Great discussion. I’ve been a fan of Shermer since reading Free Inquiry and Skeptik .
It's not that the universe has a purpose that was designed or willed into its big bang origins, such as humans understand the purpose of all living lifeforms, there are mathematically reaveled fundamental laws that govern the known universe and all of its known contents. These are clearly more than ample, given the right circumstances, a planet orbiting a star in the habitable zone, such as Earth, to give rise to universal truths and laws that produce, given the right subatomic and molecular elements, the most complex biological structures in the known universe. A significant portion of these lifeforms develop emergent properties such as cognitive processes that in plenty of examples produce conscious self-awareness, which is not yet fully understood.
The human neural-architecture is the most complex structure in the known universe, and we are still discovering more of its structure and functioning. The majority of the computations of the human neural-structure functions entirely independent of conscious awareness. Precisely how the human neural-structure produces the emergent property of conscious self-awareness and free-will, which is itself bound to the molecular properties of human physiology set within specific scenarios such as functioning within a social setting, given that humans are a social species, is not yet known and may well in principle be beyond the limits of human understanding, Noam Chomsky's conceptual distinction between problems and mysteries. The social scenarios within which humans have propagated the human genome therefore define the horizons of the functioning of the emergent properties of the human neural-architecture and the emergent neural computations that give rise to conscious self-awareness and conscious social awareness.
References
Kuhn, Michael Lawrence,
Shermer, Michael, (2023), Does the Cosmos have a Reason? Closer to Truth
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