Living well upon wondrous, mysterious facts . . .
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| The wondrous Harvest Supermoon of 18th September 2024, taken from Castle Hill, Cambridge |
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In a very interesting book chapter called, “Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?” found in the “Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics”, the theoretical physicist, Sean M. Carroll, claims that
“Every attempt to answer the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ultimately grounds in a brute fact, a feature of reality that has no further explanation.”
And, following on from this claim, the very last lines of his chapter read:
“We are always welcome to look for deeper meanings and explanations. What we can’t do is demand of the universe that there be something we humans would recognize as a satisfactory reason for its existence.”
Today, because I feel Carroll’s basic conclusion is likely to be correct, I want to be clear that I am not going to claim that I have access to some deeper meaning or explanation that could ever stand as a satisfactory reason for the existence of the universe. However, what I do want to suggest, is that there might be a way of more or less agreeing with Carroll’s claim but of doing this in a way that allows us to avoid saying the universe “must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts” (this quote is taken from the chapter’s abstract). Just to be clear, it’s Carroll’s term “brute facts” that concerns me today, rather than anything about his general scientific position.
It concerns me because, as creatures like us, with an existentialist way of being-in-the-world — in which it matters to us what happens in the world, what happens to our friends, what happens in the natural sciences, philosophy and religion, and which, as John Haugeland once summed up as the fact that we “give a damn” — it’s more true to our lived experience to say that the universe bottoms out, not in “brute facts”, but in wonder or astonishment that there is something not nothing.
For someone like me, who remains positive about the undischarged possibilities that continue to exist in the mystical language of religion even after the death of belief in God, Carroll’s “brute facts” are, instead, perceived by me as being “wondrous facts.”
However, it would be remiss of me if I did not admit that twenty-five years in the ministry here in Cambridge, talking with many people whose religious faith has ebbed away as they found themselves more and more persuaded by the anti-supernaturalist results of the natural sciences, this has meant I have met a fair number of people who have not been able to transform Carroll’s “brute facts” into “wondrous facts”, but only into what are, for them, “disappointing facts.” But, even in these cases, it is still possible to point out to the disappointed person that the universe is not so much bottoming out “brutally”, as bottoming out “mysteriously.” And I can, and often have, also pointed out that philosophy (and, indeed, religion) begins not only in wonder, as Aristotle and Plato famously thought, but also in disappointment. For is not disappointment itself a species of wonder, a cause of deep philosophical wondering? . . . “What’s it all about Alfie?” . . .
Of course, it might still be claimed that for the disappointed person, Carroll’s conclusion will still feel very brutal, but even the fact that this feeling of disappointment exists — and whether felt as brutal or not — seems to me to be as equally mysterious as is the existence of the feeling of wonder and astonishment.
In short, existence — the fact that there is something not nothing — continues to be for me something that bottoms out in a wondrous mystery rather than brute fact, because even the fact that there exists brute facts and disappointment is, itself, a wonderfully mysterious phenomenon.
And all this serves to remind me of something helpful that has been noted by Thomas Sheehan about the implications of Heidegger’s idea of Anwesen, or meaningful presence (What, after all, was Heidegger about?). Sheehan points out that Heidegger said, in what was for him a surprisingly humorous fashion, that:
“It is not the case that objects are at first present as bare realities, as objects in some sort of natural state [akin, I think to Carroll’s “brute facts”] and that then in the course of our experience they receive the garb of a value-character so that they do not have to run around naked.”
Instead, as Heidegger says elsewhere, for us:
“Even the most trivial thing is meaningful (even though it remains trivial nonetheless). Even what is most lacking in value is meaningful.”
And, in short, Sheehan states that:
“There is nowhere else for a human being to live except in meaning.”
And so my basic thought for the day — about which I’d value your own thoughts — is that for creatures like us there can never exist naked, brute facts, because what exists, is for us, always-already clothed in meaning and this, surely, is something wondrous and astonishing, and well worth keeping at the centre of our own creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion and spirituality (jiyū shūkyō).
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