Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part II

Dr Martin continues his series on the mystery of time and its relationship to our Faith, looking at thinkers like Steven Hawking and Bertrand Russell.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Part I is here.

While scientific inquiry and advances have changed the world we live in, it does not have the power to penetrate even a centimeter into the primary question of God.

There once lived a rather tiresome New England transcendentalist by the name of Margaret Fuller, reputed to have been America’s first feminist, who had fallen early on into the irritating habit of announcing to all and sundry, “I accept the universe!” It was as if she were doing the universe a favor by allowing it to exist. This prompted the tart-tongued Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle to reply, “Gad, she’d better.”

So, yes, there is a universe; and, no, it is not negotiable whether or not we accept it. It’s actually been around for quite a while, by the way, and we’ve simply got to deal with that fact. Nor does it appear to be going away anytime soon, either. But does it do anything? I mean, what is it for? And, more importantly, who’s responsible for its creation?

“Why,” to ask the question posed by Stephen Hawking, who, until his death in 2018 was the world’s most celebrated cosmologist, “does the universe go through all the bother of existing?” And since it does exist, is there anything in the laws of physics to account for that fact? “What is it,” Hawking wants to know, “that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern?”

Now there’s a bit of sleight of hand for you. To go from nothing to something, how does that work? The sheer circularity of the thing reveals a fairly serious want of logic. To blithely insist, for example, as that most eminent thinker Bertrand Russell did in his one sentence summary of the world’s wisdom, “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all there is to it,” is really an astonishingly stupid thing to say. How can anyone, much less the august Lord Russell, possibly account for the existence of the universe as a result of mere physics? 

Where is the bridge, for heaven’s sake, sturdy enough to carry us across a mere finite world in search of an explanation for that world? Unless, of course, the proof were somehow beyond that world? Failing which, are we to construe the universe as really nothing more than the result of this or that law describing it?

Evidently Lord Russell thought so. In fact, he found the whole question of origins fairly impertinent. In a famous debate back in the 1940s with Frederick Copleston, a bright and learned Jesuit priest and scholar, that very question was put to him. “Your general position then, Lord Russell,” he asked, “is that it is illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world?” To which the eminently evasive Lord Russell replied: “Yes, that is my position.”

It would appear, therefore, that the scholars and scientists, or at least the most prominent among them, may not be the most helpful in answering that question—not if they insist on mistaking a mere effect, i.e., the existence of the world, for the cause of that world. From where I’m sitting, which is inside the world, it looks like a stolen base. 

Suppose, then, we come at it from another angle—say, that of time itself, the plain fact of which one would have to be fairly mad to deny—and ask if there is any particular advantage in having time? I mean, what exactly is it for? To ensure that not everything will happen at once? That was what Einstein thought, who was at least as smart as Stephen Hawking. 

But was he right? And if so, might there be Someone out there we should be thanking for it? God, maybe? Is He responsible for time? And if it is God who created time, kickstarting everything into being, to which of his many attributes do we ascribe such an agreeable arrangement? That is, if, like poor Margaret Fuller, we wish to go on record as actually approving the universe?

The answer, not to put too fine a point on the matter, is patience. Of which there remains a quite endless supply within the Godhead—unlike, say, a great many competing deities safely ensconced within the universe, subject therefore to the same rhythms and laws the rest of us must observe. The Hindu god Shiva, for instance, among all the deities strewn about the pagan world, was most emphatically a god lacking in patience. “He made a world,” Romano Guardini tells us, 

but the lust of destruction taking hold of him, he danced it to pieces. Whereupon he made another, and then another, only to treat them all in the same way. Here is a creator made by man in his own inconstant image.

But our God, the true and living God, who stands effortlessly above the universe He made, is not at all like that. Indeed, the very greatness of our God, the signature of His power and splendor, is that He manifests His greatness precisely in the exercise of patience. “That lowliest thing of all,” Guardini calls it, “upon which, nevertheless, all earthly life depends.”

How can that be? How can something so lowly, so unprepossessing as patience, lay claim to so exalted a standing in the pantheon of divine perfections? And yet, as Guardini will argue, “God’s patience lies deeper than all else. It is the very heart of the matter.”

And so, owing to this so-called lowliest of all the attributes we predicate of God, you and I are privileged to exist. And that in its absence, nothing at all would exist, only the darkness of non-being. It remains, as Denise Levertov put it in the very title of the last poem she ever wrote (she died in 1997), “Primary Wonder”:

Days pass, when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing 
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then once more the quiet mystery 
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, 
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One,
You still, hour by hour sustain it.

Here, to be sure, is the biggest and most bedeviling question of all. In fact, it is the one question which, were none of us to ask it, we’d have no business asking any other question. Even comic novels are not spared. Where constant hilarity is the main narrative dish, the question may suddenly pop up, accosting both character and reader alike. 

Decline and Fall, for instance, a rollicking first novel by Evelyn Waugh, features a sad little man who, until his life became totally upended by the question, had been a most contented clergyman in the Church of England. “I might even have been a rural dean,” he tells Paul Pennyfeather, who affects great sympathy in hearing his story. “Only—and Mr. Prendergast dropped his voice to a whisper—only I had Doubts.”

“What a terrible thing!” exclaims Paul.

“Yes,” says Mr. Prendergast. 

I’ve not known an hour’s real happiness since. You see, it wasn’t the ordinary sort of Doubt about Cain’s wife or the Old Testament miracles or the consecration of Archbishop Parker. I’d been taught how to explain all those while I was at college. No, it was something deeper than all that. I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.

Why, in other words, why did it all begin? Because it is not finally a matter of how things exist in the world, or even of what the world is ultimately made, but that the world should exist at all. “I asked my bishop,” Mr. Prendergast goes on, “but he didn’t know. He said that he didn’t think the point really arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned.”

Say again! Face to face with the deepest and most elemental of all the questions with which to take a man by the throat and, because some silly bishop deems it of no real practical implication for how we live out our lives or discharge our duties, none of us ever needs to ask it? It is hard to find a greater instance of intellectual dereliction than that. As for poor Mr. Prendergast, it is to his credit that, failing to answer the one question on which everything finally depends, “the only honorable thing to do was resign my living…”

Why being rather than nothingness? Not a scientific question, to be sure, but one which transcends science. And as such, it remains the most necessary and far-reaching question of all. That it will not go away, and why, is the subject of these reflections.