, and theories can eventually be discarded. Scientific knowledge is consequently not simply accumulated information; it is information embedded in a social process designed, however imperfectly, to distinguish more successful models from less successful ones. If there is genuine cultural progress, this is one of the places where we should look for it.

Evolution does not guarantee wisdom

This also prevents the cosmic narrative from becoming triumphalist. Human cultural evolution has produced antibiotics and Auschwitz, modern astronomy and nuclear weapons, constitutional democracy and mass propaganda. It has produced extraordinary art and extraordinary technologies of distraction. There is no simple arrow from complexity to wisdom. Evolution has provided human beings with capacities, but it has not guaranteed that those capacities will be used well.

This is particularly important when comparing the scientific account with the developmental narratives of Teilhard and Wilber. Both thinkers, in different ways, tend to interpret later evolutionary developments as possessing greater spiritual or developmental value. But history is far less tidy. Later societies can be more knowledgeable and more destructive at the same time. Modernity can overcome forms of superstition while generating new forms of domination. Technological sophistication can expand human freedom while also increasing the scale of human violence. There is therefore no scientific basis for assuming that evolution itself guarantees moral progress.

What becomes of the sacred?

A scientifically grounded account does not have to eliminate the sacred. It simply needs to locate it more carefully. The sacred can be understood as the human capacity to designate certain values, persons, practices, places or ideals as possessing exceptional significance. Religious traditions are one expression of this capacity, but secular cultures possess their own sacred objects and principles: human rights, freedom, democracy, equality, national identity, nature, truth and the dignity of persons.

Such an account does not make the sacred meaningless. It makes the sacred an emergent feature of symbolic creatures attempting to organize collective life around what they regard as ultimately important. Dempsey is therefore onto something important when he connects meaning and sacredness to cultural evolution. The problem arises only when a sociological or psychological account is transformed into a claim about the metaphysical structure of the universe itself. The evolutionary history of religion does not establish that the universe is religious.

And what about God?

At this point the scientific story should deliberately become agnostic. Science can investigate the evolutionary origins of religious cognition, the psychological functions of religious belief, the historical development of religious traditions and the cultural transmission of theological ideas. But none of these investigations establishes or disproves the existence of God. The evolutionary origins of religion do not logically refute God, just as the human capacity for religious experience does not establish God.

This is where a distinction that Dempsey and other evolutionary spiritual thinkers sometimes blur should be maintained. One can interpret the scientific story religiously, but that interpretation is philosophy or theology rather than a direct consequence of physics or biology. A person may see the emergence of consciousness as spiritually significant, or regard the universe as participating in divine creativity, but such claims should not be presented as though thermodynamics or evolutionary biology had secretly demonstrated them. The scientific story can be compatible with theology without itself becoming theology.

A new cosmic narrative

We can now reconstruct the entire story without cosmic teleology. The universe began in a hot, expanding state and evolved through physical processes that produced particles, atoms, stars and galaxies. Stars became sites of nuclear synthesis, generating many of the heavier elements from which planets and organisms would eventually be constructed. Planets formed within the evolving architecture of galaxies and stellar systems. On at least one planet, chemistry became organized into systems capable of maintaining themselves and participating in processes of heredity and selection. Biological evolution subsequently generated an extraordinary diversity of organisms, including increasingly sophisticated nervous systems and cognitive capacities.

One lineage of primates developed particularly powerful capacities for social learning, symbolic communication and cumulative culture. Language enabled information to be transmitted with unprecedented flexibility. Cultural inheritance began to operate alongside biological inheritance. Writing externalized memory. Mathematics created increasingly powerful symbolic representations of abstract relationships. Science institutionalized methods for testing and correcting beliefs. Technology transformed both human environments and human cognitive capacities. Digital systems now externalize enormous quantities of information and create new forms of collective coordination.

None of this requires a cosmic script. It requires only a universe whose physical laws permit complexity, chemistry, life and evolution, together with the contingent historical circumstances that actually occurred. The result is nevertheless astonishing. A universe that began without minds eventually produced organisms capable of reconstructing the history of the universe itself.

From cosmic purpose to cosmic possibility

This suggests a fundamental shift in the way the grand evolutionary story should be formulated. The old metaphysical question asks what the universe is trying to become. The scientific question asks what the laws and historical conditions of the universe make possible. The first question searches for destiny; the second investigates possibility. The first asks why the universe wanted consciousness; the second asks what physical, biological and cultural conditions made consciousness possible. The first looks for meaning written into the cosmos; the second asks how meaning can emerge within the cosmos.

This distinction is especially relevant to Dempsey. His project becomes much more convincing if the phrase "evolution of meaning" refers primarily to the historical emergence and increasing sophistication of meaning-making systems rather than to the claim that meaning itself was a latent cosmic property waiting to be actualized. We can reconstruct a continuous evolutionary history without making every stage identical. Physics makes chemistry possible, chemistry makes self-organizing systems possible, biological evolution makes nervous systems possible, nervous systems make increasingly sophisticated cognition possible, and culture makes cumulative symbolic meaning possible. Continuity does not require sameness.

The real evolutionary miracle

The deepest lesson may therefore be that meaning does not have to be primordial in order to be real. Life did not need to be present in the first moments of the universe for life to become a genuine feature of reality. Consciousness did not need to be explicitly encoded in every atom for conscious organisms to emerge. Human values do not have to be written into the equations of physics in order to matter profoundly to human beings.

Emergence does not mean illusion. It means that reality can acquire new properties when matter becomes organized in new ways. The wetness of water is not a property of an isolated hydrogen atom. The metabolism of a cell is not found in any single molecule. A mind is not found in an isolated neuron. A language is not contained in a single sentence. A civilization is not contained in an individual human being. Yet these higher-level realities are perfectly real. Meaning may belong to the same general category: it is not necessarily a fundamental constituent of the universe, but a property that becomes possible when the universe produces the right kinds of organized systems.

This provides a naturalistic alternative to both reductionism and cosmic mysticism. We do not have to choose between the claim that meaning is "nothing but atoms" and the claim that meaning was built into the universe from the beginning. There is a third possibility: meaning is something that matter can do when organized in sufficiently complex, self-maintaining, information-processing and socially embedded systems.

A post-Teilhardian and post-Wilberian cosmic story

This is where Dempsey's project can be both criticized and rescued. Teilhard was right to see cosmic history as a story in which organization and consciousness become increasingly important, but his Omega Point goes beyond what science can establish. Whitehead was right to reject the picture of the universe as merely inert matter and to emphasize process and becoming, but his metaphysical conclusions cannot simply be extracted from contemporary physics. Wilber was right to insist that biological evolution is only one component of a larger story involving mind and culture, but his concept of cosmic Eros turns developmental patterns into a metaphysical principle. Vervaeke is right to focus on the evolutionary emergence of meaning-making, relevance realization and wisdom, but none of this requires the universe itself to become a conscious agent. Dempsey is right that information, learning and meaning belong in the same broad evolutionary narrative, but he should be careful not to turn the useful analogy between these processes into an ontological identity.

The universe does not have to learn in order for living systems to learn. Evolution does not have to seek consciousness in order to produce conscious organisms. Culture does not have to represent the universe awakening to itself in order for human beings to acquire collective knowledge. And meaning does not have to be present in primordial matter for meaning to become one of the most significant properties of living and cultural systems.

This is, in fact, where Dempsey's project could become genuinely post-Wilberian. He can retain the grand narrative without retaining the metaphysical guarantees. He can retain Teilhard's fascination with cosmic consciousness without requiring an Omega Point. He can retain Whitehead's emphasis on process without turning process philosophy into physics. He can retain Vervaeke's concern with meaning without transforming relevance realization into a cosmic principle. And he can retain the scientific insights of complexity theory without confusing self-organization with teleology.

The universe without a script

There is a final irony. Removing cosmic purpose from the story does not make the universe meaningless. It makes human responsibility more serious. If there is no guaranteed evolutionary destination, nothing assures us that the future will be wiser than the past. If evolution has no moral direction, we cannot simply trust evolution to deliver progress. If complexity does not equal goodness, we must decide what kinds of complexity are worth cultivating. If cultural evolution can proceed in destructive as well as constructive directions, then our task is not merely to participate in evolution but to become increasingly conscious of how we shape its cultural future.

There is no need for an Omega Point waiting at the end of history. There is no scientific evidence for a cosmic Eros promising eventual integration. There is no guarantee that Spirit will correct our mistakes. There is, instead, a universe that has produced life, a biosphere that has produced minds, and minds that have acquired the extraordinary ability to imagine futures that do not yet exist.

The future is therefore genuinely open. And that openness may be the deepest meaning evolution has given us—not a destiny but a possibility, not a cosmic script but a history, not a universe that knows where it is going but a universe in which some of its contents have become capable of asking where they should go next.

That is a cosmic story worth telling.

And unlike the older narratives of Teilhard, Wilber and evolutionary spirituality, it does not require the universe to have secretly intended us. It requires only us to recognize what actually happened. The universe became capable of life; life became capable of mind; mind became capable of culture; culture became capable of cumulative knowledge; and knowledge has now become capable of turning back upon the entire cosmic process that produced it.

The astonishing thing is therefore not that the universe was heading toward us. The astonishing thing is that we happened at all.