I am fascinated (perhaps unduly so) by a certain sardonic take on the First Cause Argument. The religionist accords for a moment with the materialist by considering as a given the ostensibly materialist contention that everything in observable existence has a what the materialist would call a cause (and one or more effects, but I will dwell on that later.) If the religionist can disarm the materialist by joining in the conceit that everything in observable existence has a material cause, then the religionist has set the stage for the contention that there must have been a First Cause for everything--that First Cause being, of course, God.
Unfortunately for the religionist's "cause," there is latent within the above argument a cavity of erosion effective against any recognizable religion being the province of said God. The "God" "proven" by the First Cause Argument--a God who is always somehow beyond question that of the religionist's choosing--is of fantastic irrelevance both to human existence and to the argument itself, since the argument by its very logic has excluded anything but material cause for any observable (and, most importantly, any expectedly observable) phenomena. Let any God so "proven" to exist ever perform a miracle, and the whole argument breaks down.
Plainly then (as would ever be expected of the mental lives of real people) the "everything has a cause" notion is neither logical nor scientific--it is experiential. People see something happen, and they look for a cause. People look for things to begin, and they look for things to end--which is only awkwardly connected to the preceding sentence, which would seem to disallow any neat notion of where one phenomenon leaves off, and another takes over. And all of this can be tangled up into notions of existence "taking over" from an ostensible pre-existence of contemplation in the mind of a Maker, and of an existence "leaving off" at some conjectured point of dissolution or stillness.
It is at this juncture that I feel the need to introduce the idea of our fitful race viewing our universe as a tapestry of interwoven images of cause and effect stretched over an infinity of time. And the "playing out" of the whole thing is crucial, for--no matter the recurring conceits of ancients and moderns about the earth as always existing--our everyday life is replete with examples of the stored energy of our lively surroundings being depleted into disorder and only partially useful heat. That is what we know as human beings--causes and effects winding down (albeit with plateaus and intermittent resurgences) toward a palpable end.
I must inquire, then, how the First Cause Argument fares when the opposite end--the winding down of the effects of causes--asserts itself after all. Here, of course, our real-life understandings are either dwarfed by a universe of wonderings, or are shouldered aside by a jostling company of unprovable physicists' theories. An argument about the existence of a divinity, or perhaps more properly about the existence of physical states ostensibly comporting with the existence of a divinity, can scarcely prevail when physical states might be postulated (and might be as likely as anything else) that defy our recourse to the comforting touchstones of our everyday experience. Here, at the opposite-end, "winding-down" aspect of a conjectured universe, we are confronted by the frustrating possibility that existence might both "end" and "never end."
The universe might cool and cool, and slow and slow--forever. The universe might wind down and wind down--and never stop. Never stop, that is, slowing down so that each passing moment involves motion so much less--while yet it traverses a lesser-still fragment of the possible remainder--so as to never end. The analogy here is to the school-days idea of the asymptote--the intellectually-conjured limit of some perpetual equation that will only approach, and never reach, that limit. Why ought not the universe--if overseen by some deity who would so please--persist that way forever?
Why ought not the story of the universe--the story of burgeoning scope of progressively unconcentrated energy--be analogous to the school-days representation of the positive graph-quarter of y equals one divided by x, the curve that falls, as the value of x increases, from the un-chartable heights of the left-hand near where x is zero, and that seems to flatten out to become a y-value of zero as x increases until it falls off the edge of the page? Of course, just as the flattening-out of the curve toward the right never reaches zero (our analogy of the universe petering out), so also is there never a conceivable limit of height on the left of the graph (where we might imagine--or pretend we can imagine--an infinity of energy density in some primordial, dimensionless concentration.)
Who can say that the motion of a winding-down universe would ever stop, and--most importantly for the First Cause notion--who can say that the conjectured infinity of energy in any point-source (traveling, as our imagination allows us, backwards) has not involved a more-and-more near-infinity across time fragments that grow progressively smaller as against any given degree of energy concentration? As any of the math teachers of our school days might tell us, the familiar visual curve of the preceding illustration can be preserved with any value of x, even if x (which, near zero, would constitute our idea of time near zero) so long as we stretch or compress the y-axis as we please.
In short, we can think of our universe as having existed forever, or as having started some-when. We can think of our universe as going on forever, or as being fated to stop. What is most important, and as I have tried awkwardly to illustrate, is the fact that the malleability of proportion--the drawing of any curve, the charting of any graph--is the one province of our Creator that he can never be denied, even as we tell ourselves that our undeniably merciful God will in turn not deny us the opportunity to assess our surroundings and so to attempt to navigate ourselves aright. These things we can do, whether our attempts--rightly understood by us as "designs"--are for good or ill, or whether they are attempts to guide kingdoms in a world of usually-needless suffering, or attempts to guide tendrils in a garden of relative delight.
If God is as God is, the chasm of every moment, and of every stride's-length, between Adam and his Creator in the Garden was an abyss of detachment that--for all we can imagine--was but a hair's-breadth of difference from our separation from God. We can say that the Garden was more good than ill, and that our lives on the outside are the opposite, but--as if we did not have trouble enough--we ought to choke on those very words. Compared to communion with God, Adam's lot was a veritable hell on earth--or at least it would have been so, if Adam had not so shameless--and therefore all the more shamed--as to direct his attentions elsewhere than to his Creator. Any of us, if possessed of the wish, can arrogate to themselves the claimed ability to inhabit the Garden forever without reaching for the tree, but I would not advise piling so unnecessary a sin upon any of our shame-ridden shoulders.
I have written elsewhere that our experiential lives are--or perhaps I should say, should be--characterized by futility and exhaustion. That is really too optimistic. Our lives are forays into failure that we will not recognize and retreats into repose that we do not deserve. It is usually not as bad an experience as it sounds, but that is the rub. Our reaching for the divine is always just beyond the immediacy of any experience we face, and the infinity of distance from us to the God who is always present for us is essentially the same whether we are in the throes of some great struggle, or we are in the mild amusement of trying to seek out--that is to say, to fit a design to--some delight of a momentary existence that beguiles us with notions of wholesomeness and positivity.
All that we make the subject of our capacity for design--whether quiet musings or great struggles--is what stands between us and God. All of it must, in the course of a life, be worked around as we might, for this is but the first building-block of that impossible creation--the life-that-is-not-life that Jesus demands that we live. This not-life is constructed without proportion, and it involves delights beyond proportion, and sufferings beyond proportion, and to experience any of it is a torment compared to the proffered experience of God. In this we can see the ridiculousness of theodicy, that inane set of postulations about why God would create evil, when all that is not God is evil and drowns in evil.
The business of figuring things out is the worst of all, the very snake-spoken ponderings of Eden--the attempts to solve problems and address evils when all that is describable as lamentable is as nothing compared to alienation from God. Evils like prating about the problem of evil when what bedevils us is the evil of problems, of figurings-out, of postulations about good and evil when all that surrounds us, when all that has ever surrounded humanity, is evil.
The only possibility of describing something that is not God as being other than evil is when that thing is tumbling unmoored through the ravages of a looming existence. We might envy the stones that are lashed by the elements, and we might hope and strain for the experience of the pilgrim--as each of us might be in rare seasons--struggling for the sake of struggling in search of God. In such a state we know not what to puzzle out, and we might ask for the designs of God to be imposed on us, and for all of our attempts to understand to be frustrated--else we grasp at our own designs.
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