Cosmic Intelligence Encompasses Randomness Without Design

A while back I had two talks over zoom and tea with a librarian at University of California, Davis, a man who has started “tea, meditation and dialogue” sessions online and on campus.

For me the conversation led to new insights, links between believing in the total randomness of the universe, atheism and the multiverse speculation.

The librarian fellow is a tea connoisseur, and though I’m not, I like tea, having never acquired a taste for coffee. I was curious about his online Tuesday tea to start the day, and participated in one of the short ceremonies.

The ritual begins with tealeaves (no bags of course), a bowl (not a cup), and very hot water. The four other participants had some specialty teas and a bowl, and they all were, except me ironically given that my meditations always take place in nature, outdoors.

The zoom session is advertised as “tea and meditation,” and the ceremony is short and solemn, lasting less than 20 minutes. The librarian conducted a Japanese-like tea ritual, and guided participants in some breathing exercises, neither of which are my cup of tea.

On Friday, the tea fellow hosts a small in-person group outside the library, where he serves tea and the first ‘round’ (cup) is sipped in silence. Since he and I seemed to think together over zoom, my intent was to drive the two hours down to Davis for an in-person tea/meditation/dialogue session.

At the end of our second hour-long online dialogue however, which I felt had gone well, the librarian referenced a remark about truth that I had made in passing during our previous talk. He questioned whether there was any such thing as “objective truth” — a term I didn’t use and don’t like, since it implies separation between the observer and the observed.

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Suddenly his worldview became clear. He had likened conspiracy theories to the need to believe in God, saying both involved believing in a “super controlling intelligence.” I didn’t disagree.

In the spirit of inquiry I asked: Is there only randomness, or is there an underlying order in the universe, which isn’t pre-determinative but includes both a random and creative element?

The dialogue facilitator emphatically replied that the universe was purely random, and that people are predisposed to see patterns, just as there is a need to believe in God and conspiracy theories.

I pointed out that the consensus among astrophysicists is that the universe is “fine-tuned” since the Big Bang, with laws that permit life to unfold and evolve as it has on Earth, including the laws of gravity, star and black hole formation, which underlie chemistry and biology.

Randomists, who are often dogmatic atheists, have gotten around this “problem” by proposing “the multiverse,” a speculative and intellectually dishonest theory that upholds randomness by maintaining our universe is but one of an infinite number of universes, the one that by chance we happen to have evolved in.

Randomists seem to fear that an acknowledgment of a fine-tuned universe (‘uni’ means one) implies that there must be a Great Designer, a Creator God that set the whole shebang in motion. However just as the laws of the universe are intrinsic, the intelligence imbuing the universe is immanent. No separate agency is necessary.

Dialogue, as I propose it, means finding the truth of things, such as randomness and God, through questioning together. That was too much for the tea and dialogue fellow, a rock-ribbed individualist who believes there is only “my perspective” vs. “your perspective.”

When I pointed out that such a worldview means that there is no such thing as truth (without implying objective, fixed truth), he ended the dialogue with an individualist’s circularity: “How do I know if the truth I’m seeing actually agrees with someone else’s?”

I responded that shared insight into ever-changing truth isn’t a matter of agreement or disagreement, which flows from the false idea that we’re separate individuals.

He then indicated he didn’t want to talk again. Rigid beliefs aren’t just held by believers.

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