PFTD: Philosophy For The Day
Philosophy's first question
This is a book review by Thomas Nagel of Bebe Rundle's new book Why there is something rather than nothing. If you weren't sold on the title like I was, you should read the review. I'll address the topic below with some paraphrasing from the article, which is far more eloquent than me.
The issue that the book discusses is the ultimate philosophical question, the why of everything. Why does the world exist? Science can give us a certain path to trace down to some basic physics, but it stops there, and the metaphysician is never satisfied with that. A part of me is somewhat more content with thinking that the Big Bang followed a Big Crunch and that this massive universe-creation-and-destruction process has gone on for all time and will go on for all time. At least it's somehow closed that way. But "it" is, all the same, and we wonder why "it" is.
Religion steps in, to propose something outside this universe that created it all. I personally have never really bought this. The book argues against this solution in its own way, but here's mine: Suppose there's a God who created the entire universe. Then why does God exist? We're supposed to just push this aside and accept the existence of God as something we cannot understand at all, because it's beyond our realm of comprehension. But, honestly, if we can accept the existence of God without question or understanding, we should be able to accept the existence of the universe without question or understanding as well. It's just our religious conditioning (for those of us raised as strong Christians) to be able to accept God's existence but to question the existence of the universe as a stand-alone. But we can grow beyond this training, and realize that the answer to why "it" is is simply "it is".
Anyway, if you like thinking about these things, read the review too.
This is a book review by Thomas Nagel of Bebe Rundle's new book Why there is something rather than nothing. If you weren't sold on the title like I was, you should read the review. I'll address the topic below with some paraphrasing from the article, which is far more eloquent than me.
The issue that the book discusses is the ultimate philosophical question, the why of everything. Why does the world exist? Science can give us a certain path to trace down to some basic physics, but it stops there, and the metaphysician is never satisfied with that. A part of me is somewhat more content with thinking that the Big Bang followed a Big Crunch and that this massive universe-creation-and-destruction process has gone on for all time and will go on for all time. At least it's somehow closed that way. But "it" is, all the same, and we wonder why "it" is.
Religion steps in, to propose something outside this universe that created it all. I personally have never really bought this. The book argues against this solution in its own way, but here's mine: Suppose there's a God who created the entire universe. Then why does God exist? We're supposed to just push this aside and accept the existence of God as something we cannot understand at all, because it's beyond our realm of comprehension. But, honestly, if we can accept the existence of God without question or understanding, we should be able to accept the existence of the universe without question or understanding as well. It's just our religious conditioning (for those of us raised as strong Christians) to be able to accept God's existence but to question the existence of the universe as a stand-alone. But we can grow beyond this training, and realize that the answer to why "it" is is simply "it is".
Anyway, if you like thinking about these things, read the review too.
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