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Passing the last one on.

Krystiana's avatarBrim-Full with Immensity of Life

(I promise, this is the last one!)

So by this time, I was thinking breakfast should have happened a long time ago, but my river path had morphed into a worn-ish trail across the edge of fields, and it just kept being beautiful!

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Eventually I just had to make up my mind to turn around (partly because I had no idea how long I’d been walking, and after all I had an essay to write). So with that, it was back along the river . . .

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through the mist, and Middle Earth . . .

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And to my cozy flat and breakfast.

The end. =]

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Proof That “Nothing” Is Possible

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I just bought the bestseller Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt (New York, Liveright, 2012).  The book looks great, but I haven’t read very far into it just yet.  On page 1, the Prologue offers what is dubbed:

“A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives.”

Here is the proof:

Suppose there were nothing.  Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something.  If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted.  If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden.  So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden.  Thus nothing is self-forbidding. 

Therefore, there must be something.  QED.

Again, I’ve yet to read beyond this page, but a quick glance revealed no immediate refutation of this proof.  My daughter, a sophomore at a non-elite university, saw through the it immediately, pointing out that it employed equivocation on the word “nothing.”  This does seem to be one way to describe what is wrong with the proof.  With a few minutes to think and type I shall quickly attempt to explain.

Suppose there were nothing.     OK, fair enough.

Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something.     Still good.

If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted.     This no longer works, for in a state of total “nothingness” there would be no “everything” and no such thing as “permission.”

If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden.     Whatever.  See the next line.

So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden.     This sounds suspiciously like a prohibition or a law, which we have already been told, correctly, do not exist in a condition of absolute nothingness.

Thus nothing is self-forbidding.   Wrong.

Therefore, there must be something.  QED.   Sorry.  As explained, it doesn’t follow.

So, with all due respects to Jim Holt, whose book I intend to thoroghly enjoy, and with a quiet hope that he offers a similar refutation somewhere beyond page 1, I offer this alternative.

“An Even Quicker Proof That There Might Nothing Rather Than Something, for Modern People Whose Lives Are Still Busy”

Suppose there were nothing.  Then nothing would exist, not even a prohibition against nothingness.  Thus, there would truly be nothing, i.e., nothing at all.  QED. 

[Update on Nov 18, 2012:  I’m very happy to say that the author goes far beyond such “proofs” as this.  The book is very satisfying for those who like to read such things.  The Quck Proof is a mere tongue-in-cheek introduction to an entertainingly written discussion of a long and serious subject.]

An excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s *The Death of Adam*

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“History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as well as benign.  Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in terms religion has supplied.  The proof of this is that, in the twentieth century, “scientific” policies of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes.  Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word “science,” which, quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant “truth.”  Surely it is fair to say that science is to the “science,” that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the “Christianity” that inspired Crusades.  In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and appropriated a great part of its language and resources and legitimacy.  In the case of religion, the best and worst of it have been discredited together.  In the case of science, neither has been discredited.  The failure in both instances to distinguish best from worst means that both science and religion are effetively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.

“These are not the worst consequences, however.  The modern fable is that science has exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it.  But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality.  It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth.  It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic.  And this is more or less where we are now.”

– Marilynne Robinson, “Darwinism” in The Death of Adam:
Essays on Modern Thought (New York, Picador, 1998, 2005), 70-71

Find the book here on Amazon:
amazon.com/Death-Adam-Essays-Modern-Thought

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While I am personally an ex-Catholic and Ms. Hamilton’s blog is called Public Catholic, she makes an important point and makes it very well. It’s not enough to say that we’re against something. We have to clearly define what we are for and then sincerely attempt to live that out.