Often when atheists and theists debate whether or not a God exists, the question of “where did the universe come from?” arises. I think this question is based on a specific metaphorical view of the world. But the metaphor through which the theist views the universe is not the only one that can be used. Here I will outline the theist’s metaphor – the universe as ‘thing’ – and suggest a counter-metaphor that dissolves the question of the universe’s origins.
The theist sees the universe as a thing, an ordinary object, like a rock or a plant or a seed. Intuitively, this view is very appealing. We are accustomed to viewing all that is – every’thing’ – as a ‘thing’ that answers to Aristotle’s four causes: what components is it made of? what organizes it into what it is? how did it come to be? and where is it going?
Our curiosity, our habit of trying to answer these questions, is a powerful human trait. If it weren’t for our curiosity we’d have no science, and without science we would not be who we are today at all. But our habit of curiosity does not mean that there are always answers to these questions. Our habit of thinking and wondering about ‘things’ does not imply that our world is in fact a ‘thing’ which answers to Aristotle’s four causes. But if the world is not a thing, what is it? How do we think about it?
I suggest we might think of the universe as a story rather than a thing. Now in one sense a story IS a thing – it answers to Aristotle’s four causes. One may ask what plot elements and characters make it up, how those elements are organized to make the story-as-a-whole, how the story came to be (who first told it or wrote it down), and what purpose or ‘message’ the story might serve. But these questions all assume that we are outside the story and able to examine it and pick it apart. If we are inside the story this becomes more difficult. Someone who is in a story does not think of it as a story. He may identify the plot elements or characters or themes that make up his life, but he does not need to. He may live without bothering to turn his life into a story, and indeed many people probably do live that way.
The universe is a story, and we are living inside the story. The universe’s story begins with “once upon a time, when time began…” and it proceeds through all its contrivances down to where we are today. Since we live inside the story, we are not necessarily able to step outside the story and take it apart. It is not a thing to which we may ask Aristotle’s questions and expect an answer.
Therefore, if a theist demands that we answer the question of how the universe came about, we may say that perhaps it did not ‘come about’ at all. ‘Coming about’ is a process that things go through, not stories in which we are the players. One need not explain how a story came about at the beginning of the story. All we need to begin a story is “once upon a time”.
hmmm interesting view, but I would have to disagree. You believe that the universe is a story, rather than a thing. Yet do stories not travel through the dimension of time? If so then is their not a beginning? What is then, before the universe. As you can see, your argument falls into the same trap as the theists. I believe that the universe is neither a thing nor a story, the universe just “is”, it is everlasting and eternal. It is infinite, and it transcends the realm of time. It’s just like “red”, one may ask “what is red?” once you bypass the empirical answers, you conclude that red is red. Or red just “is”. The same idea applies to the universe, it just “is”. Well that what i think it is anyway
Since we are living inside this story, we cannot examine it from the outside and determine whether the story is traveling in a time dimension or any other dimension. We only know of the time inside the story. As characters in the story, it would be rather silly of us to assume that the story must lie in a book with numbered pages. If such numbers ‘exist’ (however they might be said to exist) we don’t know about them. All we can do is number the events in the story (actually, number the events in our memory) and call the numbering ‘time’. Without us there is no memory and thus no time, page numbers or otherwise.
There is no ‘before the universe’ because without the universe there is nothing (says the atheist), and if there is nothing there is no change, and without change there is no index of change – that is, there is no time. Asking what there was before the universe is like asking what happened in the story before the story began. A misapplication of the concepts of existence and time.
The Universe is not a story…but thinking makes it so…human consiousness is perculair because it always seek to fit into a narrative, a story, a meaning…at this level, the human understands the universe as a story.
as regards the first two posts, time is man made. its a aid in record keeping, a way to measure longevity, time wouldn’t exist without humans,as we become more civilized, we needed time to keep in tune with deadlines.
can anything exist without a beginning?
heres a quote from an article about a new telescope in mexico:
Working above cloud level, the telescope will pick up millimeter-long radio waves that have been traveling through space for nearly 13 billion years. Astronomers will use the information to plot more detailed maps than ever of stars and galaxies as they existed shortly after the Big Bang.
“We will get incredible new insight into how galaxies were first formed,” said project scientist David Hughes of Mexico’s National Astrophysics Optics and Electronics Institute. “Once we start operating, we should be making breakthrough discoveries on an almost daily basis.”
say the big bang was the origin of the universe, the universe started in a extremly dense and hot “singularity”
I actually have the Facts without the repeated constant raving,as notes.
i interpeted dr.ray’s work with caution,i skipped the repeated points,and went for what he was/is really making a point for.
i know how patheitc TimeCube may sound but when you put it into MY views and art,you might consider dr.ray was making good points,most people chose the IGNORANT way and just read the repeated parts of his work,not the points he was making inbetween them.
Hello aporia. I was very interested by your entry and would appreciate it if you would read my question and comments. In reference to this ‘story’ metaphor, my question is - does it really stop us from talking about the universe as a thing?
I agree that if we think of ourselves as characters in a story then we may well be forced to accept that the story/universe is something we will never be able to obtain a perspective of. Smerdyakov will never be able to pick up and browse through a copy of the Brothers Karamazov, for example. This in itself really helps us to appreciate the futility of many philosophical attempts to observe what kind of “thing” the universe is (and where it comes from) and I think that your story metaphor could provide a very positive remedy when that kind of attempt crops up.
However, I’m just not sure that the metaphor you have introduced goes quite far enough to untangle the very deep confusions that some philosophers get into with this stuff. Your metaphor informs us that we will never be able to really know the story/universe from an objective, external stance but it still holds that there is a ‘thing’ beyond our perspective. There is still the story, if you like - it just so happens that we cannot tear our pen and ink sevles out of the pages and read it back to eachother. Your ‘person in the story’ has not stopped thinking of the universe as a thing - he has simply given up trying to figure out what the thing is like because he has realised that he will never be able to access an external viewpoint.
Now, if you were offering the metaphor as a practical one, meant to make us give up this silly pursuit, then I think you could defend your position in those terms. Sometimes a new picture like this will show us what philosophers hate to admit (but already know deep down) - that they will never reach a final conclusion. However, to get back to the context that you framed your comment in, the theist will defiantly grin and say - there is a ‘coming in to being’ for the universe, there is a ‘creation’, and all you have done is pointed out the profound nature of the difference between us and our maker. Their point of view is left quite intact and since we have given up the idea of knowing what goes on beyond the story, they are free to use faith or inspiration from that beyond as reasons for their belief and we just have to accept that we will never prove them wrong. The real question is whether there is a way of looking at things that will completely dissolve this notion of a thing-like universe? That would be a very useful metaphor indeed!
I don’t know if you’ll agree, but I really enjoyed reading something worth replying to and I hope that you find the response interesting.
By the way…This method of introducing one metaphor in order to dissolve another - is it by any chance something that you have picked up from Wittgenstein? This is just a question of personal curiosity because I find Wittgenstein’s use of this method in his work invaluable and would like to see it permeate more contemporary philosophy. Also, conccerning the idea of getting a view of the world outside of our own lives, there is some really brilliant stuff in Nagel’s ‘View from Nowehere’…if you haven’t already read it, it’s a must! If you’d like to ask any questions or just talk more, feel free to e-mail me on al_george@btinternet.com. Thanks aporia (nice handle by the way)!
I didn’t pick it up from Wittgenstein, at least not intentionally. I did have a couple inspirations though. One came from a dialogue of Hume (I don’t remember which as I didn’t read it myself, but was discussing it with a philosophy student) in which Hume suggests that we see the universe as a living, growing thing rather than a machine. He introduces this counter-metaphor as a way around the question of the universe’s “design”.
I figure that many of our philosophical problems arise from our use of metaphors which may be maladapted to the situation at hand. This kind of problem goes all the way back to presocratics like Thales and Parmenides and continues to this day. So I agree that this method is invaluable and should provide a touchstone for the examination of many philosophical questions (universe’s origins, mind-body problem, free will/determinism, etc.) We think first in stories and pictures before we pose abstract philosophical questions in prose; therefore, to truly engage the thoughts behind the questions we must operate not only at the logical/schematic/philosphical level but also at the imaginative/metaphorical/narrative-storytelling level.
This gives me a good reason to pick up some Wittgenstein next chance I get!
This comment highlights a difficult balance I tried to strike in explaining this metaphor. On one hand I cannot ‘know’ any perspective but my own, and in this sense the universe, ‘to me’, is simply my current perceptual frame of reference, mixed as it is with my sensory impressions, memories, desires, etc. If I think of the universe as merely a perceptual impression, it seems to be simply ‘there’ and the question of its origin seems unimportant.
On the other hand, if I want to make any ‘sense’ of my own perceptual frame of reference, I will tend to rely on various instinctual predictive models and social constructions which tend to bring me towards a ‘reification’ of the world. For example, I predict that walking backwards into my room would probably be disastrous because I see the clutter in the room right now and instinctually expect it will somehow block my path and cause me to fall if I were to walk backwards in the room. This instinctual sense of ‘presence’ or ‘permanence’ is a common theme in our predictive models of the world. Because the theme of permanence allows us to construct so many successful interlocking predictive models, we naturally think we should extend it as far as possible, even to the universe itself. The mere skepticism of Hume or Sextus Empiricus will not be quite satisfying enough to turn us back from this impression. We then feel it’s quite obvious that things are things, not just perceptions, and they have a life of their own when we turn our backs on them. Right?
**Before I came to this more skeptical position, I had my own way of ‘reifying’ the universe and I wonder if others share it. I would imagine the universe as a ball, perhaps expanding or contracting in accordance with the latest astrophysical theories, but the ball was embedded in a space that I would call ‘God’ or ‘all-that-is’ as a theist and ‘non-being’ as a naturalist. I would further imagine the universe’s presence through time as implying some sort of literal extension in a space-like time dimension. That is, I would imagine a 2D universe with time as a third dimension, and the universe as a whole would form a sort of 3D worm whose cross sections were pictures of the universe at all times in which it existed. This worm itself would be again by surrounded by a sort of ‘empty space’ of God or nonbeing or some such. I feel that the conceptualization of non-being as ‘empty space’ was a very important error I made in imagining the universe, because empty space is a human conception bound to obey the laws of ‘presence’ and ‘permanence’. Effectively what I had done was make nonbeing a ‘thing’, which is absurd. But it was natural because it is so hard for us to think about anything but as a ‘thing’. The conception of nonbeing as ‘empty space’ with all its connotations of permanence leads us to doctrines like “nothing comes from nothing” because we instinctually feel that nothing is entirely created or destroyed in empty space, things can only become different. This metaphor is used quite explicitly in a simple philosophical defense of God’s existence here.
**But thinking about nonbeing as empty space with these associated concepts of permanence and laws against creation and destruction is naive and unwarranted. There are other ways to think about it, and I will try to articulate my own way here, along with a naturalist philosophical explanation of the universe’s ‘origins’.
**The naive way to think about the universe’s origin is the following. First there was nonbeing, envisioned as blackness and empty space. In some abstract undefined sense, time was passing in this empty space. Then suddenly the universe popped into existence and our story began. However, this imaginative view is mistaken. We have no conception of what there was ‘before’ the universe, or even if ‘before the universe’ is a meaningful phrase. The only time we are aware of is associated with the changing of physical objects; therefore, without such objects there is no reason to hypothesize the universe arising from some abstract empty space with some abstract undefined clock ticking away. The way to a naturalist view of the universe is to accept that the phrase ‘before the universe’ does not signify anything beyond this mistaken conception of a universe popping into being on top of a canvas of empty space. Therefore we are effectively not ‘allowed’ to think of ‘before the universe’ as signifying anything at all. We simply cannot think about it in any useful, meaningful way.
Coming back to this conception of the universe as a 3D worm spread across time (or more accurately a 4D worm, but we cannot imagine such a thing) there is a way to signify the fact that we cannot think about nonbeing. Instead of thinking of the worm sitting in this empty space, think of it as embedded in an infinite block of impenetrable steel, like a mosquito frozen in amber. The steel represents the fact that we cannot ‘penetrate’ from being to nonbeing. A person living inside the worm that represents the universe-over-time could not go to the side of the worm, or the front, or the back, and tap on it to figure out what’s on the other side. It is the most impenetrable void and returns back no information. We are encased in our own universe like this worm in the block of steel. The worm does not sit in an empty space, because that would presuppose the ‘popping into existence’ that we said we could not meaningfully think about in the previous paragraph.
You’ve had a very private glimpse into my intuitions about the universe here. I’m not sure anyone shares them, let alone that they could form the basis of an effective counter-metaphor for the idea of the universe coming-into-being, appearing like a little ball in an empty room. But it does explain a little more about what I’m trying to say when the universe is a story. If we are inside a story, we are not allowed to think about ‘before the story’, just as we are not allowed to think about ‘before the universe’ while we’re living in it. The problem with the story metaphor is that as you pointed out, stories are embedded into a larger world of human interaction where the stories are told and written. It is difficult to separate the sense of being ‘inside the story’ from the sense of its being a story being created, told, or written in a book.
Most of the above is an attempt to engage this comment, dismantling the concept of ‘coming into being’ of the universe with something else that is equally intuitive but more accurate about the distinction of ‘nonbeing’ versus ‘empty space’.
Also, I do not expect that the theist will find any of this very compelling – he probably believes in god for reasons far removed from such philosophical speculation, so he’ll believe in whatever conception of the universe allows him to fit god into it. What I’ve written here is meant more for the naturalist who finds the question of the universe’s ‘origins’ (presumptive language implying a coming-into-being) philosophically perplexing.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply and sorry about the long-windedness of this reply, it’s my first try at fleshing out these deeply felt intuitions about the universe. The main intuition I want to communicate is this idea of nonbeing as ‘impenetrable steel’ rather than ‘empty space’ or ‘empty room’. If we habitually keep such an intuition in mind I think we will be more likely to avoid pernicious errors in thinking about nonbeing which have been propagated at least since Parmenides.
I looked up Nagel’s book on Amazon.com. It looks like it tackles the sort of problem of which this is a particular instance, the view-from-nowhere vs. the view-from-our-own-eyes. Mistakes can arise when we forget that our view from nowhere is also always a view through our own eyes. We must always remember that, and beware of the prejudices that will arise when applying a familiar perspective to an unfamiliar problem.
"It’s just like “red”, one may ask “what is red?” once you bypass the empirical answers, you conclude that red is red. Or red just “is”. "
Err… I think colors are a bad example… We “know” or at least have operational theories that describe what “redness” is…
“What happened in the story of Snow White before “once upon a time”?”
Whenever I read a book I use the writing to imagine another world, that operates on the same fundamental principles as our world. So I would imagine there is a back story for Snow White… And often when I read fantasy books I am very curious about the back story. Sometimes authors will write a seperate book that gives great detail about the back story of the imaginary world they have created. And I always love learning about the rich histories of the world I have invested my imagination into… A story without any history is very uninteresting to me. Some stories like Snow white dont give much of a history if at all, and it leaves it up to your imagination. I dont like that… But I do create a full imaginary world in my mind when I read any story. I just fill in the blanks that the author leaves out. But that imaginary world has all the same questions and problems of my own, because my imagination cannot stray from the fundamental principles that are the framework of my thought. For example, if a story was about a universe with no time… I wouldnt know how to imagine it. I cannot do that… Time is a fundamenal principle behind the way I percieve the world, and I cannot imagine things any other way. Speaking of time…
“as regards the first two posts, time is man made. its a aid in record keeping, a way to measure longevity, time wouldn’t exist without humans,as we become more civilized, we needed time to keep in tune with deadlines.”
I dont know what the hell you are talking about… I cannot describe time to you… all I can say is time just passed… There… it happend again… Thats time… Its actually happening always… Or maybe these terms are inaproriate… But… things change and I catogarize them with time. But things still go through some progression… Things still change, one thing changing after another. Maybe if nothing changed I would not percieve time. But I couldnt possibly imagine no change… So… change does happen… that change happens in some order. That order is what we call time.
