The Man Who Thought

One day a man stops to think about the various ideas that are floating around him. He hears that it is unreasonable to believe in God. There is no possible evidence for God. Most phenomena are explicable through scientific inquiry. In fact, the tendency to have religious belief is most likely a sensitivity in the temporal lobe, perhaps a genetic predisposition. Not to mention the fact that museums are overflowing with fossils that reinforce the doctrine of evolution. Moreover, any ethical teachings associated with a notion of God are quite contrary to contemporary ideas about what is wrong and right that he encounters in newspapers, television programs, internet media and in the lifestyles of most people around him. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that the very existence of the idea of God is quite miraculous. How was God ever dreamed up in the first place? It’s true, the people at the dawn of time did not have modern science to provide these answers he so conveniently has. Perhaps our early ancestors can be forgiven for their superstition. When they saw lightning—they saw a godlike force. Here is the problem, though. If God had not existed in their minds prior to their fear of lightning, how did they come to personalize this utterly impersonal, inhuman force? Where did the idea come from? What is divinity, and how did it acquire such a tremendous lock on human consciousness? Was it loneliness that made the first men and women anthropomorphize their environments at the dawn of time? It is true that anthropologists probably have answers to these questions—but at best, they are only theories, since none of us were eye-witnesses to these prehistorical events and we have no reliable recorded data or experiments from this time period that can be verified or reproduced. All we have are interpretations. None of us truly understand all the workings of consciousness today; we cannot rationally presume to even begin to understand the consciousness of a hominid some millions of years ago. There is no way we will ever really know.

The man continues to think. He daydreams of the time before evolution began, when Earth was just matter, lifeless matter. In this lifeless matter, random events occurred without any preordained plan. Through a series of chemical accidents too complex and too numerous to define in a short space, a plan was being formed. The code for all life—not just human life—was being written on the surface of the planet. Over a course of millions of years this took effect. And yet, logic tells him that there was a decisive moment, a moment every scientist would give anything to see, especially Theodor Schwann, who stated that “All living things are composed of cells and cell products.” Or Louis Pasteur, that scientific giant, who said: “Spontaneous generation is a dream.” Here, they would confront their own axioms being disproved. Truly an exciting time in the history of the universe! The moment between lifelessness and life. The moment between chaos and a code that would eventually lead to the production of rationality. The moment between irrationality and rationality might thus romantically be linked to this moment between non-life and life, even if the two moments did not coincide chronologically. It is a thought-provoking threshold between worlds. One second changed everything. Another truly miraculous thing, as miraculous as that sudden appearance of God in the consciousness of the early human beings.

The man thinks about the lifeless planet of primordial time, of all planets, stars, the sun and the moon, the countless galaxies, star clusters, nebulae, black holes, comets and meteors, the whole myriad of phenomena that he can only dream about, being earth-bound and only able to see what he sees in the night sky. What a vast universe filled with darkness, light, motion, beauty, boundlessness. In comparison to this seemingly infinite space of planets and stars and dark emptiness, he is less than a piece of straw or gravel. He is atomized. He must conclude that he is a lucky cosmic by-product, a fleck of stardust from the almost endless galaxies that began billions of years ago, most likely as a result of the Big Bang or some comparable cosmological event. It is likely that prior to this, there was no matter, no time, no energy. At best there was nothing. There was not even chance. Not even randomness. There were no numbers, no formulae, no plans. There was nothing observable or measurable. In short, there was nothing that the rules of logic or the scientific method could grasp, being utterly useless in a zone when (or where? did such words mean anything?) their apparatus could not exist.

It is at this point that the man begins to feel the vertigo of existence. Looking back as far as he can, he has imagined a place that is not a place, a time that is not a time, a possibility that is not a possibility. He has come to nothingness. This nothingness, he realizes, has produced all that thrives, pulses, shines, lives, laughs, thinks, burns, and deteriorates today. This lack of rationality, possibility, of intelligence or chance, of life and death, of patterns, forms, shapes, sounds, colors, light, dark, high, low, great and small—this nothingness is responsible for existence.

Something in him breaks down. Perhaps it is the abuse his logic has suffered. Perhaps it is the deception of emotion. Quoting King Lear, he says to himself: “Nothing can be made out of nothing.” And here is a quandary and a conundrum. Is it irrational to waste another thought on this? Or is it irrational to persist in believing that his intelligence, which he now uses to struggle towards understanding, is really built on and out of nothing? Which is it? A moment passes, and he recalls that Buddha once taught in India long ago that all existence is an illusion. This is only a temporary solution, though, tempting as it is. Because right now, the universe is really starting to look like one. An illusion, though, like a symbol, needs a referent or origin. Basically, the man is stuck with the irritating fact that nothing has produced everything, but without reason. In other words, for no apparent reason, nothing made everything in which reason exists.

Have I gone mad? the man asks himself. Or is it mad to worry about this? Rational people don’t try to solve these insoluble problems, but our man feels drawn into the depths of this intellectual whirlpool. It is enough to make one frantic, but he is not frantic, because he believes reason will get him through this one way or another. Perhaps this is one of his character flaws—he does have faith in something; he has faith in his reason. Nevertheless, this reason he trusts so much in has produced something of a nightmare. It is true that he can dismiss it all as a trick of his brain, his faulty logic, his sensitivity, his emotions, the Zeitgeist, cultural indoctrination, or the incomplete nature of human learning and discovery, but at the heart of it all, he returns again and again to the same devastating question: Why did nothing, for no apparent reason, make everything, including reason? The man thought some more, and recalled the first five verses from the Gospel of John, which say: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The man remembers that “Word” in the Greek New Testament can also be translated as “reason”. In short, in the beginning, there was a reason for existence, and this reason was God, and this reason was life, this reason was the reason for the man’s reasoning today.

The man thought some more. In his historical time period, which is to say ours, it is considered irrational to believe that in the beginning there was a reason for all existence, and that this reason is God. Instead, it is more rational to accept that in the beginning, there was no reason. All life came from non-life, all reason came from non-reason, all matter came from nothing. The man has changed his mind about many things. Though he risks being told that he is deluded, intellectually limited, possesses junk genes, or is too much of an idiot to find the right answer, he has followed the advice of King Lear and believes what the apostle John wrote. This has not stopped him from continuing to think deeply about things. On the contrary, he is thinking more than ever before, but as an individual with a unique mission in this strange, strange universe.