The Idea of the Necessity of God

 
“And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

There is But One Good

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (1945)

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was brilliant at saying things in ways that make sense and challenge our thoughts. The thought expressed in the previous quote is one which flows through much of my writing and is particularly evident in the novel I have written. To some who read this blog, God is someone that they have come to know and are beginning to understand. To other readers, God is a concept to which they find their minds returning again and again. Still others would say they can no longer believe in a God of any sort. Most of us believe in “good;” and “good” directs us toward something. The question that remains for each of us relates to the direction in which we are pointed. Does “good” point us toward humanity; the universe; or to God? May our hearts and minds lead us to the truth.

New Theories of Materialism and the Universe

Materialism is a philosophical concept that asserts that everything is, or can be explained, in relation to matter alone.1 Many secular humanists and atheists subscribe to this without reservation. But lately, Materialism is a philosophy in decline. Like many other “sacred cows” of contemporary culture, there are ideas surfacing which will challenge its status in the world. It was once thought that time and space, dualism, determinism, reductionism, locality, causality, realism, and materialism were absolute.2 Today, some quantum theorists and experimental physicists would suggest that these are not as irrefutable as once thought. Let me explain.

As Rachel Wolchover says in Quanta Magazine,

Nature, at the deepest level, may not differentiate between scales. With scale symmetry, physicists start with a basic equation that sets forth a massless collection of particles, each a unique confluence of characteristics such as whether it is matter or antimatter and has positive or negative electric charge. As these particles attract and repel one another and the effects of their interactions cascade like dominoes through the calculations, scale symmetry “breaks,” and masses and lengths spontaneously arise.3

What she is saying is that quantum particles start out as massless, dimensionless, units3 that only develop length, width, height, and mass in relation to one another. Take for example the Higgs Boson: it is theorized that other particles only have mass in relation to the Higgs Boson. It is further theorized, and there is now some evidence to suggest,4 that other elementary particles do not have the three dimensions of length, width, and height except when operated upon by other unknown particles.

What are the philosophical implications of this? If the universe is a massless, dimensionless void except in relation to greater powers, then it seems it would be more accurate to say that we live in a spiritual universe rather than a material universe. Now, if everything starts out dimensionless and ethereal before it solidifies into dimensions and masses, then we are closer to a spirit world than we might have otherwise imagined; and then, truly, everything is holy.

1 “What is Materialism;” Philosophy Now; Michael Philips 2003; https://philosophynow.org/issues/42/What_is_Materialism
2 Huffington Post; "Beyond Reason Blog;" Dave Pruett; March 20, 2015; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-pruett/beyond-reason_1_b_6874664.html
3 “At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale;” Natalie Wolchover; Quanta Magazine;
 https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140818-at-multiverse-impasse-a-new-theory-of-scale/
4 "Radical New Theory Could Kill the Multiverse Hypothesis;" Wired magazine; Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine Science; August 25, 2014; http://www.wired.com/2014/08/multiverse/

If There Is No God

If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions . . . . Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else.
From a debate between Farrell Till and Douglas Wilson. See the transcript here. 

Why is there something rather than nothing?

New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking are confident in their atheism; even if they still have a few issues to tackle. Philosophers continue to ask them why consciousness and morality exist. Why do concepts of good and bad, wrong and right persist? Are such things outdated; should they be discarded? Once one begins to ask why certain things exist, it soon becomes evident that we must not only answer these questions but inevitably we must answer the greatest question of all, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Can universes or God exist without a cause? Could either one be eternal? What are the inherent problems of a universe that simply came to be? What about a God who has always been? Is it logical to consider God the first cause who needs no other cause?

Dawkins’ assumption that God would need an external cause flies in the face of the longstanding theological assumption that God is a perfect and so necessary being who is consequently self-existent and ontologically independent.1

Stephen Hawking makes a valiant attempt to explain how a universe could simply come into being. Some find his argument elegant and easy to understand; while others suggest it is flawed and ultimately unintelligible. In his book The Grand Design, he first asks, "If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing?" He quickly goes on to answer this question by saying,

That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative. . . . Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can. . . . Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing . . . . Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.2

Hawking maintains that for most things in the universe “it takes something to make something.” You can’t make a mountain of dirt without taking dirt from a hole in the ground. However, the universe, he claims, is the ultimate “free lunch.”3 Quantum physics suggests that subatomic particles can spring into existence out of nothing. I would want to check with other physicists to see if they would agree that this is what is happening at the subatomic level. Perhaps others would express it as, not knowing the source of such particles. But, for the moment, let us concede this point to Professor Hawking. He states that when we consider anti-energy, anti-matter, and other universes, everything sums up to zero. So, as long as the net sum is zero, the universe can come to exist out of nothing (at least nothing in our universe). Yet, for me, questions remain, why is there gravity rather than no gravity? Why are there particles and anti-particles to sum? Why are there other universes? Why is there something rather than nothing?


1 James E. Taylor; "The New Atheists;" The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; http://www.iep.utm.edu/n-atheis/#H2
2 (Hawking and Mlodinow 2010, 180)
3 Some of this paragraph is a re-phrasing of a previous blog found here.

Work cited:
Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.