Meditation 36: Chaos or Creation?

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is one of the oldest and deepest of philosophical questions.  It is philosophical because the question itself is hard to understand.  Regardless of this, it continues to put itself forward, because we can conceive that there might have been nothing rather than something.  After all, if there were no being, it would take a lot less effort all around.  Think of all the forces that surround us, the tensions and processes that make up the evolutions of the universe.  Think of all the effort, pain and suffering that is involved in staying alive, both as an individual and as a species living on this planet.  There is no necessity about this, and no contradiction in the thought of bare self-sufficient nonexistence.  For this reason, perhaps, we feel the need to know why there is something rather than nothing.

Answers have varied. Some have held that there must be something, a Being that created the universe out of nothing.  First there was nothing, and then there was something, but before both is a Being that exists of its own necessity and then takes on the burden of creation.  This Being is the Creator God of the three monotheistic religions.

On the face of it, this is difficult to conceive, and it goes against the wisdom of the ancient world that "nothing comes from nothing." How could something come from nothing?  It is a total revelation that the whole world came into being from nothing at all, nothing but the will of an all powerful, but inscrutable God. 

From Plato we have a different myth.  It stars a Great Daimon, or spirit, which, though all knowing and good, is not all powerful. It creates the universe not out of nothing, but out of a previously existing matter.  The Daimon draws order out of chaos and "Old Night."  The act of creation forges links between the Eternal Forms and finite, changeable things, thus giving them intelligible essences.

The Daimon perceives perfection in the Forms, but matter refuses to be shaped to that perfection.  Things go awry, and will continue to go awry, because chaos and unpredictability remain embedded in things, along with ineluctable contingency and chance.

There is a third alternative. In the beginning and always is chaos, but chaos, or what is the same thing, nothingness, cannot remain totally chaotic.  Chaos of itself produces the order that we see about us in ever changing shapes.  We exist in the order that chaos randomly produces.  However, our lives are so short, and the life of our species is so short that we can never live long enough to see the laws of nature change.  Chaos provides the perfect conception of a universe in evolution.  Nature is contingent and probabilistic, but the laws of nature remain just constant enough for us to get our bearings in the universe. Chaos produces order because order is just a slow motion shot of chaos in action.  The answer to our question is simply that it is impossible, after all, for there to be nothing rather than something.