A Response to 'The Question that Keeps Me Awake at Night'

Responding to Dr. David Kipping on the Origin of the Order and Existence of the Universe

This essay can suitably stand alone, but if you want to understand some of the narrative, to get a better context for it, or to simply give the due credit to its inspiration, I suggest you first watch or listen to ‘The Question that Keeps Me Awake at Night’, by Dr. David Kipping on his channel, Cool Worlds. In it, he describes the struggle he has with the question of why the universe is the way that it is, and why it exists in the first place. He finds that it is something that goes beyond the bounds of science and of human reason, and therefore beyond the bounds of human curiosity. It is an excellent listen and his content is of an outstanding quality. Here is the link to that video.

When I was younger, I used to lay in bed awake, considering the universe, trying to imagine the sheer scale of it, beginning with us humans, stepping down into our cells, to the nucleus, our DNA, and down to atoms. Then I’d go up, trying to follow the size of the Earth, to the other planets, to the Sun, to the distance to Proxima Centauri, to the galaxy, to the distance between galaxies, and maybe even up to the galaxy filaments. No matter how limited my human brain was and is, and certainly how inconceivable some of those steps truly were, they really did give me a sense of awe at the scale of the universe we inhabit—a universe so vast, and at the same time so intricate and fine. Likewise, I would follow chains of causes and effects—actually thinking about the wind, and the links that go back from there to the beginning of the universe. But going between the large and the small, and going back to the beginning, this never caused me distress, because I never needed to question where it all came from and how it all got going and why it all works so well. Being a Christian, I find it is all so neatly explained by God and to me, nature is unmistakably marked by God’s existence and His providence. Yet the more I am exposed to literary and internet content–and even more so, to people–outside of the bubble of my early years, the more I realize just how foreign this is to so many people.

From forecasting the weather to stepping off the side of our beds in the morning, everything we do is dominated by routine and the expectation that our world remains fundamentally constant. But we hear about the world growing more and more chaotic; and it seems like we could never have predicted that we would be living the lifestyles that we are now; and even the Earth itself seems confused at times considering the climate. Yet we still have an underlying expectation of constancy that allows us to continue on with our daily routines. When you roll out of bed in the morning, you know that the floor is going to be there to catch you. You also know that you will go to the floor and not to the ceiling, and each step you then take to the bathroom will not change how the laws of physics interact with your body.

           A fundamental conclusion that this leads us to is that the universe is intelligible, that we can reasonably go looking for reasons for every event with the expectation of finding it. While physicists may talk about randomness and unpredictability of particles in the field of quantum mechanics, they still expect matter to behave in a certain predictable way–that is, a particle that was once observed does not simply disappear. Even if it was absorbed by quantum fluctuations, it went somewhere, not nowhere.  Chaos theory, the study of apparent randomness in a deterministic universe, doesn’t mean that the laws of physics are thrown out the window, but that the observations needed to calculate certain situations are beyond what we will ever be able to reach. We can describe wave behavior and particle behavior, even if we aren’t currently capable of predicting the way an electron spins or where it is exactly at a particular moment. We can make predictions, and this is fundamental both to scientific progress and our understanding of the world, and to our everyday sanity. There would be nothing more terrifying than finding ourselves in a world where things literally do happen for no reason. I even contend that life would not  be possible in such a world.

           This is the driving force behind science. The world is beautiful, and wonderful; we desire to know about it, and, as C.S. Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, if there is a desire, there is surely something to satisfy that desire.[i] We can know about the universe, and we can know about why the universe is the way it is, where everything came from and why it is this way and not another way. The problem then, is not that we cannot know, but that we are often looking in the wrong way. There is no demon standing at the beginning of the universe preventing us from moving further in our quest for knowledge. There is a logical contradiction obstructing our primary looking glass.

           Science, our primary way of learning new information, is such a ubiquitous tool because of our intelligible world, and because we are physical creatures. It does, however, come with a significant caveat: it is limited to physical phenomena. Now this isn’t such a problem if you think that the only things that exist are made of matter, but this worldview faces serious problems when we talk about the origin of everything. If there is something outside of our universe, outside either of its boundaries, time or space, it is inaccessible to science and scientific inquiry, and therefore when wearing our scientist hats, we have nothing to say about such things. In the same way, science can try to make predictions about anything going forward in time, and it can describe anything going all the way back to the beginning of the universe, but it cannot say anything about what might have existed before the universe began. Instead, it is the job of pure reason to consider the world that the senses deliver to it and explain the unobservable realities that lie behind what we observe.

           So, what can explain the existence of a universe? First we need to address contingency. The basic idea of contingency communicates whether something must be the way that it is, or whether we could logically conceive of it being a different way, including that it could just not exist at all. If we look at any particular thing we can observe, we can quickly realize that it does not exist out of necessity. If the screen that you are watching this on did not exist, it wouldn’t cause any logical issues that would destroy reality. Earth doesn’t need to exist. Our galaxy does not need to exist. None of it needs to be here, and yet it is. But that’s the problem we’re discussing already, isn’t it? From these statements we can see a pattern and then draw a conclusion. All of these things are made of matter and energy. They take up space, and they exist in specific ways for certain times. No material object needs to be here. Therefore, material objects are not necessary objects. Space itself isn’t necessary, and neither is time. So, what we know now is that we are looking for something that does need to exist, and that this thing is not material, doesn’t take up space, and does not exist in time, and yet is, it exists, or it ‘be’s’. It’s weird to try to think of something that does not possess any of the qualities of everything we experience, and yet it exists. It isn’t made of anything, but it does exist. This is a start, but it does not quite answer the question of why everything is. One question that many continue to push for is, ‘but where did this thing come from?’ This question, however, is nonsensical, simply because we are talking about a thing that must exist, not contingent things that happen to exist. This is distinct from the weak anthropic principle, which I will cover in a future essay. This is a thing that must exist. Again, one might protest, ‘I could totally conceive of nothing existing, not even this so-called necessary thing. There’s no logical contradiction in nothing existing!’ I would almost like to agree with that, and it is one that I have struggled with, but once again there is a logical contradiction in this, not internally perhaps, but externally. Things do, in fact, exist. If there were no contingent things that existed, we would have no need to explain them with a necessary, non-contingent thing. But since there are contingent things, there must be a non-contingent thing. Again, this is a thing that must exist. That’s really all we know about it at this point, besides that it somehow made the universe that we live in. It cannot be the universe itself, because the universe, we’ve already established, is made of things that don’t need to exist. The universe must be distinct from the Necessary-thing. A more reasonable next question is ‘Why did our universe come from the necessary-thing?’ To answer this question, there are a couple of options. Either it is necessary for the necessary-thing to create universes, or the Necessary-thing was prompted to create at least one (our) universe. Either a universe-pumping machine, or an intellect. Considering the first possibility—a universe-pumping machine—this is really just a restatement of the universe needing to exist, but we firstly established that none of this needs to exist. Whatever the Necessary-thing is, it must be self-sufficient, non-contingent. which precludes the idea that it must do anything outside itself. It is the only thing that must exist, and we’ve already established that there could be no universe instead of one. So then, it must have decided to create the universe, which means that it must have initiative. It must have a will. And that’s about as far as we can go with reason. We can describe a few more attributes of this thing, like that it is unlimited, all-knowing, all-powerful, one, basically what we’d call the god of philosophy, but reason still only tells us very little about the god. And science, our candle in the dark, couldn’t even get us this far. It took reason, building on science, our experiential knowledge, to keep pushing forward to this limited perspective from which an answer could finally come. This isn’t a very satisfying answer, but it is a reasonable explanation for what we see in this world.

So, we come to the end of our search for the origin of things—a true end on our part. Unfortunately, we are indeed limited by our very nature. We cannot comprehend the infinite, and we cannot observe the immaterial. The explanation that we’ve come to is essentially unknowable by nature of its being transcendent. Is this then the end of knowledge? Are we bound to wonder forever about that god, the origin of things, the origin of us? If we are left to ourselves, the answer must logically be yes. We’ve reached that cosmic demon that tells us, ‘here and no further’. Thus ends curiosity.

There is one option which we must consider. One hope to fulfill our desires. Returning to C.S. Lewis, we have this desire within us. We are, in fact, curious, eager to know. We should expect to find the satisfaction we are looking for. But haven’t we exhausted our powers of reason? Well, yes. And so we must rely on something greater than reason to guide us forward. Something beyond ourselves, beyond the natural. There is only one way that we can learn about the god of philosophy, and that is if the god stoops down to tell us about itself. Not only that, but we should expect that if it has made us, it has purposely put that desire in us to know it, and so we can expect that the god does tell us about itself, somehow, somewhere. Our search, then, no longer goes back through natural causes and effects, disciplines of science and empirical knowledge, but through religious and historical evidence. This search goes beyond the scope of this essay, but if we are to have any hope for this search, we must look for cohesion, just as we looked at our universe expecting cohesion. If there is no cohesion to be found, everything is in vain, and we must give up. There is no hope and life is totally absurd. How could we retain ourselves with that despair? It is no less than the fulfillment of all desires that we are looking for. We must look with hope if we are to stay curious and full of wonder. Let us continue on with this search, recognizing how fundamentally designed our world is, and how wonderfully ordered. We must be grateful to be given an ability to wonder, to be given purpose.