Existence Survey
I sometimes listen to audio recordings of debates between Christians and atheists.
Most atheists argue from a position that the idea of God is just so extraordinary or outside of normal experience that no one should be expected to accept it.
I will grant that the idea of God is extraordinary.
But will you not also admit that the existence of the universe(s), and especially consciousness, is also extraordinary. Non-existence would seem to be the default state of things, and yet here we are. Trees growing, planets orbiting, me typing, you reading, communication happening, history being made, beauty being enjoyed. This existence thing is all so extraordinary, but everyone accepts it. The jump from belief in non-existence to belief in existence is HUGE.
A person who has already made the enormous leap to believing that physical things exist is but a small stride away from believing that not only physical things exist (the assertion that only physical things exist is not only unprovable, but unsupportable and dogmatic as well).
Not only that, I think it is a natural and necessary stride because I think the existence of the universe needs a cause (and, no, I don’t think the existence of God needs a cause given His attributes).
So I want to end with a survey:
1) Does ‘something existing’ (as opposed to ‘nothing existing’) strike you as a peculiar/special/extraordinary state of things?
2) Do you think the existence of the universe requires an explanation, or do you think it can exist without a cause?
Your thoughts please.
(a pledge: I won’t post any more entries that use the word ‘exist’ so many times)
posted by Stephen @ 4/25/2005 12:17:00 AM
4 Comments:
I cannot help but refer to Chesterton and some other worthy minds in answering this question. In "Orthodoxy" GKC talks about how "normal" things in nature only seem normal because they happen on a regular basis. The sun rising every morning, the seasons changing, the fact that grass is green - these are all taken for granted. Who is to say that the grass could not turn purple tomorrow, or the sun should stop rising, or that God could create unicorns if He wanted to? God delights in what Chris Mitchell described as "a child's desire to say: do it again!" And so the world and all its marvels does things over and over again until they become unmarvelous in our eyes because we are used to them. I could also branch into why fantasy literature helps us to truly observe and restore the worthy magic and mystery into OUR OWN world, but I won't go too much further just now. :)
And I have to list two of my favorite natural marvels in response to your survey request: the ability of leaves to change into all kinds of glorious colors in the fall, and the resilience of nature to "bounce back" and produce flowers, fruit, etc. in the spring and summer no matter how brutal the winter snows (for those of us who have snow) have been. ;)
K, so I didn't do a good job of answering your survey questions. That "show original post" option is helpful to notice. The survey:
1) Yes, b/c everything seems to move towards entropy, so creation or newness of life (hence: existence) seems quite extraordinary indeed in fighting against the chaos and brokenness running rampant in the world.
2)I think it needs an explanation, but as to the nuts and bolts of that I think I'll be happy leaving it to God to explain. ;-)
Hmm. Nothing too serious for now, but I would like to say that there is nothing extraordinary about the universe existing. Existence has been the state of things for long before people started recording it. That is not to say it isn't amazing or shouldn't make us think about what we're doing here, but the world existing is the most mundane (from the same latin root as the spanish "mundo", that is, "world") fact that there is. Non-existence-- now THAT would be extraordinary!
I don't personally hold this view, but I understand why it's attractive to some people. It's best explained in terms of probabilities... what's the probability (or the odds) that a miracle of existence like this could happen by chance? However you choose to estimate it, the probability will be unbelievably small. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that we exist.
But... this isn't actually the probability we're measuring. Since we're around to observe it, we KNOW that it's happened, therefore we can't say anything useful about the odds of it happening. This extraordinary event becomes ordinary because it had to happen for us to rationalize about it.
Another way people think about it is that yes, this is an extraordinary event, happening only 1 out of every N times... but we don't know how many _chances_ it took for it to happen. Put another way, I tell you that I got tails 10 times in a row from flipping a coin. Impressed? Maybe, it's a 1-in-a-100 chance. Now I tell you that it took me 1000 coin flips to make it happen. You're probably not so impressed now...
The point of this thought experiment is that we don't know how LONG it took for us to come into existence. It's an unthinkably small probabilitiy, but it may have taken an unthinkable amount of time to happen -- time is depressingly relative. Even if it didn't take unthinkably long, one-in-a-kajillion chances can still happen on the first try.
Hope this doesn't sound too cynical, but I believe these arguments deserve more credit than they usually receive.
Jeremy
Post a Comment
<< Home