But did we understand that terrible awe? He then walks to the highest hill in his hometown and breaks into “convulsive sobs.”. ", Books of the Times - Into the Nothing, After Something. But the “principle itself” is not explained! Banks play an important role in the economy as financial intermediaries, matching up lenders and borrowers. As Marion argues, and as Holt’s own account of his mother’s death reveals, the knowledge of love—an image of the same love “that moves the sun and other stars”—must finally go beyond what analytic knowledge can subdue. Although Holt is impressed, he doesn’t buy it. Recently, I was driving with two of my brothers from New England to New York, and we all got to talking about religion. "—and spend hundreds of pages circling around the answer, like wastewater around the drain Holt's existential detective story checks off every one of my pet peeves about contemporary mainstream nonfiction. Founded in 1944, the World … ; and simplicity, as he saw it, made a hypothesis only probable, not undeniably certain.” God, the infinite ground of our finite world, is the simplest and most coherent “stopping point” of explanation. “Where other philosophical theists talked of necessity, he talked of simplicity; and simplicity, as he saw it, made a hypothesis only probable, not undeniably certain.” God, the infinite ground of our finite world, is the simplest and most coherent “stopping point” of explanation. “But how can you cross this enormous gulf between nothing and something?” Citing Aquinas, he considers the notion that “God made the world ‘in play’…that makes reality seem almost a piece of light verse.” Within a year after their conversation, Updike died of lung cancer. “Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense,” Leslie explains. There is evidently a great abundance of Being. Why Does the World Exist? https://twitter.com/JohnDeGuzzy/status/1313973335856906240, Thank you @WordOnFire @FrSteveGrunow @BishopBarron for making the #wordonfirebible available in the UK. Tolkien made his home) to meet with David Deutsch, “widely regarded as one of the most daring and versatile scientific thinkers alive.” Deutsch’s view of the world “encompassed a huge ensemble of worlds, all existing in parallel: a multiverse. It would also know the structure of infinitely many other universes. Gotta get it to schools, As far as Grünbaum can tell, the Christian account of creation, (“out of nothing”), and a “dependency axiom” (which makes God the sustainer of the universe), spawned belief in the spontaneity of Nothing, which prompts a wild goose chase of existential searching. He travels back to his home state of Virginia to be with her in her last days, and the following scene transpires as he sits by her bedside: “I was alone with her. This is the answer of Canadian cosmologist and philosopher of science John Leslie, who—although he eschews traditional religious notions of God—has written a book called Immortality Defended that looks at the possibility of eternal existence through quantum entanglement. Still, Holt rejects God because he cannot fully understand who or why God is. Recently, longtime New Yorker contributor Jim Holt released Why Does the World Exist? Penrose offers Holt an elegant account of “the three worlds” of Being, which provides a stirring sense of “moreness” that materialist accounts of the world tend to lack. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in a review of Lawrence Krauss’ book A Universe From Nothing, writes: “Nothing is not nothing. The second lesson is that Christianity gives us neither impenetrable obscurity nor cut-and-dried explanation; it is amenable to reason but not totally subject to it. stream Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the first to publish the question in 1714. How Strong is the “STRONGEST Argument Against Catholicism”? If we are scientifically minded, this should surprise us—shouldn’t it?”. is an intellectual quest of one the most intriguing philosophical questions, "Why Does the World Exist". %PDF-1.5 Follow him @MatthewBecklo on Twitter. by Jim Holt". Although Heidegger gave the meaning of Being center stage, logical positivists like A.J. The Word on Fire Institute: Two Years and Counting! He also offers us something of a “final theory” which combines the others: like Grünbaum he deems the primal metaphysical question to be somewhat ill-conceived; like Penrose and Leslie, he emphasizes human consciousness; and like Swinburne and Updike, he references Aquinas and untangles the theological implications of his work. As for the question of Being, Updike holds out as little hope for science as he does for theology. This gives Marion an interesting perspective on the question of Being; he starts not with grand concepts like God, the multiverse, or Platonic realms, but with immediate conscious experiences. Vilenkin, Holt writes, has brought quantum theory close to accomplishing this, showing that, out of “an initial state of nothingness, a tiny bit of energy-filled vacuum could spontaneously ‘tunnel’ into existence.” This is stage one: from nothingness to a quantum vacuum. Philosopher and author Jim Holt plays the role of the inquisitive detective who is on a mission to answer the ultimate question of existence. Although it’s clear that Holt enjoys their chat immensely, and admires Updike’s levity if not his faith, his mind remains restless; he is off to the races in the next chapter in a full-blown fit of Cartesian skepticism. (Holt is a committed atheist, even though he finds the writings of the new atheists ‘sloppy.’) In the end, though, it’s not enough for Holt’s hungry mind. (Weinberg, incidentally, has also “inveighed against religion,” but admitted that he didn’t think “science could ever explain the existence of moral truths.”), First, Weinberg confirms Holt’s rejection of the last answer. Was she trying to say something? But as theists like to point out, this is an evasion, or at least a misunderstanding, of the problem Holt is grappling with. And it would be very unlikely for ours to be the best of all of them.”. Holt then travels to Headington (where J.R.R. The book was also a 2012 National Book Critics Award finalist for nonfiction. “That’s a perfectly meaningful question as regards any given event,” Ayer said, “but if you generalize that question, it becomes meaningless.” Yet as logical positivism faded in the 60s, and exciting discoveries in physics and cosmology changed the intellectual landscape, there have been renewed attempts to finally answer the question. Holt then travels to Headington (where J.R.R. Along the way, Jim Holt also introduces the reader to the philosophy of mathematics, theology, physics, ontology, epistemology, and other subjects.[1][2][5]. When I put this question to Parfit, he conceded that the quest to explain reality would likely end with such a brute fact.”. Holt reasons that only Simplicity and Fullness could be meta-Selectors, because they don’t select themselves as Selectors. , this is an evasion, or at least a misunderstanding, of the problem Holt is grappling with. “It’s not merely that there is no explanation for God’s existence,” he says. He and the book were on the LA Times bestseller list during the last quarter of 2012, and the first quarter of 2013. Instead, authors begin with a vague but intriguing question—"Why does the world exist?" For Penrose and the Platonists, “the objects contemplated by mathematicians must exist in another world, one that is eternal and transcendent.” They “believe in a kind of heaven—not a heaven of angels and saints, but one inhabited by the perfect and timeless objects they study.”, Could it be an “ethical requirement” that the messiness of Being should overcome the simplicity of Nothing? “Surely,” he writes, “the bubble of false vacuum out of which the cosmos was born had to come from somewhere.” And what about the ontological “clout” of the laws of physics? Can’t stress enough how good you guys are doing. Rather, it would decree that there would be no Selector at all.” With no Selector, we should not expect Nothing to triumph—the odds are too low. For Marion, the key to phenomenology—and something that Husserl and Heidegger hinted at without untangling—is that “what shows itself first gives itself.” The paradigm of what shows itself is the saturated phenomenon, an excess of intuition that arises on the screen of consciousness, floods intentionality, and renders the thinking subject a “witness,” or “the gifted.”. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. Within a couple of seconds, her breathing stopped. He takes inspiration from readings of Heidegger and Sartre, and from something Martin Amis once said in a television interview: “We’re at least five Einsteins away from answering that question.”... Holt reminds us that no exploration of being — especially human being — can be separated from the human who undertakes it, complete with character and the play of moods. What are their answers, and which one is the most convincing? We nodded—we knew exactly what he meant. (In fact, Leslie himself seems rather tentative, admitting that his confidence in his own theory is “just a little over 50 percent.”) He cites Oxford philosopher (and atheist) J.L. In “Why Does the World Exist?,” Jim Holt, an elegant and witty writer comfortably at home in the problem’s weird interzone between philosophy and scientific cosmology, sets out in search of such answers. Holt kisses his mother, sings her a song called “True Love,” takes notice of the “sweet scene” outside, and whispers “I love you” just before she passes. “I think we’re permanently doomed to that sense of mystery,” Weinberg admits. endobj Wasn’t this mentality (“OTC” we call it now) the stuff of gangs, clubs, and nation states, the same myopic “us vs. them” mentality one sees everywhere in the world, only now in the spiritual realm? “Don’t worry about why there’s a world—it’s an ill-conceived question!”, But Holt finds something precarious in Grünbaum’s argument, and indeed in his visit with the man, which climaxes with a near car-wreck and transition “from Pittsburgh to Nothingness.” His hostile waving off of “the primordial existential question” strikes Holt as “premature intellectual closure,” a rash dismissal of both the simplicity of Nothing and the principle of sufficient reason. The closest that Holt comes to feeling that the question has been answered is with the English philosopher Derek Parfit. “I don’t think we’ll find a brick wall that says, ‘this is the ultimate explanation for everything.