I was glancing at Scientific American magazine, Michael shermer’s column which apparently was addressing the presumption that the answer to the existential question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” must be God.
He thinks, as many here, that before we reach for an answer for such a question outside of this world that we should explore possible answers in this world. But is quantum foam of this world? Multiple universes?
My thought is that science has very little to do with this world. I mean fundamentally. Now I am not here to argue that god is a better answer than what science can propose but that each proposition, because of the very nature of the question, reach their conclusions from outside of this world.
There is an existential moment for each. When I think of abraham or Paul, when they hear that voice out of nowhere, that is their experience of this world. That, for them, empirical moment is incomplete. The interpretation that the voice is God’s is outside of human experience, determined by nothing in this world, even that calling. Because man at that moment can only judge such is the case from the assumption that something in them allows them to discern between the mundane and the divine, between the creation and the Creator. From the voice itself such conclusion is impossible as there isn’t enough evidence. But by faith the are elevated to a vantage point outside of the world of mere experience and they posit that X corresponds to God something never self e idently available by the very quality of infinity.
Then you have the man in plato’s cave. He faces what is empirically available. Of course the senses are fallible, they…are like shadows on a wall. When that man is unchained and lifted…how else but by faith?..stands there in what he interprets, beyond the empirical data, as the real.
Like Abraham, the question before them is of eternal consequence but the answer is provided by a mind that believes in its own capacity to discern the answer from outside of the immediate empirical data. How can they know if not by an inhuman elevation, almost a deification. The voice is then the Voice and the merely constant become the Law.
I do not deny the virtues of science but I insist that certain questions are NOT answerable more appropriately by it instead of theism since in the end each must reach beyond the experience of man, by a confidence that I equal to faith, without which such questions as why is there something instead of nothing should and would be passed in silence.