The painter Paul Gauguin asked the questions- “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going”?
God is the term often used to answer ultimate questions, such as Gauguin’s. But along with the concept, God is a very nebulous and amorphous word, fraught with ambiguity, vagueness, uncertainty and many connotations. Is god just an idea, a hypothesis, a reified concept?
There are generally three worldviews regarding existence and ultimate reality: First is that there is a personal creator, Second that there is some kind of impersonal beginning, such as an energy, force, or spirit that set things in motion, but takes no further action in the Universe and Third that everything just came from nothing-ex nihilo. Was the universe caused or created? To cause is to set off an event or action, while to create is to put into existence.
The word God along with the concept, is generally either loved or hated. With God being such a loaded word, it often gets an intense negative reaction. It is immediately dismissed by many people - principally atheists, freethinkers and those in the scientific community. In the present western scientific/philosophical world the word “God” is generally avoided or not used at all, - as in its usual anthropomorphic sense it is not a valid scientific or philosophical concept or explanation.
This dismissal of “God” stems principally from the damage religion and churches have done in the world, by holding back progress for centuries, as well as the dreadful deeds done throughout history by religion in God’s name, and also the fact that modern science and philosophy have shown the anthropomorphic God concept not to be plausible. Using this word “God” in relation to ultimate answers, then, is problematic, in that to most people it continues to mean this anthropomorphic god of religion.
One of the great philosophical theologians of the 20th century was Hans Kung. In his 800-page tome, “Does God Exist” published in 1980 he concludes that “gods existence can neither be proven or disproven”. “Belief in God in the end comes down to faith”. But is Kung’s faith rationally justified? Kung says that metaphorically “anyone who concedes that he cannot glimpse beyond the curtain, cannot make a claim that there is nothing behind it”. Kant rejects not only proofs for God, but also proofs against God, because they also transcend the horizon of experience. “The same grounds” that prove the impossibility that reason can assert the existence of God are enough to “prove the invalidity of any counter assertions”. That God’s existence can neither be proved or disproved is the generally accepted position in both science and philosophy.
As there is no material evidence of a supernatural agent that intervenes in the affairs of mankind or in any physical processes, the question then arises whether one accepts that logically there must be a primary or first cause of some sort? Can there be an infinite regress? Does eternity or infinity even exist? Logically nothing cannot cause something. To simply assert that there is no answer to the primal question of reality, is a dogmatic assertion that amounts to a dismissal of reason.
As all religions are man-made so too are their gods. Anthropologists estimate there have been between 8,000 and 12,000 gods worshipped on Earth. We must eliminate these anthropomorphic gods of religion - these gods that are supposed to interfere in the world, or with the laws of physics, or answer prayers or do miracles and that are made in the image of man. There is absolutely no material evidence for such a god or gods.
Let us look at the god question from four angles -Theism, Deism and Atheism and Agnosticism.
Theism is the belief in a god who intervenes in his creation. It is this theistic god that is generally talked about and implied when “god” is spoken of - the anthropomorphic god of religion who is supposedly watching over us, and what we do, listening to our prayers and deciding which ones to answer, and eventually deciding whether we get to heaven or hell. This god of religion has been soundly routed by modern science and scholarship, and is long dead. It is the god Nietzsche was referring to. Theism covered the various pantheons of former civilizations and cultures throughout the world. In the modern world Theism principally covers the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity as well as some forms of Hinduism and some other Eastern religions. These religions come in different varieties. In Judaism there are at least four branches: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist. The principal shades of Islam are Sunni and Shiite, but within these there are many different sects and denominations. Christianity has three principal branches, Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, but within these branches, principally in Protestantism, there are over 45,000 denominations. In Hinduism there are four major denominations Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Smartism and Shaktism.
Today there are many attempts to reconcile this theistic god with modern science and philosophy. Paul Tillich called god “the ground of our being”. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked of a “religionless Christianity”. Bishop John Robinson in his book “Honest to God “refers to “the ground, source and goal of our being”. Cambridge Professor and Anglican minister Don Cupitt of the “Sea of Faith” group, considers that there are elements of Christianity worth saving, yet refers to himself as a “secular Christian”. Bishop John Shelby Spong states in “Why Christianity must Change or Die” that “there is no god external to life” The theologian, Professor Lloyd Geering, a Presbyterian minister, says god is “ultimate reality”. The Jesuit Theologian Karl Rahner wrote about an “anonymous Christianity”. Terry Eagleton, a literary theorist and critic, says “God is the condition for the possibility of existence” and Hans Kung defines God as “the primal ground, support and goal of reality”.
What the above shows is that the old god of theism is being forced to change and evolve as science and philosophy removes the gaps in knowledge that religions and their gods have depended upon. This theistic god gets more and more vague, as that’s the only way to keep clinging to him. Joseph Campbell wrote about how the gods humans worshipped became more distant as human understanding grew. The individuals mentioned above are trying to combine religion - minus an interfering god - with secularism and cannot fully let go of their former beliefs. These forms of religion are oxymoronic.
Deism is the god of philosophy, and is a completely different concept. In its first manifestation it was a belief in a god who created the world, set it in motion and had no further involvement. For many it is the belief in a force, energy, or source, that created, or set the universe in motion, but does not interfere thereafter. It is a god of reason, rather than revelation. Not a god in the anthropomorphic sense, but the controlling force or energy that began and continues to sustain the universe. Deism is the god of Hobbes, Spinoza, Toland, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Whitehead, Bergson and many others up to the present day. As the theologian / philosopher John Hick says “Deism is little better than atheism”. Einstein said he “believed in Spinoza’s god”. Stephen Hawking asked “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a Universe for them to describe”. Deists have no need of worship, deference or homage. Forms of Deism are Pantheism, Panentheism and Pandeism, the Hindu concept of “Brahman” and many other versions of a god concept. Pantheism is the belief that god and the world are one and that everything in the world is part of god. Panentheism is a word constructed from the Greek words “pan” meaning all and “en” meaning in. In Panentheism god and the world are inter-related, with god being in the world and the world being in god. It avoids isolating god from the world, as theism does, or identifying god with the world as pantheism does. Pandeism is a hybrid of pantheism and deism, in that it is a belief that the creator of the universe actually became the universe.
Plato’s God was the “form of the good”, to Aristotle God was the “unmoved mover”, and to Plotinus God was “the unliving primal one”. “A final ground of everything” is what Kant called the very first, and very last reality that human beings designate with the name of God.
One of the greatest philosophers of religion in the 20th century was the late Anthony Flew. He was dubbed “the world’s most influential atheistic philosopher”. In 2004 at the age of 81 he announced that he had come to believe in God because “the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also of intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before”. He further stated: “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: follow the evidence wherever it leads”. In many interviews after his announcement he insisted it was the Deistic god to which he was referring.
Atheism: is the view that there is no God. Atheism is a belief that the proposition of God’s existence is untrue. Atheism is not knowledge. Just like the belief in God cannot be proven, neither can it be proven that God does not exist. But the word is generally used as “A-theism”- a disbelief in the theistic god. Many who call themselves atheist, do have a belief in some form of creative or controlling force, energy or primary cause. Some who consider themselves atheists are deists without realizing it.
Agnosticism: The word Agnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis meaning knowledge, and the A (alpha) before gnosis negates the word. It is the position in religion that neither affirms theism (belief in god ) nor atheism (denial of god). As we can neither prove nor disprove Gods existence agnosticism is probably the most logical and reasoned position to take regarding God.
Science may have eliminated the need for religion, by showing they are all man made, but not for the ultimate answers that Paul Gauguin was seeking. Science only deals with observed reality as perceived by our senses. Answers to Gauguin’s questions are more likely to emanate from philosophy rather than science, as science is limited in that it can only deal in objective reality. It can ask how but not why. It stops just before the big bang and can go no further.
Science is currently searching for what it refers to as a “TOE”- a “theory of everything” and not a quest for God. Stephen Hawking said “if this theory of everything is discovered, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason-for then we should know the mind of God”. This hypothetical framework will combine in a single equation all the forces, interactions and laws of nature from the cosmic to the subatomic, but if found will it explain the ultimate origin of the laws and forces within the universe? Apophatically let us eliminate what this TOE concept is not. This concept will have no form, no gender, no personhood. It will have no sight, no hearing, no taste, no smell, no tactile sensations, as all these are derived from the brain, and brain is matter. This god, this energy or force, will have no emotions, no feelings, no perceptions, and no concept of right or wrong, as these all stem from electrochemical reactions in a brain made of matter. This TOE God can be neither matter nor material. Matter is created from energy, by mind, as per quantum physics, as we see demonstrated in the collapse of the wave function whereby the act of observing can alter its potential.
Hawking himself in A Brief History of Time used the acronym GUT when referring to his hope of developing a “Grand Unified Theory” by fusing all known particle interactions. However he had not taken into account Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems and in 2004 in a Cambridge lecture he remarked that in principle that he had given up on the quest for a GUT.
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems in mathematics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics have shown that there are fundamental limits to mathematical and physical knowledge. Biology, is built on physics and there can be no biological life outside the physical world. Accordingly science cannot answer Gaugin’s ultimate questions.
As science uses telescopes, microscopes and many other tools to explore the macrocosm and the microcosm, and as each layer of knowledge is unveiled, more questions arise, as well as the profound realisation of our ignorance. At this point we do not as yet even know what matter or energy are, nor do we know how either life or consciousness came forth. Matter as we know it and can observe with our instruments consists of only 4% of the Universe. The rest of the Universe is supposedly dark energy and dark matter about which we know nothing.
Physicists can go back in time to the first hundredth of a second after the big bang where the laws of physics apply but they are unable to go back to time zero and the cause of the mysterious primal explosion. They are unable to explain the fact that the whole potential for hundreds of billions of galaxies as well as life and consciousness, was contained in a tiny unit of infinite density, temperature, and force. To answer Gaugin’s questions this primal mystery must be answered. As scientific methods cannot answer this mystery are we not thereby being forced into metaphysics or the protophysical?
There must come a reconciliation between science and philosophy as science cannot answer all questions. Physics explains much of the physical universe, but not the laws of physics themselves. Scientific laws, do not explain the world, they describe certain regularities in mathematical terms, which are referred to as secondary causes in contradistinction to the primary cause, which is the ultimate cause of all things - the “causa causarum”. I used the term philosophy above to include the study of theology in a very broad epistemological sense. As Gaughin’s great mysteries of existence remain as elusive as ever, all forms of knowledge and information need to reconciled. Epistemology needs to be brought more to the fore in Academia.
If we are to answer Gaugin’s questions then we must put aside our biases and prejudices, and not exclude any form of knowledge from our searching and just seek for truth, from whatever source, no matter where it leads us. Whatever we accept about the God concept must be based on reason and science and not on religious faith or alleged revelation.
The answers to Gaugin’s questions must be outside religion, in that all religions are man-made and not ultimate truths. The answers are outside science also as, at a fundamental level in physics, science has reached its boundary and is melding into metaphysics. We see this where science is being forced into postulates such as Multiverses in Cosmology and Panpsychism in Consciousness studies - hypotheses for which there is absolutely no material or objective evidence. Science can only deal with objective reality as perceived by our limited senses, and our senses are creations of matter, which thereby gives a circular and unacceptable answer.
As agnostic astrophysicist, Paul Davies said in his book, The Mind of God; Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, sooner, or later:
Whatever the answer to Gaugin’s questions must advance both the explicability of our universe by physics as far as possible, and at the same time leave room for what in principle cannot be explained by physics.
There must be answers to questions such as where did the primal fireball of the tiniest size and the utmost density come from? And what was the cause of the unimaginably, gigantic, primal explosion? Where did the immeasurable energy of the cosmic expansion come from and what brought about its tremendous initial force? Why did the singularity not continue in its unexploded form? Had it a reason or purpose in expanding? If science cannot answer these questions, where do we go for answers? There is no point in saying there are unanswerable questions. Man has been searching for meaning and understanding since he first evolved and will continue to do so whether these questions can be answered or not.
As we come up against the primal mystery of reality as Martin Heidegger put it, “why are there beings and not nothing”? What term are we to use for this reality?
Is there a power greater than happenstance and what should we call it?
For ultimate answers to these primal mysteries of reality, it is time for a new vocabulary.
So what term could we use as we search for an ultimate cause- a TOE or a GUT, a cosmic force, an innate ordering force or what ?????
⏩ Noel Byrne is a retired Civil Servant and a Humanist, with a principal interest in Philosophy, and a particular interest in Ethics and Morality.
God is the term often used to answer ultimate questions, such as Gauguin’s. But along with the concept, God is a very nebulous and amorphous word, fraught with ambiguity, vagueness, uncertainty and many connotations. Is god just an idea, a hypothesis, a reified concept?
There are generally three worldviews regarding existence and ultimate reality: First is that there is a personal creator, Second that there is some kind of impersonal beginning, such as an energy, force, or spirit that set things in motion, but takes no further action in the Universe and Third that everything just came from nothing-ex nihilo. Was the universe caused or created? To cause is to set off an event or action, while to create is to put into existence.
The word God along with the concept, is generally either loved or hated. With God being such a loaded word, it often gets an intense negative reaction. It is immediately dismissed by many people - principally atheists, freethinkers and those in the scientific community. In the present western scientific/philosophical world the word “God” is generally avoided or not used at all, - as in its usual anthropomorphic sense it is not a valid scientific or philosophical concept or explanation.
This dismissal of “God” stems principally from the damage religion and churches have done in the world, by holding back progress for centuries, as well as the dreadful deeds done throughout history by religion in God’s name, and also the fact that modern science and philosophy have shown the anthropomorphic God concept not to be plausible. Using this word “God” in relation to ultimate answers, then, is problematic, in that to most people it continues to mean this anthropomorphic god of religion.
One of the great philosophical theologians of the 20th century was Hans Kung. In his 800-page tome, “Does God Exist” published in 1980 he concludes that “gods existence can neither be proven or disproven”. “Belief in God in the end comes down to faith”. But is Kung’s faith rationally justified? Kung says that metaphorically “anyone who concedes that he cannot glimpse beyond the curtain, cannot make a claim that there is nothing behind it”. Kant rejects not only proofs for God, but also proofs against God, because they also transcend the horizon of experience. “The same grounds” that prove the impossibility that reason can assert the existence of God are enough to “prove the invalidity of any counter assertions”. That God’s existence can neither be proved or disproved is the generally accepted position in both science and philosophy.
As there is no material evidence of a supernatural agent that intervenes in the affairs of mankind or in any physical processes, the question then arises whether one accepts that logically there must be a primary or first cause of some sort? Can there be an infinite regress? Does eternity or infinity even exist? Logically nothing cannot cause something. To simply assert that there is no answer to the primal question of reality, is a dogmatic assertion that amounts to a dismissal of reason.
As all religions are man-made so too are their gods. Anthropologists estimate there have been between 8,000 and 12,000 gods worshipped on Earth. We must eliminate these anthropomorphic gods of religion - these gods that are supposed to interfere in the world, or with the laws of physics, or answer prayers or do miracles and that are made in the image of man. There is absolutely no material evidence for such a god or gods.
Let us look at the god question from four angles -Theism, Deism and Atheism and Agnosticism.
Theism is the belief in a god who intervenes in his creation. It is this theistic god that is generally talked about and implied when “god” is spoken of - the anthropomorphic god of religion who is supposedly watching over us, and what we do, listening to our prayers and deciding which ones to answer, and eventually deciding whether we get to heaven or hell. This god of religion has been soundly routed by modern science and scholarship, and is long dead. It is the god Nietzsche was referring to. Theism covered the various pantheons of former civilizations and cultures throughout the world. In the modern world Theism principally covers the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity as well as some forms of Hinduism and some other Eastern religions. These religions come in different varieties. In Judaism there are at least four branches: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist. The principal shades of Islam are Sunni and Shiite, but within these there are many different sects and denominations. Christianity has three principal branches, Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, but within these branches, principally in Protestantism, there are over 45,000 denominations. In Hinduism there are four major denominations Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Smartism and Shaktism.
Today there are many attempts to reconcile this theistic god with modern science and philosophy. Paul Tillich called god “the ground of our being”. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked of a “religionless Christianity”. Bishop John Robinson in his book “Honest to God “refers to “the ground, source and goal of our being”. Cambridge Professor and Anglican minister Don Cupitt of the “Sea of Faith” group, considers that there are elements of Christianity worth saving, yet refers to himself as a “secular Christian”. Bishop John Shelby Spong states in “Why Christianity must Change or Die” that “there is no god external to life” The theologian, Professor Lloyd Geering, a Presbyterian minister, says god is “ultimate reality”. The Jesuit Theologian Karl Rahner wrote about an “anonymous Christianity”. Terry Eagleton, a literary theorist and critic, says “God is the condition for the possibility of existence” and Hans Kung defines God as “the primal ground, support and goal of reality”.
What the above shows is that the old god of theism is being forced to change and evolve as science and philosophy removes the gaps in knowledge that religions and their gods have depended upon. This theistic god gets more and more vague, as that’s the only way to keep clinging to him. Joseph Campbell wrote about how the gods humans worshipped became more distant as human understanding grew. The individuals mentioned above are trying to combine religion - minus an interfering god - with secularism and cannot fully let go of their former beliefs. These forms of religion are oxymoronic.
Deism is the god of philosophy, and is a completely different concept. In its first manifestation it was a belief in a god who created the world, set it in motion and had no further involvement. For many it is the belief in a force, energy, or source, that created, or set the universe in motion, but does not interfere thereafter. It is a god of reason, rather than revelation. Not a god in the anthropomorphic sense, but the controlling force or energy that began and continues to sustain the universe. Deism is the god of Hobbes, Spinoza, Toland, Leibnitz, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Whitehead, Bergson and many others up to the present day. As the theologian / philosopher John Hick says “Deism is little better than atheism”. Einstein said he “believed in Spinoza’s god”. Stephen Hawking asked “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a Universe for them to describe”. Deists have no need of worship, deference or homage. Forms of Deism are Pantheism, Panentheism and Pandeism, the Hindu concept of “Brahman” and many other versions of a god concept. Pantheism is the belief that god and the world are one and that everything in the world is part of god. Panentheism is a word constructed from the Greek words “pan” meaning all and “en” meaning in. In Panentheism god and the world are inter-related, with god being in the world and the world being in god. It avoids isolating god from the world, as theism does, or identifying god with the world as pantheism does. Pandeism is a hybrid of pantheism and deism, in that it is a belief that the creator of the universe actually became the universe.
Plato’s God was the “form of the good”, to Aristotle God was the “unmoved mover”, and to Plotinus God was “the unliving primal one”. “A final ground of everything” is what Kant called the very first, and very last reality that human beings designate with the name of God.
One of the greatest philosophers of religion in the 20th century was the late Anthony Flew. He was dubbed “the world’s most influential atheistic philosopher”. In 2004 at the age of 81 he announced that he had come to believe in God because “the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also of intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before”. He further stated: “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: follow the evidence wherever it leads”. In many interviews after his announcement he insisted it was the Deistic god to which he was referring.
Atheism: is the view that there is no God. Atheism is a belief that the proposition of God’s existence is untrue. Atheism is not knowledge. Just like the belief in God cannot be proven, neither can it be proven that God does not exist. But the word is generally used as “A-theism”- a disbelief in the theistic god. Many who call themselves atheist, do have a belief in some form of creative or controlling force, energy or primary cause. Some who consider themselves atheists are deists without realizing it.
Agnosticism: The word Agnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis meaning knowledge, and the A (alpha) before gnosis negates the word. It is the position in religion that neither affirms theism (belief in god ) nor atheism (denial of god). As we can neither prove nor disprove Gods existence agnosticism is probably the most logical and reasoned position to take regarding God.
Science may have eliminated the need for religion, by showing they are all man made, but not for the ultimate answers that Paul Gauguin was seeking. Science only deals with observed reality as perceived by our senses. Answers to Gauguin’s questions are more likely to emanate from philosophy rather than science, as science is limited in that it can only deal in objective reality. It can ask how but not why. It stops just before the big bang and can go no further.
Science is currently searching for what it refers to as a “TOE”- a “theory of everything” and not a quest for God. Stephen Hawking said “if this theory of everything is discovered, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason-for then we should know the mind of God”. This hypothetical framework will combine in a single equation all the forces, interactions and laws of nature from the cosmic to the subatomic, but if found will it explain the ultimate origin of the laws and forces within the universe? Apophatically let us eliminate what this TOE concept is not. This concept will have no form, no gender, no personhood. It will have no sight, no hearing, no taste, no smell, no tactile sensations, as all these are derived from the brain, and brain is matter. This god, this energy or force, will have no emotions, no feelings, no perceptions, and no concept of right or wrong, as these all stem from electrochemical reactions in a brain made of matter. This TOE God can be neither matter nor material. Matter is created from energy, by mind, as per quantum physics, as we see demonstrated in the collapse of the wave function whereby the act of observing can alter its potential.
Hawking himself in A Brief History of Time used the acronym GUT when referring to his hope of developing a “Grand Unified Theory” by fusing all known particle interactions. However he had not taken into account Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems and in 2004 in a Cambridge lecture he remarked that in principle that he had given up on the quest for a GUT.
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems in mathematics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics have shown that there are fundamental limits to mathematical and physical knowledge. Biology, is built on physics and there can be no biological life outside the physical world. Accordingly science cannot answer Gaugin’s ultimate questions.
As science uses telescopes, microscopes and many other tools to explore the macrocosm and the microcosm, and as each layer of knowledge is unveiled, more questions arise, as well as the profound realisation of our ignorance. At this point we do not as yet even know what matter or energy are, nor do we know how either life or consciousness came forth. Matter as we know it and can observe with our instruments consists of only 4% of the Universe. The rest of the Universe is supposedly dark energy and dark matter about which we know nothing.
Physicists can go back in time to the first hundredth of a second after the big bang where the laws of physics apply but they are unable to go back to time zero and the cause of the mysterious primal explosion. They are unable to explain the fact that the whole potential for hundreds of billions of galaxies as well as life and consciousness, was contained in a tiny unit of infinite density, temperature, and force. To answer Gaugin’s questions this primal mystery must be answered. As scientific methods cannot answer this mystery are we not thereby being forced into metaphysics or the protophysical?
There must come a reconciliation between science and philosophy as science cannot answer all questions. Physics explains much of the physical universe, but not the laws of physics themselves. Scientific laws, do not explain the world, they describe certain regularities in mathematical terms, which are referred to as secondary causes in contradistinction to the primary cause, which is the ultimate cause of all things - the “causa causarum”. I used the term philosophy above to include the study of theology in a very broad epistemological sense. As Gaughin’s great mysteries of existence remain as elusive as ever, all forms of knowledge and information need to reconciled. Epistemology needs to be brought more to the fore in Academia.
If we are to answer Gaugin’s questions then we must put aside our biases and prejudices, and not exclude any form of knowledge from our searching and just seek for truth, from whatever source, no matter where it leads us. Whatever we accept about the God concept must be based on reason and science and not on religious faith or alleged revelation.
The answers to Gaugin’s questions must be outside religion, in that all religions are man-made and not ultimate truths. The answers are outside science also as, at a fundamental level in physics, science has reached its boundary and is melding into metaphysics. We see this where science is being forced into postulates such as Multiverses in Cosmology and Panpsychism in Consciousness studies - hypotheses for which there is absolutely no material or objective evidence. Science can only deal with objective reality as perceived by our limited senses, and our senses are creations of matter, which thereby gives a circular and unacceptable answer.
As agnostic astrophysicist, Paul Davies said in his book, The Mind of God; Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, sooner, or later:
we will have to accept something as given, whether it is God, or logic or a set of laws, or some other foundation for existence … whether we call this deeper level of explanation God or something else is essentially a semantic matter.
Whatever the answer to Gaugin’s questions must advance both the explicability of our universe by physics as far as possible, and at the same time leave room for what in principle cannot be explained by physics.
There must be answers to questions such as where did the primal fireball of the tiniest size and the utmost density come from? And what was the cause of the unimaginably, gigantic, primal explosion? Where did the immeasurable energy of the cosmic expansion come from and what brought about its tremendous initial force? Why did the singularity not continue in its unexploded form? Had it a reason or purpose in expanding? If science cannot answer these questions, where do we go for answers? There is no point in saying there are unanswerable questions. Man has been searching for meaning and understanding since he first evolved and will continue to do so whether these questions can be answered or not.
As we come up against the primal mystery of reality as Martin Heidegger put it, “why are there beings and not nothing”? What term are we to use for this reality?
Is there a power greater than happenstance and what should we call it?
For ultimate answers to these primal mysteries of reality, it is time for a new vocabulary.
So what term could we use as we search for an ultimate cause- a TOE or a GUT, a cosmic force, an innate ordering force or what ?????
⏩ Noel Byrne is a retired Civil Servant and a Humanist, with a principal interest in Philosophy, and a particular interest in Ethics and Morality.
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