Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part IV

Dr Martin continues his series on the mystery of time and its relationship to our Faith, this time taking aim at the religion of "scientism".

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Modern scientific atheism (A.K.A. scientism) is just a dogmatic assertion that dismisses God, meaning, and purpose, reducing the universe to a mindless chaos of accidental stuff.

There are some ideas so plainly preposterous, so spectacularly stupid, that only an astrophysicist of atheist persuasion could possibly believe them. And when will we stop listening to such people, I’d like to know—all these self-styled experts eager to tell us how little we know? Especially about the origins of the universe, concerning which they scarcely know anything more than we do. We are all beggars before the banquet of being, after all, beseeching a hidden God to cast light upon the darkness in which we live. “If you think you know,” to embroider upon a line from St. Augustine, “it is neither God nor the origins of the universe that you know.”

Why is it, then, that the brightest bulbs on the planet choose to inhabit the darkest places? Why are they not the least bit humbled by all that they do not know? Instead, they pride themselves on telling us how the far-reaching extent of their minds enable them to enter into everything, including the vastness of deep space itself, which, they will dogmatically assert, has always been and always will be. Try and remind them of T.S. Eliot’s admonition that “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless” and they will leave the room at once, muttering all sorts of imprecations upon your benightedness.

They remind me of that old heretic Eunomius, leader of the hard-Left Arian party near the end of the fourth century, for whom even the most recondite of divine mysteries could not diminish, by his reckoning, his unrivaled capacity to solve them. The Trinity? A piece of cake.

The Son’s procession from the Father? Not a problem. “I know God,” he boasted, “as God knows himself.” He was, as St. Gregory of Nazianzus would later testify, the sort of Arian dialectician, “who discoursed on the generation of the Son of God as if he had been there as midwife.”

Your average atheist, of course, does not need to midwife anyone, least of all the Son of God, whose existence he has long since denied notwithstanding any and all objections. Thus, to a mind like that of Sir Arthur Eddington, for instance, erstwhile expert on planetary origins, the very idea that there might have been a beginning remains wholly “repugnant” to him, “utterly absurd…incredible even.” How can any intelligent student of the universe, he asks, possibly deny that nothingness has been going on for the longest possible time and that not a scintilla of activity could ever have taken place amid those endless aeons before the world began?

Until, that is, and all at once it seems, all that impacted nothingness suddenly burst into bloom, collating itself into countless self-replicating bits to produce life as we know it. Almost as if a magic wand had somehow been waved and presto! the world suddenly appears before our eyes. Why does anything exist at all, why is there not just nothing? 

That may be, as William James tells us, “the darkest question in all philosophy” and, therefore, insoluble on the strength of human reason alone, “no logical bridge,” he says, having yet been built for us to cross over from “nothing to being.” But not, you may be sure, for the smart set, for whom there is nothing the least bit problematic about the matter, the universe having caused itself, causa sui, as they say in Latin, to pop into being. The world, in other words, is self-generating, thus the sole source of its own existence.

What could be simpler, they will argue, than the notion that the whole blooming business should be seen as moving from atoms to acorns to Anthropos and that, enroute to this very moment, there needn’t be evidence of a single superintending Higher Intelligence to make it all work? We don’t require a Deus ex machina, a God from the machine, to account for the world. 

There was no Word to speak the universe into being in the first place, they say; no Eternal Speech to sustain it along the way. In fact, there was never any Eternal Word at all. Not, certainly, in a way that readers of St. John’s Gospel would recognize. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What on earth does that mean?

It means nothing at all. There was only the silence of an absolute and everlasting absence, which, while it may have terrified hypersensitive souls like Pascal (“The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me,” he tells us in one of the most moving passages in the Pensées), it troubles the scientist not one little bit. Everything, you see, works out just fine without God. I mean, we’ve got this amazing and complex world on our hands, and all we need to know is that whatever force it was that succeeded in jump-starting the whole shooting match, it could not possibly have been God.

Welcome to Atheism 101, for which the only prerequisite for passing the course is a willing suspension of disbelief concerning the operative premise of the class, which is this single apodictic certainty that behind all the matter of the universe there could never be Mind. Nor could there ever be meaning, either. Not in matter, certainly, which amounts to really nothing more than endless stuff without sense. 

Or worse. Like the character in that Jean-Paul Sartre novel (Nausea), who finds himself positively “choking with rage” at so many “monstrous lumps of gross, absurd being,” constantly intruding upon his life. The sheer obscenity of it sickens him no end. “You couldn’t even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness,” he concludes. And sputtering with rage, he screams “Filth!” in the face of so many “tons and tons of existence,” causing him, finally, to lapse into sheer exhaustion and ennui.

The universe, say the enemies of telos, who refuse to ascribe meaning or purpose to it, is no more than an accident that, quite inexplicably, happened to happen. It is certainly no mystery before which we must either endure or rejoice. It is only a problem in engineering and thus perfectly soluble. When Martin Amis was asked in an interview, for instance, his account of the origins of the universe, his response was: “I’d say we’re at least five Einsteins away from answering that question.” It’s only a matter of time, in other words, before science cracks that particular nut.

So, sit down and, reaching into your scientistic toolbox, just unpuzzle the damn thing yourself. Since none of us can answer the question metaphysically, which is not a job for science to begin with, then simply impose a meaning of your own. Go ahead and set all that chaos in order so that what appears to be nothing more than a random concatenation of atoms, swirling mindlessly about the void, will finally add up to a meaningful place to be.

In other words, exercise the skill set you already have in your head. Or, not wanting to do it yourself, refer to your local astrophysicist who, along with wise politicians, will happily provide the choreography to the cosmos you seem to require. But for heaven’s sake, do not look to some Supreme Someone to charge the world with grandeur. Because it hasn’t got any. So, just relax and leave the electromagnetic waves to do their thing.

We are left to accept a world of such chaos and confusion. It is a world wholly bereft of a single usable truth. Save only this—that nothing will ever finally matter, and thus we must train our minds not to mind. In the circumstance, how nicely skewered the inimitable Mr. Chesterton has left the proponents of a cosmos without God, men and women of science who will, he says, “complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then go and pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

A perfect polemical bullseye, I’d say.