I think you underestimate how radical a rational position can be.
You've invoked consciousness, purpose and meaning as if they were important. All of which are like the higher being - they aren't real outside psychology. They are compact labels we made up to try to capture some aspects of our psychology. They help us predict each other's behaviour and communicate effectively.
There's no hard problem of consciousness, no problem of meaning or purpose, no need to ground anything in faith, no solutions exist, because all these things are psychological concepts that have no meaning at all outside the psychological context. They aren't nonsense - they are important to us as people - but that doesn't make them real in any fundamental way. They are contingent on the details of our brains. Its very important to realize that we don't need cosmology to be compatible with these things.
Consider how difficult it is to even define any of these terms in satisfying way. They are all metaphorical, like the higher being.
This means that:
> what is actually a very reasonable idea: there is some purpose to the universe which is probably beyond our understanding and which will never be revealed by science.
is incoherent. 'Purpose' is a property that is convenient to ascribe to brains. There is absolutely no justification to apply it to anything else. And if you look even a little closely, you can't even find it in brains.
You've invoked consciousness, purpose and meaning as if they were important. All of which are like the higher being - they aren't real outside psychology. They are compact labels we made up to try to capture some aspects of our psychology. They help us predict each other's behaviour and communicate effectively.
There's no hard problem of consciousness, no problem of meaning or purpose, no need to ground anything in faith, no solutions exist, because all these things are psychological concepts that have no meaning at all outside the psychological context. They aren't nonsense - they are important to us as people - but that doesn't make them real in any fundamental way. They are contingent on the details of our brains. Its very important to realize that we don't need cosmology to be compatible with these things.
Consider how difficult it is to even define any of these terms in satisfying way. They are all metaphorical, like the higher being.
This means that:
> what is actually a very reasonable idea: there is some purpose to the universe which is probably beyond our understanding and which will never be revealed by science.
is incoherent. 'Purpose' is a property that is convenient to ascribe to brains. There is absolutely no justification to apply it to anything else. And if you look even a little closely, you can't even find it in brains.