The PROBLEM OF PIFFLE, Part Three: Formless and Void
Part Three: Formless Void: Nihilist and Irrational
This is the third of a six part series investigating the paradoxes confronting monotheistic and atheist models of the world. The first part is here; the second part here.
The atheist worldview, by denying a Supreme Being, denies not only a rational creation, but denies any supernatural element or aspect to creation, including universals.
This means the atheist universe is a nihilist universe, void of metaphysical truth.
It is a formless and irrational universe, where laws of logic are either biological accidents of primate evolution, or arbitrary results of human fiat, hence void of universal principles of logic, and lacking any account of them.
It is an unreal universe, lacking any account of the nature of being.
It is an agnostic universe, where certainty either in rational matters or empirical matters is impossible.
It is a nominalist universe, where words have no innate meaning.
It is an amoral universe, where all human opinions of right and wrong, virtue and vice, good and evil, are merely opinions, without objective foundation.
It is an antinomian universe, where law cannot be founded on justice, and so must be founded on utility, self-interest, social convention, sentiment, or some other unsound base, hence must be lawless.
Above all, it is an ugly universe, morally corrupt hence unable to seek or create beauty.
Each of these points will be examined in turn.
Nihilist Metaphysics
The atheist, by excluding a Supreme Being from all being, cannot explain being. He cannot explain why the universe exists. Nor can he explain that the universe exists.
Why is there something rather than nothing? His two options are, first, that the cosmos is eternal, second, that is created itself by itself.
The first option is absurd, given that the natural world displays a constant state of change and decay, and not even long-lasting material things last forever, not the earth, not the stars, no, not even the cycles of events that lead to the creation of new worlds and new stars. Given this, the lifespan of the universe cannot be extrapolated backward indefinitely.
Moreover, as a matter of logic, there cannot be an infinite regression of a chain of causes. Such a chain has no first cause, which means, no cause at all. This is for the same reason a railway car in motion, each car imparting motion to the car it pulls, must have an engine at the front of the train to impart motion to the whole, or otherwise there is no account for why the railcar moves at all, much less why it moves at a given speed, not faster nor slower. An infinite chain of railcars, in other words, would have its velocity as a given, unchanged from all eternity, and for it there would be no explanation.
The second option assumes an effect arising without cause, which is logically absurd; and, more to the point, would have the rational design observed in nature arising without a rational designer. This means matter and energy spring into being under their own power, effects arising without cause, and means the properties and proportions of the matter and energy, the laws of nature, display organization without any reason for there to be organization. Nor is there a reason why this spontaneous creation by nothingness, of its own power, of energy and matter would start when it did, or stop, or why it is not continuously ongoing.
A universe where effects arise without cause is irrational in the three senses of the word: first, the universe is irrational because it is lacking in design, point, or purpose. Second, it is irrational because any organization seen in nature is an illusion produced by human limitations of perception, and hence immune to any rational account. No one organized it. Third, it is irrational in that no account can be devised to explain the causes and effect of things, which means, in other word, that the cosmos is not a cosmos at all but a flux of chaos, dreamlike images that arise and vanish out from and back into nowhere and for no reason.
Either an impossible eternal universe or an impossible self-creating universe force the conclusion that there is no reason why there is something rather than nothing. Asking the universe for meaning is ruled out of bounds.
The same logic applies to the parts of the universe as to the universe as a whole. If nature is all that exists, and there is no supernatural reality undergirding nature, then nothing is eternal, not laws of logic, not laws of nature, not abstractions of mathematics, not timeless principles of ethics, justice, beauty, for the simple reason that there is no place for these things to be, no account for their existence, no way they could be objective to the human mind perceiving them.
A perfect circle, for example, as a mathematical idea exhibits certain properties, such as that the ratio between diameter and circumference is an irrational number we call pi. No human mind contemplating the properties of a circle can come to any other conclusion, hence, in that sense, the conclusion is objective. It is not an arbitrary fiat of human willpower, not a social convention. And yet, if all things come into being and pass away, this, too, must pass away. There must be a time and place and conditions under which the ratio between circumference and diameter is no longer irrational. But that is logically impossible, because the conclusions of Euclidian geometry are independent of time and place and condition. They are unconditional conclusions.
As with abstractions of geometry, so too with abstractions or universals of other kinds, such as the laws of nature deduced by physical science, the moral principles deduced by moralists, the laws of logic deduced by logicians, and on and on. Unless there is an eternal part of the universe, something like a mind or memory or Platonic world of Forms in which these ideas and ideals are stored, and from which the light of reason casts them into human understanding, then all these ideas are human inventions, existing in human perception, and their objectivity is an illusion and a category error. Absent the supernatural to undergird nature, there are universals, no laws of nature, no laws of logic.
More to the point, secular philosophy cannot account for the study of metaphysics at all, and, in an atheist universe, there can be no disciplined study of metaphysics, for there is no foundation, no floor, no first axioms for the discipline of studying first axioms to study. The universe is irrational. Effects arise without cause.
There are no axioms to the world. The only truth is that there is no truth, which is the axiom of nihilism.
An atheist is not necessarily a nihilist at the beginning, because he is not necessarily rational and coherent at the beginning. However, it is what rests at the logical endpoint of the road he is on, whether he himself can be troubled to walk that road or not.
Irrational Logic
Likewise, if the laws of logic were not implanted in the mind of man as truthful universal categories by the deliberate act of a creator, they arose aimlessly.
Even a Darwinian process favoring those nervous systems which replicate logical abstractions correctly, there are no logical abstractions in nature, that is, nothing in the empirical universe, for the categories of logic to replicate. There is no supernatural world of Platonic Forms where the perfect abstractions of universal logic rest, open to the mind of mind to perceive by the light of reason, if there is no supernatural world at all.
And, even if there were a supernatural world, and if somehow such nerve-arrangements as perceived it resulted, under a given set of circumstances, more often than not in the survival of the fittest and most fertile in creatures possessing and passing along that nerve-arrangement, there is no reason to believe that an even more finely tuned set of nerve-arrangements better able to perceive a different set of logical abstractions, hence better able to fertilize and expand the selfish genes of the race, might not arise by future processes as blind as those which gave rise to us. If man’s possession of categories of logic is an evolved trait evolution, said evolution can never said to be complete. No answer is final.
More to the point, if this evolution happened only under a given set of circumstances, the categories of logic apply only where and insofar as those circumstances apply.
This is not like saying the eye can be evolved to see under circumstances where sight is beneficial, because light is an objective reality. In a godless universe, human reason is not an organ of perception that grasps supernatural abstractions and eternal truths. There are no eternal truths if there is nothing eternal. There are no laws of nature, no laws of thought, no laws of morality, if there are no universals. And if nature is all that there is, all that there is suffers birth and growth, change, corruption and decay, hence, if nature is all that there is, there are no universals.
In a godless hence nihilist universe, logic is a human abstraction existing in the human mind only, an illusion produced by limitations of the nervous system.
We did not, by any pre-human act of combining natural elements, make ourselves human. No man concocted these categories of thought, the Law of Non-Contradiction, the Law of Identity, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and so on. That means they were not made at all. If they are found in us, they are a natural organ, like a fingernail or a liver, somehow an aid to survival and fertility, and have no point, purpose, nor meaning beyond that. Men did not make ape-men into rational men.
Without a rational creator, these logical categories were not deliberately installed into the human soul on purpose, in order to grant all men an instrument and tool for reasoning. Tools do not exist except when made by tool makers. Hence the so-called laws of logic fell into place by happenstance, blindly, because for a few generations of ape-men, the fertility of those lucky enough to be struck by this particular neural arrangement prospered at a rate greater than their close neighbors. Under other circumstances, other laws of logic would have come to pass, in other nervous systems, arranged differently.
Which means that our human arrangement is not real. What we think are laws of logic are mere conventions, or an accident of Darwinian statistics.
What we call reasoning is a meaningless flux of neural actions with no significance, except, perhaps, at one time, under certain conditions, those who suffered them outbred their competition. As soon as those conditions pass, what we call reasoning passes. They are not and cannot be a means of discovering eternal and invariable categories of truth inherent in the nature of universals, because, in a world where all things change and decay, there are no eternal categories, no universals, no powers of reason that are reliable for anything other than an immediate, concrete action, such a weaving a nest for building a dam.
This means no reasoning is possible, not even the reasoning that an atheist uses to confirm that he lives in a godless hence nihilist universe where no reasoning is possible. The universe is irrational.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
