People who invest time and mental effort in the study of religion and
philosophy often are motivated to do so by one or more very basic questions
about themselves and the world, questions that should not be surprising
even to those who have less interest in these fields of study.
Some of the more common questions are: Where did the world come from? Where
did I come from? Why do I exist? Why does the world exist? How should I
live my life and why? What is the meaning of life? What purpose do we have
in living?
Many—probably most—humans are dismissive of questions like
this. There's no mental energy available for theorizing, when it's
already too difficult just surviving from one day to the next, or too
exhausting intellectually and emotionally trying to meet one's family
and workplace obligations. Thinking too long about open-ended problems of
philosophy is not a priority, indeed not considered a wise use of one's
time. For many people the presence of an organized religious group in their
immediate community gives the comforting impression that at least someone
with authority knows and is satisfied with answers to questions like those
mentioned above. For others, these and similar questions are scorned
because of a culture of anti-intellectualism and hyper-focus on materialistic
gain. Even intellectuals will often prefer to relegate such questions to a
remote hierarchy of scientific “experts” in the most abstruse
realms of theorizing.
What questions like this are trying to get at is a set of concerns about
the nature of personal identity and of the world that is perceived
incompletely by our senses. One can ask, “Who am I?”, or in a
more existential formulation, “Who is it that is asking this
question?” Am “I” a bit of epiphenomenal froth floating
upon the sea of electrical impulses in the “meat machine”
brain? Am “I” an eternal spirit briefly trapped in a gross
physical body? Am “I” an illusion to be transcended by the
“no-self”? Different thinkers have affirmed various different
answers to these questions over the past four thousand (or more) years.
To complicate matters, someone asking one of these questions may be looking
for an answer that conforms to the way they primarily interpret the words
and phrases being used in the question. One person may ask
“why” a phenomenon occurred or how a state of affairs came to
be, meaning only what was the chain of causation that led to the phenomenon
or state, from some defined starting point in the past. Another person may
assume a conscious motivator or agent behind the event being questioned,
and therefore may ask “why” meaning what was the intent behind
it. In either case, the person may be asking about immediate causes or
something that involves a wider time window. Not only what was the
immediate causal sequence that led to an event, but what was the history
behind that immediate cause. Not only what was the immediate intent of a
conscious agent, but what was the ultimate goal that the immediate action
was intended to serve. This is not only a question of interpretation for
philosophical questions. Someone asking why a plane flew into a World Trade
Center tower might get an account of the pilot's actions in the last
hours prior to that event, might get a summary of the goals of the
terrorists as described by their leaders, might get a history of political
and military conflicts in the Middle East during the late 20th century, or
any number of replies that looked at longer or shorter time windows and at
psychosocial or purely mechanical explanations of what led up to the
crash. Very often we think we know what the questioner means when asking
“why” questions. Sometimes we are right.
The presence or absence of a conscious agent also makes questions about
what something “means” ambiguous. One person asking what a
phenomenon or object “means” may be asking what does it
signify, represent, stand in place of—in other words, what other
object or phenomenon is the initial one pointing to or suggesting, according
to some shared coding system (or more imaginative interpretation scheme, as one
finds in works of literary criticism sometimes). And what is signified could be
something very concrete and specific, or could be something more abstract
or conceptual that in turn points to yet something else. The blip on a flight
controller's radar “means” one particular plane, the image of boy
and girl stick figues on a school crossing road sign “means”
some unspecified children may enter the roadway, the stylized heart symbol
on a greeting card “means” the sender is nominally expressing
love toward the recipient, etc. But the “meaning” can also
relate to values, both the values that the listener holds and those that
the listener presumes the speaker holds (perhaps shared, perhaps
divergent). Values, especially those relating to “good” and
“bad” judgments, might relate to emotions, to habits (of thought or
behavior), or to some notion of utility (“what tasks is this tool
good for?”) or aesthetics (“this color carpet is good in the
den”). The word “flag” may represent a piece of cloth or
just an image that resembles one. Or it may represent the culture and way
of life that one associates with one's country (or with the country of
a hostile power). And this leads again to intent. What did the speaker
intend when they said “flag”, in terms of either a literal
interpretation or of something more associative and value-laden? Or,
perhaps what may not be exactly the same question, what did the speaker
intend the listener to understand by the word in context, even when the
speaker might have an understanding based on different values? (When
Victor Laszlo conducts “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca, one can
see two different intents being served in the same act and in the same moment.)
In everyday conversations we very often have to resolve the ambiguities based on contextual clues and prior knowledge about the speaker, often in real-time. In philosophical or religious discussions this is fraught with opportunities for miscommunication and misunderstanding, even when we are familiar with our interlocutor. The scale within which we perceive the phenomena of the world and of our own thought processes is not necessarily appropriate to questions of cosmic order or inquiries as to the nature of the subatomic constituents of “reality”—what allows us to talk about causes, reasons, intentions, definitions and values with another human, difficult as that may seem at times, is that we share a roughly similar notion of scale, one which makes the interpretation of certain words and concepts appear “commonsensical” in many cases. When we expand our thinking and our discussions to processes and objects whose domain has a scale vastly different from the one within which we normally interact with the world, our “commonsensical” notions are either not helpful or actively obstructive to the development of understanding.
When the question is “why does anything exist” we have to first
interrogate what each of the terms in that question means. What does it
mean to say a thing exists? Things exist in our imagination that have no
solidity or force in the physical world, and similarly things exist in our
language and symbolic representations that don't have corresponding
processes or objects that can be found in nature. For that type of
existence we can say that what is imagined is a product of the activity of
our nervous systems and that what is symbolized is a product of a coding
system reproduced on some physical medium of communication (a printed page,
a painting, a radio signal, a frame of a motion picture, etc.), so the
existence of any of these derives from the prior existence of a nervous
system or of a conventional medium of communication.
What physically exists, on the other hand, has an extension in the number
of dimensions that we recognize the world (or cosmos) as having. Our
sensory organs and nervous systems allow us to easily perceive three
dimensions of spatial extension, with time as a fourth. There could be more
dimensions that our perceptual capabilities are not adapted to recognizing;
according to some theories there may be as many as ten or eleven dimensions
in total, with six or seven “folded up” within the processes
and objects that we recognize in such a way that we can't normally
detect these “extra” ones. As far as the dimensions that we
recognize go, something only exists if it has some extension in all of
them. We don't perceive any one dimensional or two dimensional objects in
the physical world (as opposed to in our symbolic representations of abstract
concepts), nor do we perceive three dimensional objects that have no
extension in time, i.e., that don't have at least some duration, no matter
how fleeting (as in the case of some subatomic particles).
But what do we mean by anything—a thing, a process, an object? This
again is heavily biased by the scale within which we perceive and interact
with the world, which again leads to “commonsensical”
interpretations that can render philosophical discussions frustrating and
rather arbitrary. A common practice in philosophy is the “thought
experiment” where someone proposes a situation from which some
philosophical conclusions will be drawn. For instance, one might start by
saying, “Consider a chair in an empty room” or some such
constructed situation. But while what we recognize as “a chair”
may appear as a discrete object to the edge detection neurons in our
brains, that discrete nature may be an arbitrary imposition, since an
actual object such as one that we would describe as a chair is exchanging
molecules or even smaller particles with the environment in which we see
it, and having energetic interactions with that environment. For that
matter, there is no such things as “an empty room”, since the
environment has not so easily detected particles and forces present in it,
even if it's a high technology “clean room” or our best
attempt at a vacuum chamber. One explanation of why anything exists is that
even in a “quantum vacuum” field, subatomic particles may be
popping in and out of existence—although this formulation merely
changes the question of where the particles are coming from to one of where
the field is coming from. So the chair and its empty room are conceptual
objects based on our familiar perceptions as well as on our conventional
definitions of what types of constructs belong to the class of objects that
we use the word “chair” to represent and the word
“room” to describe. Less than impressive as a basis for argument.
A sufficiently large and somewhat flat rock in a cave may be a “chair
in an empty room” for practical purposes.
This highlights that our concept of what a thing is involves us arbitrarily
separating some piece of the environment out from the rest of it, when
ultimately every “thing” is connected to or embedded within the
universe system and every “process” is part of and dynamically
inseparable from that system. From that standpoint, when we are asking why
anything exists, we may as well ask: why does everything exist? The
existence of subsystems within the overall system of the world is real, but
the subdivision and demarcation of these subsystems is an artifact of the
boundaries and categories that our minds are capable of recognizing,
partially the result of the functioning of our sensory organs and the
nervous system to which they are connected (and perhaps also of the
instruments we use to investigate non-ordinary scale objects and processes),
and partially the result of a learned vocabulary and classification scheme
that conditions our interpretations of the perceived world.
The extension of objects and processes in the time dimension is one of the most challenging aspects of the world for our minds to understand, because we perceive only a small window called “the present” which has fuzzy boundaries but is experienced as a duration somewhere between roughly one fortieth of a second and one half a second. Time and change are equivalent: the configuration of processes and objects in space changes to a new state in each “moment” of time, and that state change constitutes “time passing” from our position as time-bound creatures. Nothing remains exactly the same from one moment to the next, although at the scale with which we interact with the world the changes may not always be dramatically evident. But if even one element changes, it changes the relations of everything else to it, changing the whole universe configuration.
What allows our minds to recognize and interact with the subsystems of the
world system at the scale of our senses (and instruments) is what seems to
be their inherent lawfulness. That lawfulness means that processes
and objects have consistent properties and behave in consistent ways
through the various changes that we experience in the passing of time. The
radius of a circle always has the same relation to its circumference,
algebra works the same way despite the different particulars that we
may be describing in algebraic equations, the gravitational constant
does not change from one moment to the next (at least at the scale of our
interactions with the world), a logarithmic spiral does not assume a
different shape as its scale is expanded, etc. Plato's theory of a
world of ideal forms can be taken as a reification of the lawfulness of the
world, where what we experience as, for instance, triangular shapes are
shadow instances of the eternal idea “triangle”, which is part
of a different, timeless realm of existence. Since we observed earlier that
to exist is have extension in the dimensions of the world, this realm of
Ideas or Forms or Laws has what we can consider a meta-existential reality
rather than existence as we know it. Law does not extend into our familiar
dimensions, but it provides the structure or lattice upon which the field
of our dimensional world is built. The next few paragraphs proceed with
this assumption, which doesn't exactly repeat Plato's concept but
which metaphorically “rhymes” with it.
With a little imagination we can (and will) go further and posit that the
Law under which our world is instantiated could be one of any number of
similar realms at a meta-existential level. A sufficiently brilliant
mathematician could derive a calculus with different logical rules and
different geometric forms and constants, one which would have no application
to anything in our world of reality but which would be internally consistent.
At the borderline of philosophy and physics is a set of related issues that
are discussed under such headings as fine-tuning, the hierarchy problem, and
the anthropic principle, which in different ways all deal with difficulty of
arriving at a universe with the exact parameters that allow our existence
as (to some degree) intelligent observers. Why do we have a universe that
obeys the particular rules and possesses the precise numeric constants that
we have discovered?
Bear in mind that the question is about the various rules and parameters
that we observe in the world. The relation of these rules to Law on
the meta-existential level may or may not be straightforward. Something has
to have instantiated Law, something which is responsible for the existing
substance of the world, which is in a way a primal substance, which obeys
the instantiated Law and takes on form in accordance with the rules and
parameters provided by it. This existential operator we can refer to as
Being (although it could also be called Becoming or some other term that
sounds more dynamic, if desired). In what may be an unsatisfying analogy
for mathematicians, we can liken the world to a predicate calculus produced
by adding an existential quantifier (Being) to a propositional calculus (Law).
Because our best guess is that
this universe is finite, albeit very large in terms of human scale, the
Being operator must also either have a finite substance or be extending
only a finite portion of itself into the world, though perhaps bringing some
very basic qualities or properties with it. One way to visualize what
has happened in the meta-existential realm is that Being and Law have
collided or interpenetrated each other, and the result of that is creation
and expansion of our dimensional existence in a “direction”
orthogonal to both. In our imagined meta-existential realm there is no time
or space as we understand those dimensions, and nothing that matches any of
the dimensions undetectable to us but perhaps folded up in those we perceive.
The “collision” that instantiated our world's existence
involved the “unpacking” of Law into the physical laws of the
universe and the “patterning” or shaping or extrusion of Being
into the matter and energy that we perceive as constituting the substance
of the universe. From our standpoint, time began when this happened, so it
makes no sense to ask the natural question of what happened before the
moment of creation, since before and after relate to the time dimension as we
experience it in the created world.
Is there some necessity or inevitability behind this? Perhaps not.
It is not unreasonable to think of Being as not necessarily constrained by
this particular Law other than through this unique act of creation.
It may be essentially totipotent, protean, maybe antinomian. But
in the instantiated universe, it flows through the patterning of Law much as
a stream of water flows through irrigation ditches in an orderly agricultural
field. Because we have some evidence that time began at a definite interval
prior to our present moment, we might ask whether time will also end at
some later Omega Point, meaning, in effect: will Being flow through Law and
out again? Perhaps to instantiate some different Law?
My guess is that very many philosophers (and even more physicists) would
find the model described in the above few paragraphs objectionable, as the
whole idea of a meta-existential realm adds what they might consider
unnecessary factors or complications, and almost certainly unprovable elements,
to the discussions of where the world comes from, Plato notwithstanding. The
alternatives are little better, however: an eternal universe such as the
steady-state theory proposed, which seems counter to the best present evidence,
or creation ex nihilo (even if couched in the language of quantum vacuum fields
spawning ghost particles, with the existence of the field itself left
unexplained). It does seem necessary to me to acknowledge that our four
or five or ten or eleven dimensions of spacetime came about as part of
the act of creation, according to an orderly set of rules. And that the
actuality or substance of our existence should be thought of as distinct
logically from the lawfulness of the existent cosmos. From
“inside” the dimensional world of our existence, we can't
easily observe or comprehend what is “outside”, other than
by its projection “into” our field of observation, as in
Plato's allegory of people observing shadows on a cave wall. Our
perception of the world depends on the functioning of our sensory organs
and nervous systems, both in their immediate mode response to input and
in how we have trained them to relate that input to previous experiences
and their symbolic representations. If something beyond the existent
world that we perceive has given rise to it, understanding that on a
personal level is a first step to understanding the other unknowns that we
sometimes question, if not among our peers or the public at large, then
quietly, in our reflections.
Religion has a similar set of issues with its varied explanations of how the universe originated, with different sects offering their own models or creation stories.
In some belief systems the world is created by the act of one or more
primordial entities from some undifferentiated substance, which begs the
question of where the undifferentiated matter and primal entities came
from. The spirit of God moving over the face of the waters in Genesis
can be read as one example of an entity bringing forth the world we
recognize from some prior chaotic or “formless” state; the
divine cow Auðumbla licking the universal ice to defrost the world
in the Edda is another example; the mating of the salt water goddess
Tiamat and the fresh water god Apsu giving rise to all the other gods of
creation in the Enūma Eliš is yet another. In each case there
are one or more existing willful entities whose actions instigate the
creation of everything else from a relatively undifferentiated origin
state. Taoism also starts with an existing undifferentiated state but
attains its initial order through a process of unconscious gestation,
and then is further shaped by various purposeful (and mythological)
creatures. If we considered Being as described in the preceding
paragraphs as a willful or mindful entity (leading to a panpsychist
view of the existing world), it would occupy a similar role in the
world origin as do the Elohim (but also the undifferentiated substance
that they shape into Creation) in Genesis, and the divine cow and
frost giant in the Edda, and the water goddess and god in Babylonian
myth; if it does not share with us some quality of mindfulness, it
becomes more like the undirected gestational force in Taoism. What
gives form or ordered structure to the formless primordial state in our
model is Law, and if we want to analogize Being as a willful creator,
it produces the differentiated world out of itself by choosing
to instantiate the particular set of Law that gives rise to our
human-experienced universe.
Buddhism is more in line with the steady-state model, with an eternal
universe that cycles through various transformations as the result of
impersonal forces, with impermanence the underlying truth of everything.
As noted in the example of the chair above, this recognizes that the
seeming discrete existence of objects and processes that we perceive is
actually an illusion. Although some strands of Buddhism have taken on a
panoply of supernatural spirits, saints and divine creatures, these are
not critical to its core beliefs and can be seen mostly as a result of
the grafting of Buddhist thought and disciplines onto cultures that had
prior religious beliefs in deities and spirits. If physicists were able
to amass more evidence for the universe having a steady-state existence,
Buddhism would appear to be the creed most capable of claiming to be a
scientific belief system. The evidence at this time does not favor that
model, however, although the case is far from closed.
Another religious model for the creation of the world is that the Creator
is external to the world that it created. Nothing existed as we understand
it, then the external Deity caused it all to come into existence, and
largely left it to the created creatures to manage as best they could; the
Deism of the later Enlightenment takes this position most strongly,
dismissing the accounts of interventions by God (miracles) in later
history as human-invented stories. This type of belief meshes well with
other beliefs about the perfection and infinite “all-ness” of
the deity—if God is all-powerful, all-wise, all-loving, etc., then
God must be separate from the world with its limitations on matter, energy
and causation. Our model agrees that Being and Law occupy a realm that is
in a sense “outside” the world, but proposes that their
interaction is what constitutes the “inside” of spacetime; the
“all-ness” of Being is also based on its substance being
finite rather than infinite. If the limitations of Law are willfully
embraced by Being as part of the act of creation, then all power that is
possessed by Being is being exercised within the strictures of
Law—that is to say, it is self-limited. The type of logical
paradoxes that philosophers concocted to bedevil theologians (“Can
God create a rock so heavy that God cannot then lift it?”) are
based on notions of infinity and infinite values that don't seem to
apply to the universe that we observe and experience.
Gnosticism, which overlapped with and influenced early Christianity, takes
the more radical position that the world was created by the imperfect or
even evil demiurge, a god subordinate to the supreme all-good God, and that
our spirits are “emanations” from the supreme consciousness
trapped in the imperfect world in material bodies and always yearning to
ascend to God again. In some ancient texts the emanation trapped in our
world is personified as Sophia (Wisdom), and we all partake of her essence.
In the more recent fiction work Legion by William Peter Blatty, we
are all Lucifer (Light Bearer), broken into many soul-shards in the created
world (which Blatty relates to the Biblical Fall of humans).
What seems to be at the root of gnostic and dualistic thought is our
difficulty with the perceived multiplex nature or manyness of the world and
our sense that in oneness there would (or should) be harmony. In the model
described above, Being is inherently both one and many, not just either. Law
produces the structures into which Being funnels itself, but what is being
funneled still has an essential unity. The problem (that we have) with
manyness under Law is that conflict can exist (in our evaluation) between
different “parts” of the world, especially the world of mindful
entities. Resources may not be sufficient for all; what optimizes the
experience of one entity may be very far from optimal for others (or what
optimizes the experience of the group overall may be suboptimal for certain
group members, and vice versa); what one attempts with one's limited
powers and perceptions may end up having undesirable, often unanticipated,
results. And maladaptive behaviors produced by the conflicts, in reaction,
may compound the undesirable qualities that we perceive in our state of
manyness. Why would a creator design a limited world of multitudinous
entities jostling against each other? One could just as well ask why a
writer uses a language made of a finite number of separate words and
grammatical constructions, or why a poet writes in specific metric forms
with rhyming or other poetic devices—it may be an artistic experiment
or dare, or it may be that a particular idea or emotion cannot be
better expressed in any other way.
This also raises the question as to whether universal foreknowledge is
possible—and while this has been a longstanding tenet of some strands
of Christian religious belief, it is far from accepted, or even discussed,
in other religious traditions. If time is a dimension, has “it”
in effect already reached its end, as determined in the moment of creation,
with our awarenesses limited to the infinitesimal durations that correspond
to our human lifespans? Is it an already completed four (or five or ten or
eleven) dimensional object from a meta-existential perspective? Or is our
perception of the “eternal present” an indication that the
occurrence of time's end may be necessary, but that the circumstances
of that end remain subject to some ongoing and incompletely deterministic
creative force, perhaps one in which we even participate in some minuscule
way?
As fanciful as the above may seem, especially as it echoes motifs in
various religions that have arisen, the essential point is that the
“is-ness” or existential fact of the world is conceptually
different than the structure or rules that we perceive as providing the
lawfulness of the world we experience. The dimensional extension that we
need to perceive in order to recognize objects or processes as existing
depends upon both. While the universe and our own part in it may have a
finite existence, what gives rise to both it and us has a reality beyond.