Finding Purpose
in a
Godless World

Finding Purpose in a Godless World

A psychiatrist presents a compelling argument for how human purpose and caring emerged in a spontaneous and unguided universe.

Can there be purpose without God? This book is about how human purpose and caring, like consciousness and absolutely everything else in existence, could plausibly have emerged and evolved unguided, bottom-up, in a spontaneous universe.

A random world—which according to all the scientific evidence and despite our intuitions is the actual world we live in—is too often misconstrued as nihilistic, demotivating, or devoid of morality and meaning. Drawing on years of wide-ranging, intensive clinical experience as a psychiatrist, and his own family experience with cancer, Dr. Lewis helps readers understand how people cope with random adversity without relying on supernatural belief. In fact, as he explains, although coming to terms with randomness is often frightening, it can be liberating and empowering too.

Written for those who desire a scientifically sound yet humanistic view of the world, Lewis’s book examines science’s inroads into the big questions that occupy religion and philosophy. He shows how our sense of purpose and meaning is entangled with mistaken intuitions that events in our lives happen for some intended cosmic reason and that the universe itself has inherent purpose. Dispelling this illusion, and integrating the findings of numerous scientific fields, he shows how not only the universe, life, and consciousness but also purpose, morality, and meaning could, in fact, have emerged and evolved spontaneously and unguided. There is persuasive evidence that these qualities evolved naturally and without mystery, biologically and culturally, in humans as conscious, goal-directed social animals.

While acknowledging the social and psychological value of progressive forms of religion, the author respectfully critiques even the most sophisticated theistic arguments for a purposeful universe. Instead, he offers an evidence-based, realistic yet optimistic and empathetic perspective. Finding Purpose in a Godless World will help people to see the scientific worldview of an unguided, spontaneous universe as awe-inspiring and foundational to building a more compassionate society.

About Dr. Lewis

Ralph Lewis, MD, is a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada; an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto; and a psycho-oncology consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto. He works primarily as a full-time clinician in a time-pressured hospital-based practice, focusing particularly on youth and young adult psychiatry, and (separately) on psycho-oncology in adults and the elderly.

Since 2018 Dr. Lewis has been blogging for Psychology Today (he initially started out blogging for Sunnybrook in 2017). Prior to the publication of his 2018 book Finding Purpose in a Godless World he had published articles on a psychiatric understanding of belief and purpose in Skeptic magazine and The Human Prospect, and delivered presentations on these topics at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s TAM conference, the Kurtz Institute for Science and Human Values and Canadian Association for Spiritual Care. Since 2018 he has published, presented and interviewed in a wide range of forums, while continuing his time-intensive full-time clinical practice. Many of those articles, presentations and interviews are available on this website under the Articles menu tab, Interviews tab, and Videos tab.

Dr. Lewis helps people seeking meaning in the face of severe and tragic adversity, in addition to having extensive clinical experience with complex and subtle psychiatric and psychological conditions. His writing reflects his diverse interests, which include human rationality / irrationality, the formation of belief systems, the unreliability of intuition and subjective perception in shaping explanations and beliefs, the tendency to see patterns and intention in randomness, the neural basis of motivation and purposiveness, the physical and evolutionary basis of consciousness, and many other diverse topics pertaining to the human condition.

Dr. Lewis obtained his MD (MBBCh) in 1990 at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where he grew up. He completed residency training in Psychiatry at the University of Toronto in 1996 and went on to do a two year clinical research fellowship jointly at Sunnybrook and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (formerly the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry), with a concurrent Master of Science in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. He has held his present staff physician appointment at Sunnybrook and his faculty appointment at the University of Toronto since 1998.

Ralph, his wife Karin and their three children try to live purposeful, inspired lives in a godless world—appreciating the random, precarious, and precious nature of life and knowing that while the universe doesn’t care, people can and do care.

Read Dr. Lewis’s Blog