What Breathes Fire Into the Cosmic Equations?

Stephen Hawking famously posed this perfectly reasonable question in his A Brief History of Time, asking “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Or, how does the living water flow through the dry channels of physics? Supposing a Grand Unified Theory of the Cosmos — AKA a Theory of Everything — “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we would know the mind of God,” which is to say, the fire breathing…

Tetragrammaton?

That is an awkward pun to spring on the reader so early in the book, but I will grant you that there is no suitable word that rhymes with dragon. Nevertheless, tetragrammaton is the mot jewste, in that it refers to the four-letter un-word in Judaism – YHVH – that is related to the Hebrew “to cause to become.” Thus, it is the ultimately unknowable creator, source, and ground of the Cosmos, the only conceivable math wiz capable of breathing fire into his own equations.

Hawking, bona fide genius that he was–

Worthy friggin’ adversary.

No doubt. He realized that the equations of physics alone cannot account for the existence of the Cosmos, since they would merely be the blueprints -- “a set of rules and equations” -- not the building. Blueprints don’t just turn into buildings on their own: a formal cause does not bring itself into being without material and efficient causes, i.e., a builder and materials.

Also, in this case, we’re looking at the already completed building -- the Cosmos -- and reverse-engineering it to locate the floorplan. Moreover, one must be at least a little curious as to how it came to be that a monkey is walking around with the blueprints to the Cosmos. Does this mean that a monkey — or even barrel of them — could use the blueprints to create a Cosmos of its own?

A fire breathing monkey?

Hawking concedes that “The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?”

The latter is a metaphysical nonstarter — a Forbidden Idea — because regardless of how compelling the theory, theories cannot compel into existence the reality they describe. Supposing otherwise is just another name for magic, or abracadabra, which comes from the Aramaic phrase avra kedabra, meaning “I will create as I speak.” Now, some people say the Creator speaks the world into existence, but I don’t think Hawking has this kind of Hebrew magic in mind. Rather, he wants to keep the magic of creation without the magician, which is to say, without a transcendent creative intellect.

The mother of all One Free Miracles.

But supposing the world is somehow spoken into being, it would certainly explain how it is that the Cosmos is so conveniently made of language, including the language of modern physics and of science in general. It would also explain how the Anthropos – purportedly the image of this YHVH – is able to unpack the language of a logospheric Cosmos brimming with information about itself.

But before jumping to conclusions, let’s just stick with the self-evident principle that nothing can bring about its own existence, because supposing it did, it would have to exist prior to its existence, which is one very expensive absurdity. Believing otherwise is not a scientific theory, rather, a metaphysical suicide note. Physics is the study of the effects of a conflagration for which it cannot account in principle.

Nevertheless, in a later book Hawking went wobbly on the mind-of-God business and insisted that our Cosmos “can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

The science is settled!

The scientist is at any rate. Except his opinion is not anything that remotely resembles science. It brings to mind the words of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as to why he didn’t abandon the Church: “What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?” For here, Hawking is abandoning a metaphysical certitude – that things require a sufficient reason – for an illogical and incoherent alternative.

You may or may not find it absurd, but on a purely logical basis, what is more reasonable, creation from nothing or… Creatio ex nihilo? For Hawking’s creation of the universe from nothing indeed resembles a parody of Christian metaphysics, in that he wants something for nothing, but from nothing nothing comes. If nothing ever existed – which is metaphysically dubious at best – it could by no means ever become something in the absence of One Free Miracle (Axiom 9). You can call this miracle “spontaneous creation,” but that’s just a verbal chant over an unintelligible mystery, or what we might call a godlessness of the gaps.

In other words, science presumes that everything has a cause. Except for Everything.

In reality, nothing can be the cause of itself, let alone of everything. If this were the case, then it would undercut one of the top five principles that permit the very existence of logical thought, which is to say, the principle of sufficient reason. It would be as destructive to intelligence as denying the principle of noncontradiction, and for what? Just to preserve one’s atheistic magic? Why is that so important, and why would anyone want to base his metaphysic on the destruction of thought? That is a rather steep price to pay: we had to destroy the intellect to save the intellect!

That tears it. Any further harm visited upon the intellect shall be visited tenfold upon their heads!

The scientistic harm is unavoidable, because it means we either pay the price of irrationality – accepting that something can be the cause of itself – or admit that spontaneous creation is simply a poverty-stricken synonym for a Logos-infused Cosmos that demands a sufficient reason. We needn’t speculate as to who or what lit this infusion, only that unavoidable principles cannot be so easily avoided.

Besides, Hawking slips in the word “creation” as if it is not deeply problematic. We agree that a principle of creation is most certainly the sufficient reason for why there is something rather than nothing. We can remove the Theos from the principle, but this merely elevates the principle to Theos, which is just another semantic evasion, i.e., the same meaning in a different — and less adequate — word.

Which is why the most literal-minded creationist is infinitely closer to the metaphysical truth than the one who denies any principle of creation. Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean one must leap to the existence of God, only that creativity is an ontological primitive. Creativity exists, but it too requires a transcendent principle to account for it. Certainly determinism cannot be the principle of creativity.

As touched on above [in yesterday’s post], we now know that our Cosmos has been creatively evolving for 13.8 billion years, long before biological or psychological evolution got underway. What we call “history” turns out to be Everything, just in different phases.

On the one hand, we cannot know and can never know with certitude if creation and creativity imply a creative mind. On the other hand, C’mon, be reasonable: what else could it be? What does it take to convince one that physics is not, and can never be, complete or consistent, let alone self-explanatory? The Cosmos is not autochthonous. Intelligible universes don’t just spring into existence out of nothing, for there is no such thing as a free launch. This is a serious undertaking. No one says you have to believe a creative mind launched the Cosmos, but at least acknowledge the massive God-shaped hole in your metaphysic. Put it this way: either there’s a hole in your head or the whole is in your head, but how did it get there? How is the Anthropos capable of modeling the whole Cosmos in which he is situated?

Our Cosmos is permeated by rational structures at every level, discoverable by the human mind. Cosmotheandrism does not take seriously those Kant-inspired philosophers who cling to the superstition that the Cosmos has no objective order, rather, that we merely clothe the phenomena in our own categories. Indeed, if this were the case, then Einstein could never have made the surprising discovery that space and time are not the containers of the Cosmos, rather, that the Cosmos is constituted of space and time interacting with matter.

How could we ever be surprised by reality if reality is but a projection of our own psychic categories? For the moment we imagine that we impose rather than discover reality, we are not doing science, rather, just rummaging around in our own heads.

Now, the Cosmos reveals various levels of rational structure. While we can discover these rational structures, no amount of discovery can explain why the structures are here to begin with. Rather, the Cosmos is silent on that question, and yet, it is a deafening silence, because it means that our contingent Cosmos, while intrinsically incomplete, silently adverts to a transcendent principle that does complete it. As per Gödel, any consistent mathematical description of the Cosmos will necessarily be incomplete, but, in the words of Torrance, “the fact that the universe is intrinsically rational means that it is capable of, or open to, rational explanation — from beyond itself.”

It is precisely this metaphysically unavoidable Beyond that we designate with the symbol O. To put it another way, “To be inherently reasonable the universe requires a sufficient reason for being what it is as an intelligible whole” (ibid.). O is, among other things, that which completes the Cosmic Area Rug. In its absence, we have a beautifully and intrinsically patterned rug that really pulls the Cosmos together, and yet, with no explanation of how it got here.

Not to mention the nihilistic bums who steal the rug and and consign us to a meaningless absurdity that pulls everything apart: Anthropos from Cosmos, Cosmos from Theos, Theos from Anthropos.

A metaphysical brainwreck.

To paraphrase Paul, the whole creation groans for its completion in O. Put it this way: the Cosmos answers the questions we put to it in its own limited way, “but it is quite unable to explain itself or to yield any final account of the fact of its astonishing intelligibility, and so at these limits the universe by its finite nature simply turns a blank face to our questions” (Torrance).

But that’s not the end of anything, rather, only the beginning. One might say that the Cosmos reveals the top side of the Cosmic Area Rug, but we can know with certitude that it has a hidden side.