According to my reading of Brian Cox's Wiki page he's not an outright atheist which I suppose makes him agnostic. He always comes over as Mr. Nice Guy, completely genuine in his atheism agnosticism. For me he challenges the Christian fundamentalist tendency to use Romans 1:18ff as an indictment on outgroups, sometimes as a pretext to accuse them of suppressing the truth in their wickedness. That, I believe, is not true of Brian Cox; he's entirely genuine in his expression of what I would identify as his resigned nihilistic world view. Let's remember that Romans 1 was written in Roman times and was addressing a very different cultural landscape of myriad minor gods and contrasting it with Judeo-Christianity's strict monotheistic creationism.
In Brian's latest series, Universe, he does his best to wring out some kind of meaning & comfort from his depiction of an eons long cosmic history that ends in the absurdity of meaninglessness and darkness. From my perspective the story Brian tells, although intriguing & aesthetic, has a denouement that is dreary and devoid of eternal hope. He charts the relatively brief flicker of human civilization which according to Brian must, in the vast expanse of cosmic time, ultimately be snuffed out like a candle and forgotten. Brian might be agnostic but really his is an atheistic view of the cosmos which gives no cognizance to the theistic possibilities of agnosticism; in fact I would go as far as to say it is not unlike H. G. Wells' nihilistic vision of the destiny of human civilization we find in Wells' book "The Time Machine".
However, I wish there were more affable atheists and agnostics around like Brian. Ironically, I feel I have more in common with his epistemic attitudes than I do with vociferous fundamentalists like Ken Ham.
In the following interleave format I provide a selection of Brian's comments around the subject of meaning that I found in the first episode of his Universe series. This isn't a verbatim transcript and it's highly selective in its quotes.
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Brian: There are 200 billion stars in our Galaxy and 2 trillion Galaxies in the universe.
My Comment: Breath taking statistics in one sense, but in terms of the computational resources needed to create living complexity those stats are actually quite miniscule. Take the logarithm of those figures and you end up with small numbers.
Brian: The universe is vast, terrifying and incomprehensible. It's only natural for us live out our lives oblivious of it. There are two perspectives: We are grains of sand adrift in an infinite indifferent ocean or nature's most magnificent creation.
My Comment: Yes, Brian's right, the Universe is vast, terrifying and incomprehensible. It's incomprehensible because on the face of it is devoid of anthropic significance & relevance, an utterly anti-anthropic enigma to average opinion; better to remain abstracted by commonplace necessities! And yes, Christian theists have been hard put to it to make full sense of it all since the demise of the Ptolemaic Solar System. As for the two perspectives, I'll vote for the second perspective; the human organism is a magnificent creation, an informational miracle, an organized material contingency of unparalleled surprisal and completely unwarranted by any logic known to man. If the configurations of life really were the result of a mere random selection you could search all the grains of dust across the visible universe and not find an example of life.
Brian: The story of the cosmos is surely the greatest story ever told.
My Comment: Certainly a great story but not quite the greatest story in my opinion. The greatest story is the the revelation of the story of salvation (Philippians 2:1-11).
Brian: The Sun has created the things which brings meaning to the cosmos - life & human beings. Ancient cultures deified the Sun.
My Comment: The traditional deification of the Sun is seen here to have a metaphorical truth. This metaphor recognizes that without the Sun life wouldn't happen. The prehistoric agriculturalists understood the importance of the Sun and the cycles of the heavens. Not surprisingly then, they saw those cycles as having divine significance. It is this tendency to deify the heavens (and nature) that Genesis 1 tries to head-off
Brian: Far back at the beginning gravity began to sculpt the universe in hydrogen and helium. The thing that brings meaning to the universe is life and life is just complex chemistry. The Sun had power to turn planets into worlds. Quite by chance the earth formed.
My Comment: In this first episode of Universe Brian repeats more than once his view that he sees meaning exclusively intrinsic to the very ephemeral appearance of life; nowhere else is meaning to be found. If the chances he talks of failed to bring about the existence of life then there would be no meaning; in Brian's world meaning is captive to chance. Brian uses that emotionally loaded word "just"; Viz: "life is just complex chemistry". But given that this chemistry, if appropriately configured, generates the conscious first person perspective there is no "just" about it far as I'm concerned; this is a highly anthropocentric feature of matter. Chemistry has been miraculously provisioned to generate consciousness, if used rightly. The human mind is more than the third person perspective, a perspective which is bound to only see the first person perspective as a complex organization of interacting particles (i.e. chemistry).
Brian: How can the complexity of life emerge completely naturally in the universe: It's the huge temperature difference between the Sun and the cold of space which creates life. This temperature difference allows for the building of complexity. Life is miraculous!
My Comment: In talking about life emerging "completely naturally" I guess Brian is thinking of its emergence being sufficiently provisioned by the natural laws of physics. The extremely low entropy of the Hot Sun/Cold Space temperature difference is exploited by those laws to create the low entropy configurations of life. Many naïve Christian young earthists still falsely believe the second law of thermodynamics is an outright barrier to the emergence of life, not realizing that entropy is a crude parameter which only measures the statistical weight of a total system. Entropy is an extensive rather than an intensive variable and therefore given that the 2nd law only pertains to this extensive variable it is not in-and-of-itself sufficient condition to rule out the possibility of increases in order in localized pockets of the system; the second law only tells us about the inevitably increasing statistical weight of the whole system. Crystal formation is a simple case in point: Crystal formation entails a considerable local increase in order although the overall system in which crystals are formed increases in entropy.
To be fair, however, life in its complexity of organization is a very different kettle of fish to simple crystals. But to prove that localized increases in order can't happen and that life can't evolve requires a much more thorough understanding of the implications of the natural physical regime and whether it allows for the probable existence of localized pockets of complex organisation. In particular there is neither proof nor disproof of the mathematical existence of the spongeam, the necessary condition for evolution. The spongeam is a structure in configuration space that considerably constrains the random diffusive dynamic of conventional evolution. This structure entails an overall increase in entropy with time and yet pockets of complex order may be permitted if the channels of the spongeam funnel evolutionary migration through regions of complex order. But at least one fundamentalist seems to have twigged that the analytical difficulties here are such that he has advised the 2nd law not be used as a way of trying to refute evolution.
Brian rightly sees life as a miracle. But in what sense does he see it as a miracle? Is he aware that any physical system which generates life in a relatively short cosmic time must have a miracle of contingency at its heart? (See here for more)
Brian: We exist because of the sun. We don't need to invent imaginary gods to explain the universe. We can replace them with the real thing; everything has been created and crafted by stars.
My Comment: This really does look like the sort of thing an atheist would say. It also looks like the classic exclusive-OR of dualism, that is, the "God did it" or "natural forces did it" paradigm where the suggestion is that if it's one then it's not the other. I criticize this false dualism more fully here.
Brian: But dark will eventually descend as the stars fade. Red dwarfs like Trappist-1 (already 7 billion years old) will, 5 billion years from now, see our Sun flicker and fade way forever. The death of the Sun is just one of many and cosmically speaking is an inconsequential event. But it would be the end of a glorious time of art, music, poetry and science and that does matter. The fragility of our lives makes them valuable.
My Comment: But valuable only to us, otherwise, according to Brian, our lives are of no significant import in the wider cosmic context.
Brian's prognostications here are very reminiscent of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine a story which contrasts the halcyon days of human civilization with its eventual & inevitable demise when seen in the big picture. The Sunset of Mankind, Wells called it in his chapter 6. The above is Brian's Sunset of Mankind. His quoting a glorious time of art, music, poetry and science is a bit one sided though: The history of humanity includes many, many brutally ugly injustices & sins, injustices & sins that will never be called to account & settled according to Brian's Sunset picture (Or Wells' picture for that matter).
Brian: In 10 trillion years the last star (which will be a red dwarf) will fade. The universe becomes a void without light, life or meaning. The darkness will last forever. As the stars fade so does all possibility of life and meaning. The stars illuminated the dark and allowed us to illuminate it too.
My Comment: The anti-climax to end all anti-climaxes! Brian is asking us to gain some comfort from the idea that we are, or rather were, a tiny island of meaning which is eventually and inevitably swallowed up by the dark abyssal deep of chaos (See Genesis 1:2). The kaoskampf ends in defeat for humanity on this account. If Brian is agnostic and caught between atheism and theism he's not giving much space to the possibilities of theism. Perhaps he's hoping for a revelation and a ray of light to break through the gloom. That, we can only leave in the hands of the Almighty Himself.
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Notice that in order to sketch out his grim prognostication for humanity Brian has assumed it's just a case of extrapolating the laws of physics far into the future. But there is an asymmetry between past a future: The past provides us with observational evidence of itself in terms of the signals it sends us; a consequence of increasing entropy. There are no such signals and therefore no such observations to be made of the future. See this book where I take up this question with a Genesis 1 literalist & fundamentalist who thinks that for scientists reconstructing the past is just a case of back-extrapolation rather than of observation and therefore treats the past and future symmetrically and as equally speculative.
Relevant links:
Brian Cox and the Fallacies of Hope
Footnote
* The Sunset of Mankind was the title of chapter 6 of H. G. Wells' science fiction romance, The Time Machine.
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