Nothing Comes from Nothing

Maria was not a Problem. Maria was right. 

Sound of Music is not the source of all truth, but it is frequently true. When wondering where to start, the beginning is a good place to start: whether A, B, C or Do, Re, Mi. Another truth Maria sings is that “nothing comes from nothing.” 

Oddly, certain Americans have decided that they can get something from nothing. It is bad when a scientist with no philosophical training starts with something (say mathematical objects) in his worldview, forgets this, and then argues he can get something from this not “nothing.”

No kidding. You can get something good from something: often an amazing amount from little!  In fact, just a spoonful of sugar can be used to make the medicine go down, but this is another lesson and another wise musical.

A worse error might be believing in “nothing” (when it comes to God) and thinking this denial easily produces something good. Obviously nothing comes from nothing: even “not believing” is something, an act of denial.

The two usual candidates for something good coming from this theistic “nothing”  are better ethics and Socratic curiosity, but neither benefit comes from the alleged nothingness of God’s non-existence! But wait, as they say on infomercials, there are two more problems with this folk non-theism:  did denial of this particular god have much to say about the existence of all plausible God candidates? is your replacement for the “god job” actually adequate for the role (e.g. a basis for ethics) given the replacement?

Sympathy for the Atheist

Nobody blames atheists for wanting to get rid of whimsical and angry sky gods that have the characteristics of Marvel super heroes. Atheists have been running from fear for millennia. The first atheists, the Epicureans, wanted to be happy and thought being happy meant getting rid of fear and the worst fears they could imagine came from the existence of the Homeric gods. Zeus was not a good person.  After all, if God is going to smite you for doing something you have done or want to do, then it is a great relief to proclaim you are not smitten on the existence of this God and so will not be smitten!

The happiness the Epicureans gained did not come from nothing, but from an act: denying this particular g/God exists. My relief from fear of monsters in the basement came from believing, based on evidence and research, that the monster I feared never existed. My relief did not come from the monsters “nothingness,” but from a truth (or a belief) that set me free.

But a warning is in order: A person can get short term relief from wishful thinking. Desire can be a powerful motive for self-deception. I might wish there was no God to fear and so I might hope very hard arguments for theism and the (almost) universal experiences of God can be denied, but that comes with danger.

If wishes destroyed beings, spammers would die.

When it comes to morality, Plato is right: belief in a whimsical sky god, like Zeus, can be bad for morals. Of course, the God of the philosophers, the God of traditional Christianity, has nothing in common with Zeus except a name that confuses English speakers.

Zeus is not a God, he is a god (super being). God is not a Greek god, because no Greek god has His properties (omniscience, omnipotence to cite two). God lacks the properties that Greek gods have (eg. fallibility, controlled by Fate).

The intellectually lazy sometimes wish they could get a short cut in philosophy. They think, “Nobody much believes in the Greek gods anymore. Let’s just go the whole way and deny the existence of God.”  The problem is that gods could all exist (as devils) and God still exist Greek gods might not exist and God still exist. They are different categories of beings for which (sadly) we use the same English word.

Clarity about Nothing

Denying a God with moral laws and moral judgments exists might provide relief, but this comes from something: either the truth or hiding from the truth. But of course, this does not say much about whether we should be relieved. Finding freedom in denial is not wise, if one ends up denying reality.

“Nones”  also claim to easily find a basis for morality. The usual candidates are science, self, or society. Notice again that morality is coming from something not nothing. Now we must ask: is the something picked up to the job?

One way to make the replacement for God up to the ethical job is to dumb down the requirements. Christian theists believe that there is objective morality. An advantage to objective morality is that it provides a basis for moral hope. If an action is bad, history (most cultures in most places over most times) will tend to get moral judgments right. Some culture somewhere sometime might get some moral truth wrong, but history will set things right.

Now “nothing” will not give us moral hope, and the world seems like a morally hopeful place to many of us. If a “none” wants to keep morality, he needs a substitute for God that can do this hard job. Science is the best substitute: “we are hardwired” to do certain things a “none” says (with some relief). But the moment we ask “should we not do them” despite nature’s wiring the problem becomes obvious.

The valiant attempts by atheists to get “ought” from the “is” of science is, perhaps, one of the saddest sights in philosophy. Unquestioned assumptions such as “we ought to obey our hardwiring,” collapse under persistence asking of “why ought we?”

Society and self are going to fail any test for a basis for morality. You might feel good about yourself by doing what Mom and Dad do or the President says you should. Moral conformity is (after all) pretty safe, but then so is moral cowardice. How can one society condemn another? If society inculcates ethics, then why is the Islamic State in Iraq not free to train up their children in the way they think they should go?

Sometimes I think this sort of “none” thinks God died and left them God. But in fact, “nones” inherit (in the West) an overwhelming Christian culture (however imperfectly practiced) that they then modify. Is their basis for this modification adequate? Who decides (for example) what the rules are for society? Something or somebody will.

If there is no God, then society will become God and this goes badly. You can rebuke any Catholic bishop based on the external standard he upholds and gain great cultural leverage. You can only “prefer” one societies standard over another and hope your own has the “big guns.” Now if we know God doesn’t exist, then this might be best we can do, but we know no such thing.

I suppose the good news for a “none” is that the something around them, the culture created mostly by theists, gives them a great deal to modify. Could they have produced America or Britain? Societies built around explicit atheism have turned out badly. Even Western European nations are only a few decades from having theistic super-majorities for their entire histories.

Their current populations inherited a culture and are “fixing it” without reference to God, but the dead who built what moderns are modifying used belief in God (mostly) to build what they are fixing. Could moderns have done as well with their theistic “nothing.”

It doesn’t look good. Everybody has a problem with nastiness (Christian theists know), but nothing has proven nastier in history than societies built on overt atheism. Look them up.

Theism can lead to wonder.

Sometimes it is claimed that only “nothing” (or denial of God) can lead to Socratic questioning, but of course this is wrong. It is true that one way to get new questions is to reject old answers, but this is not the only way.  Good answers lead to better questions! God exists and He answers questions, but good answers lead to more questions not to “not thinking.” Every scientist knows this truth. When we know why the sky is blue, we don’t stop thinking about the sky. The answer fills us with wonder about other things.

Theists (overwhelmingly of the monotheistic sort) produced modern science, because their theism gave them a basis for thinking math would work, the universe was structured, scientific methods could be found, and laws would be universal.  Saying God created (as almost all of the first scientists did) produced wonder about how he did it. 

Right answers, like believing in God, do not shut off thought: they are doors through which a thinker can go leading to a cosmos of infinite wondering.

Believing in “nothing” instead of God gives a person a question: “If not God, then how or who or what?”, but even theist can wonder about this question. When I read, I frequently ask counterfactuals: If the South had won the Civil War, what would have happened? What if Rome had not fallen in the West?

All sensible theists do the same with God. We are perfectly free to pretend God does not exist, just as nones do. Doing so leads most humans back to His existence. Try it and see.

Because denying that God exists does not make God vanish, God keeps doing good even for the none: He undergirds ethics for the just and the unjust, the sane and the insane, the theist and the non-theist.  A “none” might get some relief from the denial and suffer little short term damage. God goes on sustaining the cosmos and ethics for the none and for theist. It is simply a shame to miss the joy of knowing the source of goodness, the ground of being, and love. The real Maria von Trapp, a devout Catholic knew this: something good came from Someone Good.