One of the deepest questions modern philosophical thought can ask is: How do we get something from nothing? How did this universe, supposedly spawned from the Big Bang, come from what could only be consider nothing?
It occurred to me a while back that this wasn’t always the question man asked, or that this question wasn’t always phrased in terms of something coming from nothing. In the vast majority of ancient religious texts, creation myths are put in terms of order coming from chaos. But chaos is very different from nothingness, at least to the modern way of thinking. So it raises the question: when did order from chaos turn into something from nothing? And why?
My thought process on this question went like this: my not being a scholar or historian on ancient religious texts notwithstanding, it seems to me that man stopped thinking in terms of order from chaos around the time when Christianity became a dominant world religion. The creation myth in Christianity is that before the world, before existence, there was only God. And God one day decided to create the world. So at least with Christianity, we have an intermediating creation narrative: world from God. So what was originally a question of order from chaos became a question of world from God, and then finally a question of something from nothing.
How world from God became something from nothing isn’t a mystery. It’s clearly laid out in history. Science, becoming ever more antagonistic with religion from the Enlightenment era onwards, became more and more capable of casting doubt in people’s minds about God’s existence. So if you take world from God, and shave off God, you get world from nothing, or something from nothing.
But just because Christianity might have been the intermediary link between order from chaos and something from nothing, that doesn’t explain how order from chaos became world from God. So the question then becomes: how did chaos become God? Is chaos God?
Well, one way to think about it is, chaos is everything-ness… every possible thing and its opposite. Everything you can imagine. Everything you can’t imagine. It is light and dark, good and evil, black and white, male and female, up and down, etc., etc., etc. It is all things at once and all opposite things clashing together with all things, and at the same time harmoniously interleaved with all things. It is the impossible made possible, contradictions all simultaneously true, and also simultaneously false. Is it possible that this also describes the mind of God? Is God just everythingness? Not just the things that exist, but all potential? Isn’t God just the infinite? Boundlessness? Everything that exists and beyond?
Maybe. But there is a more interesting implication that comes from this–not so much that chaos is God but that chaos could be defined in this way–everything that exists along with everything that doesn’t, all possibilities with all impossibilities, all truths and their opposites–and that is that the ancients saw creation in the exact opposite way as we do. Whereas we look at it as something from nothing, they looked at it as something from everything. It’s almost as if they saw the beginnings of all things as more than the world they found themselves in. And somehow, in some way, certain things got shaved off of chaos leaving behind order. Order is, after all, certain things and not other things, certain ways things work as opposed to other ways, made of these substances but not those, governed by natural laws and not magic. Things fall to the ground. They do not fall up. Water makes things wet, not dry. When a man is alive, he is not dead. You don’t have opposites coexisting at the same time. You don’t have propositions and their negations, facts and fiction, both being true at the same time. ← That’s order, that’s predictability. It is stability. It is security. It’s almost as if the ancients were oriented to explain existence in terms of why we have the particular order we do and not a chaotic mélange of all possibilities–as if the default way of things, if it weren’t for order, would be chaos–that is, order plus all alternative orders, order coexisting with more than itself, not less, and therefore indistinguishable from everything else in this messy tapestry of chaos.
If this is true, we only arrived at something from nothing by first taking chaos–that is, the paradoxical marriage of all things and their opposites–and encapsulating it into a monotheistic creator God, and then dispensing with it by way of a historical trajectory into science and secularism.
So did we really do a full 180 on the question of the universe’s origin? Did we go from asking how we get something from everything to asking how we get something from nothing?
