Godheval

The concept of God, arising independently in many different cultures, and independently in the minds of every individual, is subject to a tremendous amount of variation and interpretation. God as a divine overseer is common, but implicit within that concept is the idea that God must then also be a discrete and transcendent entity. God as a physical architect means that there had to have been a vertical transmission of creation. The concept of “Ex Nihilo” – out of nothing – can only be reconciled with the physical laws if we consider creation as something “other than”, i.e. “less than” God.

The argument would be that in the beginning, “nothing” existed, but only in the sense of nothing “other than” God. In the strict physical sense, it is impossible for something to come out of nothing. However, if we consider things in the above context, and that all things came from “God”, which by definition could not have been created, then God is itself that nothingness. This idea will be called “Deus Ex Nihilo”, which literally means “God out of nothing”. Nothingness in this sense is not the absence of being, but the absolute origin of being. All things that “exist” as we humans understand it, must be attributed some kind of form or substance. Deus Ex Nihilo, that absolute nothingness, lacking form or substance, would thus also have to be the very origin of form and substance. In this concept we take the liberty of changing the conventional definition of nothing, but that is not so great a leap. That definition has no known manifestation in the universe. Even the “emptiness” or “nothingness” of space is now considered to have physical properties, that of a fabric which is pulled, stretched, and warped by celestial bodies. Where else, then, do we experience “nothingness”?

Nowhere.

According to the physical laws of conservation, we know that all energy and matter came from other energy and matter, and thus each new initiation of being can only truly be a reconfiguration of an earlier being. If Deus Ex Nihilo, is the absolute “nothingness” and origin of existence, then all “beings” (here meaning things that exist) must by the physical laws be derivations – or more accurately, transfigurations – of God itself. This would seem to be a rejection of the concept of God as a separate and transcendent entity, some divine overseer detached from the products of its creation. The Deus Ex Nihilo concept does not any presume or deny the role of intelligence, will, or consciousness in creation. Therefore it can be reconciled with both the blind evolutionary and intelligent design perspectives, provided the latter is not restricted to the biblical literalist conception.

The idea that God not only influences but actually exists within all things is not at all new. Pantheism, which has branches in, and serves as the foundation of many world religions, also suggests that “All is God” and “God is All”. There are two primary spheres of Pantheism – Classical, which maintains the “personal” or “living” qualities of God, and Naturalist, which removes that spiritual component and relies on a more scientific interpretation. The concept of Deus Ex Nihilo parallels the latter.

One particular take on Pantheism comes out of the Advaita Vedanta school of philosophical Hinduism. It suggests that if the “maya”, or illusion of being is peeled away, an underlying “nothingness” will be discovered. This is known as “Moksha”, which corresponds to the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, both referring to a liberation from existence as we “know” it, manifest in the cycles of life and death.

But how can one separate from illusion and even identify “reality”, if such a thing even “exists”? This question is at the heart of perhaps every single philosophy or religion. There are two opposing schools of thought which each offer an answer. Physicalism posits that everything in the universe can be explained in terms of physics, that it is a sum of the actions of the natural laws. This idea runs into a wall in what is called “Hempel’s Dilemma”. On one hand the science of physics as we know it today in fact cannot explain all phenomena. Physicalism must rely on the idea that one day there will be a physics, i.e. an understanding of the natural laws, that will allow us to explain all phenomena. However, that foreseeable evolution of physics, whatever it is, would be then have to be defined as the science which can explain all phenomena. It’s a circular argument. In spite of that, physicalism remains a viable philosophy – at least within our lower domain of consciousness.

Subjective Idealism is the opposite of physicalism and suggests that all phenomena are nothing more than collections of sense data in those who perceive them. The obvious problem with this is that it implies that nothing exists outside of beings capable of perception. How, then, do we explain those beings themselves? But not to worry, because physicalism and subjective idealism can be reconciled. Our (human) perception of objects are indeed subjective, although there is a general agreement amongst humans as to the state of reality. Objects, as humans understand them, may not truly exist in the forms we perceive, and may indeed be the distorted manifestations of sense data, but whatever their “true” forms are, could possibly be explained in physical terms.

Returning to the concept of Deus Ex Nihilo, ALL things – be they “physical” objects, the laws of physics themselves, or the sense data of living beings corresponding to how those laws act on physical objects – are fluctuations, movements, or reconfigurations of the absolute.

The so-called “reconfiguration” of existence, e.g. turning “nothing” into “something” is comparable to the structure of computer data. All data – a term which can conceivably incorporate as much breadth, depth, and diversity as the natural world – are mere patterns of 0s and 1s. When any new data structure is created, it does not come from “nothing”, it is merely a new configuration of those 0s and 1s, which in the “brain” of the computer have always existed. Conversely, when data is “deleted”, it is not converted into nothing. All the 1s are merely changed into 0s. The real world analogues for the binary 0s and 1s, i.e. the states of “being” or “not being” are not to be seen as discrete opposites. They should be regarded as twin manifestations of existence itself, which is both “everything” and “nothing”…