And I believe this is what most people have a hard time swallowing. All the weirdness, the changes, the time, the mysteriousness, the complexity, all that would fit just fine in many cosmologies. But what you tend not to find in the explanations people have given for the universe, from Egyptians to Nahuatl to Yoruba to Greek to Chinese, is a world of complete arbitrariness and purposelessness and unintelligence.

As intelligent creatures ourselves who understand things in terms of purpose and intention and problems to be solved and how various actions or things do or do not solve those problems, we see the world in those terms. They define our experience. And it is by means of that intelligence, that ability to dissect meaning and purpose and function, that we have been able to gain our great knowledge of the universe. So, sitting atop the peak that intelligence lifted us to, it’s hard cheese to have what we’ve reached at that peak inform us that none of it actually exists in the mountain below us.

The cry, “So we’re just a bunch of monkeys?!” isn’t really or an objection to our physical similarity to apes or simians, it’s outrage against the assertion of fundamental unintelligence. That our experience of meaning and purpose and thought and mind are really just a side effects of overdeveloped adaptive mechanisms we happen to have been randomly gifted by blind, mechanistic processes.

Point out to me that I’m pretty similar to an ape, sure, no big deal; in many ways I’m also similar to a whale (and have casually made the comparison myself). But comparing me to a rock, that’s an insult. It attacks my very nature and everything I have built my understanding of myself and world on, everything coherent that makes up my experience of the world and gives it texture and meaning and intelligibility and makes me different from a rock. Telling me I realy am just a rock, tumbling along mindlessly, makes nonsense of my entire psychological and intellectual experience, and fundamentally, that’s really the only experience I know.

So that, I think, is the real problem, the philosophical conclusion or assumption or assertion of evolutionary theory, or materialism, however you like to characterize it. Not the actual processes themselves. The vision of the universe were being sold.

We can’t help but look around us and see purpose and intention and intelligence and order everywhere, from physics to psychology to biology. And it puzzles us that the mode of expression for unintelligent, unpurposed processes should be in what appears to be the most unfathomably vast structure of intelligence imaginable.

Life. The complexity of life, the way it solves the problems it encounters, the creativity, the enormous brilliance, the perfection, the seemingly obvious intention, just smack us in the face continually, at both microscopic and macroscopic levels. The very nature of life is tied up with DNA, which is an information storage device of the highest order. Information is not a physical property. And the information DNA contains is all about purpose and specialization, intention, use, reasons, solutions to problems. Taking the blind bits of matter and organizing them for a defined and stored purpose. That’s what life, in its essence, is. It’s what distinguishes it from unliving matter. Intelligence, purpose, specificity, design. Achieving a specific end out all the possible random ends that matter could have blindly produced by deliberate intervention.

That knowledge is written so deeply into us and our understanding of the world that we just can’t deal with any explanation that doesn’t affirm it. How can it be that the amazing, unending depths of intelligence we discover in molecular biology and macrobiology, from top to bottom, from the smallest cells and proteins and DNA, all the way up to whole species and their place in their environment, written across all time; how it is that all that vast summation of purpose and brilliance and intention and problem solving and brilliant design is the result of and reducible ultimately to, blind, purposeless, unintelligent forces?

It it all really so reducible, so exolicable without any reference to purpose or meaning? All that? It’s all?merely chance and molecules banging about? Just the banging of keys by dead, material forces that we somehow perceive as a symphony? Rocks falling on a piano. Why should that be so? What kind of crazy mixed-up world is that? How did my own intelligence and carefully acquired information but ot from an endless historical procession of purpose and development and learning lead me to disprove the entire concept that defines the universe?

If the universe is not to be haunted with purpose or intelligence, and the scientists are the Ghostbusters, won’t that task include busting themselves? We humans are the ones who keep seeing ghosts everywhere, including within ourselves. Can we even hope to successfully remove them from our minds and our outlook and see the world as it is, or are we forever doomed to misinterpret the world through the lens of our own fanciful psychology? If we change our minds and allow the possibility of a metaphysically haunted universe, what trouble does that buy us? Do such philosophical speculations lie within the purview of science at all?

Physics, at its furthest reaches, runs into similar problems. Considering all the order and balance and design, why should it be so? The three traditional explanations are: God, logic, or nothing. Since God is not an allowed explanation, being unscientific, and as far as science has been able to tell there is nothing logically necessary about the universe as it is, that only leaves us with nothing. But nothing often strikes us as a pretty inadequate explanation, especially for the sort of crazy, unlikely place we live in.

Multiple universe theory is one nice solution to this problem, but is fundamentally unscientific in nature, lying as it does outside its bounds and testability. Most such theories are really closer to stories than hypotheses, and the value they provide is in solving the philosophical human problem rather than any actual testable problem in physics.

Much like in the biological examples, the problem that rankles and that multiple universe theory tangles with is the denial of the appearance of purpose and design and intelligence, regardless of appearances to the contrary and how we understand and perceive the world. The goal of both branches of theory is not merely to explain mechanisms, but address human concerns about the apparent purposiveness and intelligibility and unliklihood of the world we find ourselves in. Not only must the mechanisms that work the levers be explained, the ghosts must be expelled from them. The apparent intelligibility and purposiveness and unliklihood are just an illusion. We merely fill the universe with the ghosts of our own projected psychology. All is perfectly explicable, and you don’t need to bring any of that into it. You just need to put your faith in things like an inaccessible infinitude of variant universes, and our own can be kept safely materialistic.

Frankly, it seems to many people like the universe really is already quite full of ghosts that cannot be effectively expelled, and our only really solid evidence against them is the extra-scientific, philosophical assertion that they don’t really exist. That assertion does not itself exist as an observation of science, but as an external addition to it. It cannot be directly derived from the data.

Science does not deal with such questions, because it cannot test them, because they do not deal with things that exist in a physical space. But they are, in fact, very real in our experience, and can be tested by means such as philosophy within the non-physical, mental space. And considering that all our understanding of the physical space also only exists there, at some point we have to grant some credence to the idea that the physical world is, in our experience, already haunted. In fact it might be far more accurate to state that the idea of a non-intelligent, universe haunts and disrupts our mental space.

We grant special favor these days to the reality of the physical world, because it has gained us such power over things and one another. But all that knowledge only exists in and depends upon our existence in the non-physical mental space of our own existential, psychological experience. How you see the universe as existing and how you see different questions and answers as being real or answerable will greatly affect your values, reactions, approaches, and conclusions.

Philosophy cannot be collapsed and encompassed wholly into materialistic science, but materialistic science can be (and in practice already is, for it exists within our mental frame and knowledge and world of ideas) encompassed by philosophy. And the answers to those sorts of questions, philosophical questions, trouble us and touch us far more deeply than those of science (which are very, very interesting and useful), because they touch the very heart of our existence and experience, which is fundamentally about and defined by meaning, purpose, intelligence, significance.

That is why we struggle so with the assertions of evolution. Not because they are so hard to swallow or understand, not because of the science and mechanisms and processes. But because of what the evolutionists (being by nature not just a bundle of physical processes but philosophers themselves) add in addition as a philosophical conclusion about the nature of the universe and ourselves.

None of this, of course, is an argument for deciding in favor of one particular viewpoint or another. It lies outside the technical data. It’s simply an exploration of the problem and why it is felt so deeply and so hard to resolve, when people have found it so easy to accept a multitude of varying and complex explanations about the universe and ourselves. It’s an explanation for why this one is such a problem. It’s not because of its details. You should hear some of the crazy details people have been willing to roll along with across cultures throughout time. It’s because of the philosophy.