Interview with a Universe, Part 2: On Absurdity, Tautology, and Transcendence

Let's reset. Is there anything on which we can agree this morning?

FOR STARTERS, I OBJECT TO THE TITLE: WHAT DO YOU MEAN A UNIVERSE? THERE IS ONLY THE UNIVERSE.

So, "all is one," so to speak?

CORRECT.

If this were true, how could anyone know it?

POINT WELL TAKEN. I SUPPOSE IT CANNOT BE KNOWN.

I say it can, which is why we have the word. No one has ever seen the Universe. Rather, it is an epistemological assumption -- that everything we perceive is part of a coherent system. 

OF COURSE I EXIST. DON'T BE ABSURD.

God is the transcendental condition of the absurdity of the universe.

I SEE. SO ABSURDITY IS PROOF OF GOD? I AM MAKING MY SKEPTICAL AFRICAN KID FACE.

Have you never wondered from whence you came?

I AM ETERNAL.

I understand the sentiment, I really do, but it turns out you are finite -- that not only did you have a beginning in time, but you are the beginning of time. There was no time prior to 13.8 billion years ago, give or take.

DOUBLETALK. 

No, tripletalk, but let's first lay a scientific foundation.  

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

 Or as we like to say around here, garbage in, tenure out.

PRIMITIVE NONSENSE. YOU JUST REJECT MODERNITY.

Anyone who has sensitivity and some taste can be persuaded that the modern world does not have its origin in what is admirable. It is a monster whose every alleged parent denies.

MORE AD HOMINEM. I AM HARDLY A MONSTER.

No, but you are a creature -- again, both you and time and everything else came into being at a precise point in timelessness -- or rather, as our resident Poet says,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: / for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment / of time gave the meaning.

YOU SPEAK TO ME OF MEANING -- AS IF POETS, AND NOT I, ARE THE LEGISLATORS OF THE WORLD!

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. LIKE I SAID: ABSURD.

You keep saying that word. But 

Even if we keep silent about it out of courtesy: the majority of our listeners only oppose us out of ignorance.

Let's talk about absurdity, because you are half-correct, precisely.

For, as we touched on yesterday, the people we call existentialists are correct "in asserting that human life has no ultimate meaning that can be found within human life itself," but quite absurd in insisting "that no reason can can be found for the existence of the world outside the world itself (Mascall). 

Thus, the choice we face is "between ultimate irrationality and meaninglessness on the one hand and a transcendent ground of meaningfulness on the other (ibid.).

YOU KNOW WHERE I STAND.

Yes we do. But with all due respect, "this seems to be to be a very odd position in which to rest":

For it means that we can hope to receive answers to every conceivable question about the world and human life which our innate curiosity can suggest to us except the final and ultimate question, the question on which everything else depends, namely, why is there a world at all and what does human life ultimately mean? 

In other words, you -- the universe -- expect us to believe that you are thoroughly intelligible and yet ultimately unintelligible. Does this make sense to you? That your very sense is nonsense?

WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY...

It is not our knowledge that sometimes makes us feel superior, but the quality of our ignorance compared to others’ knowledge.

 In other words, we at least know that we don't know. Unlike you.

We advise anyone who goes hunting for a precise explanation of the world to invent one. So that he runs less of a risk of believing in it.

I DIDN'T ASK YOU.

Our most urgent task is that of reconstructing the mystery of the world.

YES, SO LONG AS YOU REMEMBER THAT IT IS I THAT PRODUCED YOU, NOT VICE VERSA. 

Ethics is the first step in the descacralization of the universe.

MEANING WHAT, EXACTLY?

That the IS does not account for the OUGHT. Supposing we ought to believe that you are a self-sufficient explanation, why ought we believe it? For

When the fool learns that the proofs for the existence of God are invalid he automatically thinks that those for the existence of the world are valid.

I AM MY OWN PROOF.

Let's see you try to prove it and not descend into tautology. For we have a saying around here, that

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is. 

THAT IS THE LAW: WHAT IS, IS.

If laws of history existed, their discovery would abrogate them.

YOU'VE CAUGHT ME OFF GUARD. LET ME THINK ABOUT THAT ONE.

While you're thinking about that one, consider this:

The tacit presuppositions of any science are more important than its teachings. Only what a science ignores about itself defines what it says.

And probably the most important thing that science ignores is Gödel: that a science can be complete or consistent, but never both. It seems that irony is baked into the cosmic cake, and that

Even our favorite ideas soon bore us if we do not hear them expressed with irony, with grace and with beauty.

One out of three isn't bad. Conversely,  

God is the region that one who walks forward finally reaches. One who does not walk in circles.

So, up and out of the intra-cosmic absurcularity. To be continued...