Disclaimer: this post threatens to meander deep into the territory of bitter instant coffee and meagre jazz cigarettes.
Ages ago I said that science is all about the models, not about absolute truth. A scientific model is one thing, the thing that it models is quite another. It's not a case of "never the twain shall meet", but they are very definitely distinct.
I would argue that one absolutely crucial distinction is that models necessarily make sense. They have order and logic and they are predictable and clear and useful. (Obviously, the clarity of a particular model may depend on one's expertise in the area and the size of one's brain). If a model is not all these things then it is a poor model.
The same is
not necessarily true of the thing being modelled. There is no obligation on the observable universe to 'make sense'. The universe does not need to have an "answer" in order for it to exist. Even if the human race, or any other sentient entity in the universe, never figures out exactly what the universe is and how it works, that won't stop the universe from existing.
Here is where it gets a little "instant coffee" ... apologies in advance if I accidentally use the word 'teleological' at any point. I like the word a lot more than the concept.
The human brain has evolved to cope with our environment. One way it does this is by creating simplified models of the outside world to allow us to predict the way the world works. The outside world is
much too complicated to analyse in precise detail at every step. Every tree is different, but the brain can filter out the differences and recognise a tree as a tree. Conversely, every human face is remarkably similar, but the brain can easily tell them apart. These are capabilities that we take for granted, but, when you analyse them, they're pretty remarkable. The brain, in effect, superimposes simpler and more useful models and does its "thinking" with these models rather than with what it directly observes of the world. It is a cheat, but it means we don't have to carry our brains around in wheelbarrows. And it means if we have ten boxes of ten apples each, we don't need to count every single apple to know we have a hundred apples.
Science is an extension of this natural talent. We have re-used our capacity to form intuitive models of our immediate environment in order to form more and more abstract models of the universe. But the origin of these models and this method is our brain and its method of dealing with the outside world.
This is not to suggest that all our models "make sense" purely because we invented them. There
is apparent order in the world. When we compare our models with the observable universe, they match to a very useful degree. But they never match exactly. And we can conceive of things within these "simple" models that do not (and cannot) exist in the "real" universe ...
infinite numbers, perfect
Platonic solids, the humble
pi.
Plato himself found this a bit of a headache, and his brain probably
did need carrying around in a wheelbarrow. Keen readers may want to read (or read up on) Plato's Republic and the
allegory of the cave. Very keen readers may want to have a look at some
Hume too. (I studied philosophy at a Scottish University so I
may be recommending Hume in order to spread the pain ... but I would like to think it's more generous than that)
Stumbling finally to my point: we cannot argue that the the fact that the Universe "makes sense" means that we require a knowing creator because the Universe does not necessarily make any sort of sense at all. There is no necessity for an answer so there is no necessity for an entity asking the question.
There ... and I didn't mention Telly Savalas once.