“…the ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as understanding that.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Many people believe that metaphysical questions – or questions about the ultimate nature of reality – serve no practical purpose. They may be interesting to think about, but other than to satisfy an intellectual itch, the questions of metaphysics will not change our life. In this 2-part video series we make the case that for at least one such question, this could not be further from the truth. In the first video of the series, relying on a chapter titled The Sense of the Sacred in Iain McGilchrist’s magnum opus The Matter With Things, we explore what this question is and the depth of its meaning.
“For me, and for many philosophers historically, the deepest question in all philosophy – both the most important, and the hardest to answer – is why there should be something rather than nothing.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
To grasp the transformational power of this question, we first need to dispel several misconceptions about what this question is asking. Firstly, this question is not asking for the first cause in a temporal chain – the first mover, so to speak, that set the cosmos in motion. As for all we know, there may have been no first mover, the universe may be eternal, with no beginning in time. And as McGilchrist writes:
“It is not a question of a temporal cause in a sequence, one lying on the same plane as the sequence itself, but of an ontological cause, underlying and sustaining any such sequence. In other words, not ‘what was it that set some process in motion at a point in time?’, but, rather, ‘how does it come about that there is a process, or motion, or a point in time, at all – now or ever?’ The answer to this question is of an altogether different order, and must lie on a plane different from, and deeper than, everything else.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
Another misconception is that this question can be answered through the discovery of a set of laws that govern the workings of the universe. Perhaps, for example, advances in quantum physics will reveal laws that can account for the origin of it all. The discovery of a set of laws, however, cannot tell us why there is something rather than nothing. Laws can only explain the regularities we observe in nature; they cannot tell us why the elements and processes of nature exist in the first place. In acknowledgement of this fact, the 20th century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:
“At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
And as McGilchrist explains:
“Laws cannot cause anything to happen. They are merely a description of an observed regularity in phenomena. What causes the observed regularity remains unspecified and is unaltered by being labelled a law. What’s more, laws have to operate on something.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
In fact, the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ cannot be answered with a natural explanation of any sort. For if we point to a physical entity or process as an answer, then we are assuming the existence of the very thing which the question is asking about, or as McGilchrist puts it:
“The question cannot be answered in terms of a physical entity or process, because that already presupposes what we are questioning – why there are physical entities and processes.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
