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 Mason's
Meditations
If
you're looking for something to chew over, some thoughtful seeds
for mental cultivation, bookmark this page for Jeff Mason's monthly
meditations. To think in or take away...
Number
Thirty Seven: Chaos
or Creation?
"Why
is there something rather than nothing?" is one of the oldest
and deepest philosophical questions. It is philosophical because
the question itself is hard to understand. Regardless of this, it
continues to put itself forward, because we can conceive that there
might have been nothing rather than something. After all, if there
were no being, it would take a lot less effort all around. Think
of all the forces that surround us, the tensions and processes that
make up the evolutions of the universe. Think of all the effort,
pain and suffering that is involved in staying alive, both as an
individual and as a species living on this planet. There is no necessity
about this, and no contradiction in the thought of bare self-sufficient
nonexistence. For this reason, perhaps, we feel the need to know
why there is something rather than nothing.
Answers
have varied. Some have held that there must be something, a Being
that created the universe out of nothing. First there was nothing,
and then there was something, but before both is a Being that exists
of its own necessity and then takes on the burden of creation. This
Being is the Creator God of the three monotheistic religions.
On
the face of it, this is difficult to conceive, and it goes against
the wisdom of the ancient world that "nothing comes from nothing."
How could something come from nothing? It is a total revelation
that the whole world came into being from nothing at all, nothing
but the will of an all powerful, but inscrutable God.
From
Plato we have a different myth. It stars a Great Daimon, or spirit,
which, though all knowing and good, is not all powerful. It creates
the universe not out of nothing, but out of a previously existing
matter. The Daimon draws order out of chaos and "Old Night."
The act of creation forges links between the Eternal Forms and finite,
changeable things, thus giving them intelligible essences.
The
Daimon perceives perfection in the Forms, but matter refuses to
be shaped to that perfection. Things go awry, and will continue
to go awry, because chaos and unpredictability remain embedded in
things, along with ineluctable contingency and chance.
There
is a third alternative. In the beginning and always is chaos, but
chaos, or what is the same thing, nothingness, cannot remain totally
chaotic. Chaos of itself produces the order that we see about us
in ever changing shapes. We exist in the order that chaos randomly
produces. However, our lives are so short, and the life of our species
is so short that we can never live long enough to see the laws of
nature change. Chaos provides the perfect conception of a universe
in evolution. Nature is contingent and probabilistic, but the laws
of nature remain just constant enough for us to get our bearings
in the universe. Chaos produces order because order is just a slow
motion shot of chaos in action. The answer to our question is simply
that it is impossible, after all, for there to be nothing rather
than something.
.
Mason's
Meditations will next be updated early November 2003
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21.
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