Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies

> Notice the glass of champagne, indicating their celebratory mood at the time of the momentous discovery.

This looks more like a glass of wine, though in a plot twist there’s an open bottle of beer behind it.

Tangentially, I’m actually a bit surprised that any of the bricks got stuck together.

It seems like arbitrarily ruling out divine meaning as a hypothesis for why the world is unexpectedly orderly is not being entirely intellectually honest. It's like a theist ruling out evolution as a possible cause of our existence. Divine meaning (in various forms) is historically a very popular explanation, and to just rule it out with nothing more than a "we shan't have need of that" (presumably with an implicit "we are so much more superior to those foolish ancients") seems to me to be just hiding from yourself that you've made materialism/rationalism into your religion.

I think divine meaning actually opens up some really interesting possibilities. The 20th century revealed a lot of limitations with a meaningless world. As Nietzsche and others apparently predicted some of the horrors of the 20th century, with godless Communism and Fascism (not sure if Fascism was godless or man-is-god) resulting in the deaths of around 100 million people, and in the case of Communism, destroying beauty and vibrancy and enslaving entire countries to the State. Now the bleak meaninglessness that troubled intellectuals has filtered down into western culture broadly, and the results are not looking pretty so far. But if all the beautiful parts of the world are at all reflective of a divine meaning, that seems potentially much more interesting that meaninglessness.

The divine meaning hypothesis is not scientifically testable (although neither is any other hypothesis, really), but we do actually have evidence of divine meaning, from mystics of all sorts. It's not clear to me how one goes about evaluating mystics, but there is something there. There are also plenty of stories of people interacting with the divine, as well as the "supernatural": saint stories, ghost encounters, NDEs, etc. There's a lot of noise there, probably more so than the mystics, especially given charlatans and people wanting to believe. But even the existence of a consistently strong desire for meaning on our part suggests that there is a decent possibility of something being there. Our desire might just be a wish for order in chaos, but it might also be an indication that we are longing for the divine meaning.