Interlude: Ex nihilo nihil fit

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Xenophanes in Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

Some 2500 years ago, having moved beyond the anthropomorphic religion of Homeric Greece, the Greek Pre-Socratic thinkers began seeking to understand reality through reason and observation. They were doing science in the sense of trying to explain the fundamental facts of existence according to logical standards and the kinds of observational tools then available. They sought to explain two basic elements of reality, that anything exists and the process by which things change.

Heraclitus saw only change: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.” For him, the universe was uncreated, it always existed, coming apart and back together again. He saw fire – the most visible form of energy – as the principle force of change, as could be seen in the cool becoming hot and the wet, dry.

Parmenides and the Eleatic School made central the logical claim that nothing can come from nothing. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, saw no reason to explain existence as “to be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.” The Eleatics saw the universe as unique, uncreated, unchanging and unbound. They argued that if the universe was bound in space or time, that would mean that it was not unique. If it was not unique, it could not be the universe. The Eleatics denied the existence of change. Zeno used various paradoxes of logic to argue, for example, that things cannot move as “if anything is moving, it must be moving either in the place in which it is or in a place in which it is not” and neither is possible.

Despite the Eleatics, the fact that things appear to change needed explanation. Empedocles accepted the monist view of reality: the universe is singular and unbounded. He pictured it as a circle containing the All. But while the underlying reality is unchanging, the four basic elements – fire, air, water and earth – produce change by combining and separating driven by the opposing forces of Love (philia) and Strife. Anaxagoras developed this approach further by positing a universe made up of an infinite number of particles of all possible qualities while “in everything there is a portion of everything else.” In the original cosmos, all these fundamental particles already existed but were mixed and therefore left the total without quality. Mind (nous) set them in motion and caused them to be separated into what now exists.

In their answers to the questions of why anything exists and how things change, the pre-Socratics said everything that we can logically say. The cosmology of Empedocles and Anaxagoras could be read as an early premonition of our modern version. Our understanding of reality includes seemingly unchanging fundamental particles and forces making up the changing observable. Love and Strife can be read as Gravity and Dark Energy, one pulling matter together and the other pushing it apart. More generally, the essential dynamic of everything that exists – natural and human – can be seen as either a coming together or a coming apart.

It was while reading Empedocles that I went back to reconsider the modern theory of the creation of the universe from the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory essentially explains nothing. Literally. It does not and cannot explain where whatever it was that went “bang” came from. Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing can come from nothing. Further following the Eleatics, it is not possible to understand the universe as expanding since that would require space to expand into. Modern cosmology seeks to sidestep this by positing that space itself expands as the surface of a balloon expands as it’s pumped up. (Where does it expand into?) Or perhaps our universe is one of many in some higher dimensional multi-verse. (And in what space and from where does that come?) Obviously, these too explain nothing.

That the universe exists, that we exist, must mean that something always existed. That the universe seems to be expanding may be better understood as an unchanging totality without boundaries of time or space. Everything that exists – in the “past, present or future” actually exists at once, whole. Stephen Hawking once hinted at this by noting that the universe could be understood as one big wave function, a singluar All. That the universe appears to be expanding under the influence of dark energy and will eventually decompose into its constituent particles may simply be the state of this All. It is we – individual living beings – that move through reality that experience change and time.

This leaves the question of why there should be something rather than nothing in the first place unexplained except by the very fact that we exist. I don’t know where any of this leads except to wonder.