III Diálogo entre las ciencias, la filosofía y la teología. Volumen I

As noted, Nagel wants to preserve some version of naturalism because he is averse to theism (or at least theism in certain versions, to judge from Mind and Cosmos). His doubts about the comprehensive explanatory adequacy of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, insistence on the irreducibility of consciousness and rationality to material explanations, and rejection of metaphysical materialism shocked his colleagues – all of them, like everyone in research universities, members of an academic culture in which materialist, reductionist naturalism is a largely unquestioned and uncritically accepted default assumption.

But naturalism has a bigger, even more fundamental problem than the mystery of consciousness, first-person experience, intentionality, and rationality, and that is, quite simply, the fact of existence, period – that there is anything whatsoever, none of which accounts for or can account for its own existence. Significantly, Nagel nowhere raises this issue in Mind and Cosmos, although he draws close when he states that «[t]he world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.» Clearly, he is not talking about scientific explanation when he says of the world «[t]hat it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it» (7). Especially astonishing to him is the fact that conscious, rational beings have evolved, which leads him to advocate for a teleological, non-materialist naturalism. Yet properly grasped, the radical contingency of everything that exists and that the natural sciences investigate or could investigate is a logical and metaphysical death knell for naturalism at a more fundamental level. It is part of expanded reason’s revenge on the unjustified restriction of reason to the epistemological imperialism of scientism. And this recognition is itself the product of the exercise of reason – a faculty capable of distinguishing between empirical and conceptual questions, and of understanding that nothing whatsoever in nature, nor nature as a whole, can explain its own existence.

There are plenty of physicists who understand this, and realize that their discipline can study only physical processes and natural laws, not how or why there are any physical processes or natural laws whatsoever. But metaphysical naturalists who believe in physics as first philosophy are oblivious of this distinction. Some think, for example, that if we can explain everything back to the instant of the Big Bang itself, to the most basic, primordial conditions that were followed by the expansion of the universe with such incomprehensible power and accelerating velocity, we would have explained the mystery of existence. An entirely physical, naturalist cosmology would be tantamount to a comprehensive ontology. But this is fundamentally confused, and ultimately irrational: it fails to recognize that whatever were the most elementary conditions and character of natural reality at the moment of the Big Bang, they are ontologically no less contingent – no more capable of explaining the fact of their existence – than is our universe in its ever-expanding, highly differentiated form 13.7 billion years later. To see this is to realize the rational inference that follows: something ontologically beyond or outside the entire natural order that is not contingent must exist, something which can and does both in principle and in fact account for the existence of the natural order – even though how this is so remains not merely obscure, but vertiginously incomprehensible. On the other hand, to insist that there must be something ontologically contingent that is «just there,» that «the natural order» or «natural laws» or «nature as such» or «the basic physical constituent realities of the universe» are somehow simply a given and whose existence need not be explained, is nothing less than the abdication of reason at the analytical endpoint of precisely the rational process that seeks to understand the totality of human experience, human history, the natural history of our world, and the history of the universe, by showing the interconnected, integral character of different sorts of knowledge gained through all the academic disciplines. It is irrationally to draw back from the precipice of reason to which reason itself leads. Positing any brute facticity of existence to the universe, nature, natural laws, matter-energy, or the like amounts to physics refusing to yield to philosophy not simply when it «should,» but must, and this according to its own principles – provided those principles are well understood. A failure to do so indicates a failure to understand what science itself can and cannot do, what the natural sciences are in contrast to what they cannot be; it is symptomatic of the unwarranted metastasis of naturalism into a metaphysical assertion. The crucial distinction in question can be helpfully brought out by comparing the relevant arguments from two books published in the last decade: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (2012), by the American cosmologist Lawrence Krauss; and The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013), by the American philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart.

Like other scientists who write well for a general audience, Krauss can be engaging when he is discussing the extraordinary discoveries in cosmology and the remarkable features of our universe as disclosed since the early twentieth century. But when he endeavors to make good on the claim in his book’s title and subtitle, he quickly shows that he either cannot or does not want to consider escape from the self-imposed prison of restricted reason that he inhabits. The results are unfortunate. An alert reader is bound to be puzzled already in the Table of Contents with chapter titles that include «Nothing is Something» and «Nothing is Unstable,» and in the preface, one can see that treatment of the central issue at hand is unlikely to go well.¹⁶ Oblivious of the basic conceptual difference between contingent and necessary being, or between a first efficient cause and a ground that makes any efficient causal order possible, Krauss asks blithely, «what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?» (xii) He asserts that the question, «Why is there something rather than nothing?» «is usually framed as a philosophical or religious question» – which is descriptively correct – but then mistakenly adds that «it is first and foremost a question about the natural world, and so the appropriate place to try and resolve it, first and foremost, is with science» (xiii). With unwitting incomprehension, Krauss states that his book’s purpose is to «show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing,» and that both experiments and theories in modern physics «all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem. Indeed, something from nothing may have been required for the universe to come into being» (xiii). Conceding that «we may never have enough empirical information to resolve this question unambiguously» – unaware that no amount could ever be enough – he demonstrates from within the confines of his constricted, naturalist worldview that he does not even grasp what is at issue: «For surely ‘nothing’ is every bit as physical as ‘something,’ especially if it is to be defined as the ‘absence of something’» (xiii, xiv). The philosophers and theologians, he opines, have been «focusing on questions of nothingness without providing any definition of the term based on empirical evidence» (xvi). These are all exact, direct quotations.

With prefatory statements such as these, it is not surprising that nowhere in Krauss’s book – which again, is interesting and informative when treating twentieth-century cosmology – does he even engage the question he ostensibly seeks to answer. He seems unaware that the empirical and theoretical questions of physics on which he focuses are different from «the possible question... of what, if anything, fixed the rules that governed such creation» (a notion which throughout he conflates with the temporal origins of the universe); and ironically, he is correct – although he means to be disparaging – when he states that «The metaphysical ‘rule,’... that ‘out of nothing nothing comes,’ has no foundation in science» (174). Quite so. But instead of recognizing here the limits of scientific inquiry and the starting point for a different kind of rational reflection, in his scientism Krauss tries to force an empirical, scientific answer on a question that cannot in principle have one. Shortly after drawing as near as he comes to grasping the difference between a physical and a metaphysical question, he absurdly suggests that a conceptualization of multiverses in which «the laws of nature are themselves stochastic and random» could circumvent the ontological contingency of those stochastic, random laws (176). Unsurprisingly, given this fundamental incomprehension, everywhere in his book «nothing» or «nothingness» turns out to refer to some primordially basic, already existing, natural condition or quality of the very early universe (or occasionally, its post-entropic, presumptive end-state billions of years hence). Nowhere in his exposition does nothing or nothingness mean ontological non-existence. Hence, depending on what Krauss is discussing, nothing or nothingness refers variously to «empty space» (58, 149, 152), «almost nothing» (148), «gravity» (148), «non-zero energy» (150), «quantum fluctuations» (151), «underlying laws of nature» (151), «gravity and quantum mechanics» (151), «the final post-entropic state of the universe» (157), «[q]uantum processes associated with elementary particles in the primordial heat bath» (158), «quantum mechanics and general relativity» (161), or «quantum gravity» (169). Krauss concedes that «it would be disingenuous to suggest that empty space endowed with energy, which drives inflation [of the universe after the Big Bang], is really nothing. In this picture one must assume that space exists and can store energy, and one uses the laws of physics like general relativity to calculate the consequences» (153). Exactly. This is extremely interesting and, if true, takes its place alongside the other astonishing findings that cosmologists and particle physicists have contributed to our knowledge. It also has absolutely nothing to do with ontological nothingness.

To move from Krauss’s book to David Bentley Hart’s Experience of God is to move from someone confused about the limitations of his own discipline, and who does not understand the difference between empirical and conceptual questions, to someone lucidly aware of this difference, deeply learned about the histories of Western and Eastern philosophy and religious traditions, as well as the history of science, and knowledgeable about modern physics and its relationship to metaphysical questions. Hart’s wide-ranging book addresses commonalities in the understanding of God, and especially divine transcendence, across multiple, philosophically sophisticated religious traditions, including issues pertaining to metaphysical naturalism and ontological contingency. Hart sees with articulate clarity that the sheer facticity of the existence of all realities that do not explain their own existence – which is to say, everything in the universe that we know of or can encounter, in any academic discipline, by means of whatever methods, and including the universe considered as a whole – implies that these realities must, as a matter of both metaphysical and logical necessity, owe not simply their particular coming-to-be but also the continuing fact of their existence to something that is not itself another contingent reality in need of precisely the same type of explanation for its coming-to-be and continuing existence. This logically and metaphysically necessary, non-contingent, supra-natural reality is what all of the world’s religious traditions have understood by God; more on this below. Note that this argument is neither a form of the traditional ontological argument for God’s necessary existence associated with St. Anselm, in which a perfect being must exist because perfection entails existence; nor is it in any sense a form of the traditional argument from design, of the sort frequently associated today with the proponents of so-called Intelligent-Design arguments for God’s existence. It is more closely related to some versions of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, including the third of Aquinas’s viae.

Yet quite apart from any considerations of faith or religious belief, the ontological contingency of all things that exist, have ever existed, or will ever exist, and the conclusion that there must therefore be some non-contingent reality that explains their existence and is metaphysically distinct from all of them, is a strictly rational inference. In other words, recognition of the inadequacy of metaphysical, materialist naturalism is not a «matter of faith» or based on a «religious objection,» which is important insofar as this is sometimes implied, even by theologians.¹⁷ Rather, this unavoidable, rational inference about a necessary, transcendent source and sustaining ground of being does not ineluctably entail faith in God as understood, much more expansively and elaborately, in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, for example. The inference is philosophically very strong, but prima facie, at least, religiously rather weak. That said, it is not unimportant that these traditions have for millennia understood that the God of faith possesses logically singular attributes that are shared with attributes of the rationally inferred ground of all contingent beings. Indeed, we meet here precisely the metaphysical, logical, and religious distinction between God and creation that both rational reflection and multiple faith traditions share.

What Hart sees that Krauss does not is that even a complete empirical explanation of the universe extending back to and including the Big Bang would not and could never be an account of either why or how there is something, anything at all, rather than nothing. Physics could never, even in principle, function as first philosophy; nor could all of the sciences, taken together and including even all possible discoveries at every scale from the subatomic to the cosmological (including all possible multiverses, if such exist), in principle explain the existence of what it is that they study. In Hart’s words,

Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature – the physical – is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the stream of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, «hyperphysical,» or shifting into Latin, super naturam. This means not only that at some point nature requires or admits of a supernatural explanation (which it does), but also that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural in the first place.¹⁸

In other words, «there simply cannot be a natural explanation of existence as such; it is an absolute logical impossibility» (44). Efforts such as Krauss’s imply that the closer we get temporally to the Big Bang in our physical explanation about the universe, or the simpler are the physical states and natural laws out of which the universe developed, the closer the natural sciences get to «explaining everything.» But such attempts overlook the total irrelevance of their findings for the question of ontological contingency: «no purely physical cosmology has any bearing whatsoever upon the question of existence... and so it is immaterial here how small, simple, vacuous, or impalpably indeterminate a physical state or event is: it is still infinitely removed from non-being and infinitely incapable of having created itself out of nothing» (97). Again, it is extremely interesting and indeed dumbfounding that the cosmically elaborated universe in which we live today seems to have developed as it has from such extremely few initial natural conditions and states, and anyone who cares about knowledge ought to be grateful for the remarkable experimental and theoretical work physicists have done to disclose the mind-blowing character of our universe, intellectual labor that remains ongoing. But reducing everything to its most basic, original conditions and constituents at the moment of the Big Bang, and thinking that thereby one has arrived at a sort of ontological «ground zero» of nothingness, simply broadcasts, with an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, one’s incomprehension of what the contingency of existence means. «In fact,» Hart writes, «one will be starting no nearer to nonbeing than if one were to begin with an infinitely realized multiverse: the difference from non-being remains infinite in either case» (98). To see this is to understand the point at issue.

A corollary of Hart’s argument is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is a truth of reason. It is not simply something that religious believers happen to affirm based on faith, as is sometimes implied, but also, and more basically, a rational inference about the impossibility of an infinite regress of contingently dependent beings, given the obvious reality that any exist at all. The manner in which dependent beings exist qua existence, as distinct from the natural causes and forces that account for them coming into existence as they have and being the sorts of natural things that they are – which is what physics and the other natural sciences study – cannot itself be the result of simply other antecedent causes and forces of the same sort. Hence the term «creation.» In fact, contingent beings’ existence per se must be radically different in kind – of a sort that literally, albeit admittedly inconceivably, has its source in what can and does create everything out of nothing. And logically, although again incomprehensibly, it must be creation out of nothingness – because anything antecedent that was not self-subsisting of its very character would be another contingent, dependent being in need of the same sort of explanation. Whatever all of the natural sciences taken together explain about how everything that exists fits together is a conceptually different story, the objects of which study are entirely and necessarily included within the metaphysically and logically more fundamental account of their existence – because one cannot study something in any discipline, whether in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, that does not exist at all. For anything to exist, there must be a non-contingent source and sustaining ground of all contingent beings. Regardless of where and in what discipline it begins, any logically progressive, restlessly and consistently rational reflection on reality will inevitably end up here – moving from the humanities or social sciences to the natural sciences, and within them eventually to physics, until physics reaches its limits. As a corollary, Hart therefore rightly says that «naturalism – the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural – is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking» (17). Confronted with an unavoidable inference at the most fundamental level of rational reflection, protagonists of naturalism stubbornly champion a sheer «it’s-just-there» irrationalism. It almost seems as if they are dogmatically committed to whatever it takes, no matter how radically incoherent, to avoid the acknowledgment of a necessary, non-contingent, supra-rational ground of all contingent realities – and where such an acknowledgment might lead.

Is this sustaining ground of all contingent beings God? It seems to me not only intellectually correct but also prudent both to note the features that this source of creation ex nihilo shares with God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the possibility of rationally affirming the reality of this source of creation without implying that such an affirmation automatically entails a further faith commitment. This distinction provides an analytical basis for arguing against the constrictive scourge of metaphysical naturalism without immediately raising the additional, fraught, complicated issue of faith and religion – an important consideration given the character of our current, prevailing intellectual culture. Strategically, this distinction opens a space for rational dialogue – at least with those who are not irrational fundamentalists in their materialism – to question and, if they are rational, eventually to reject metaphysical naturalism without any adjunct pressure also to make some sort of faith commitment.¹⁹ Of course, perhaps some who do so will come to faith as well, and in ways consistent with their rational reflection on the contingency of creation. But creating a non-threatening space for dialogue seems desirable from a purely pragmatic point of view, considering how many problematic expressions of religion are evident in the world today, which tend to render many direct efforts of proselytization ineffectual. So too, resistance to religion is bound to come from deeply ingrained habits of self-determination and individualist autonomy so widespread especially in the modern West, and the pervasive assumption that any and all religion compromises this autonomy in oppressive ways. Prudentially, then, it seems wise to maintain a distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of faith.

At the same time, of course, it would be contrived to ignore the overlap between the rationally entailed features of this God of the philosophers and many of the traditional attributes of God as understood in the monotheistic traditions: the creator ex nihilo who is one, necessarily exists, is eternal (in the sense of atemporal rather than temporally perduring), is transcendent, sustains all contingent beings, is infinitely powerful, and is incomprehensible. Hart discusses these and other rationally entailed attributes of God.²⁰ Whether this God also called the ancient Israelites to be his chosen people, or became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Palestine, or revealed himself to his last and greatest prophet Mohammed in the early seventh century are additional, analytically distinct questions – yet they are not questions about some other God, but rather about the only one whose reality and sustaining power explains how and why anything exists at all. And far from trivially, this is the same God whose existence, if more than just a matter of metaphysical and logical necessity, is also the ground and source of the uninvented values, meaning, moral norms, and sense of purpose affirmed by these religious traditions and which a materialist naturalism does not and cannot provide.

The positive implications of this understanding of God for Roman Catholic and much other Christian theology can only be noted briefly here. Keeping the rationally inferred metaphysical transcendence of God clearly in mind insulates Christians against the intuitive tendency, reinforced by the grammar of ordinary language, to speak and think of God as a highest being among other beings, a comparatively greatest demiurge within existence, rather than the logically necessary prior ground for any and all possible and actual existent, contingent beings. The similarly incomprehensible eternity of God – not an entity that has always existed in temporal everlastingness, but one for whom there is no passage of time – eliminates the tendency to think of God as a cosmic supercomputer somehow able to process simultaneously all the data of all events in the universe in real time over 13.7 billion years. God’s transcendence means God needs no «room» to be what he is, and so, being in no sense spatial, points to how God could be present to every bit of matter-energy (including dark matter and dark energy), no less than his eternity points to how he could be present to every moment in the history of all possible universes. This has important implications for a theology of divine providence, because it is precisely God’s metaphysical transcendence that far from precluding entails his presence in and through all physical reality. And God’s radical, incomprehensible otherness helps to provide a formal, theoretical way for thinking about the nature of Christ as truly human and truly divine (rather than as a party-human, partly-divine theological centaur), as well as for a sacramentality (underpinning a robust Catholic sacramental theology) in which grace can be and is present in and through the material world, because the material world, as creation, is not and can never be devoid of God’s sustaining presence as the necessary ground of all that exists. To be blunt, God could become incarnate in Christ, and the sacraments can convey grace, because metaphysical naturalism – with its abstracted, mistaken view of matter as «mere» and separate from its supernatural, sustaining source – is a false, irrational view of reality.

We have all heard and continue repeatedly to hear variations of a narrative in which the rise of modernity beginning in the seventeenth century meant intellectually, and fundamentally, that a purely natural, scientific, empirical, materialist, anti-supernatural worldview progressively and gradually displaced premodern, prescientific, religious worldviews in which variously unenlightened persons superstitiously believed in supernatural reality, because science has shown that everything that exists can be explained, or will eventually be explained, via its empirical, reductionist methods. This narrative is not only mistaken, but based on a foundational, philosophical amnesia. It presupposes an obliviousness of the conditions necessary for its own existence by neglecting the conditions necessary for the existence of anything at all. Obviously, humanistic scholars and social scientists would be foolish and irrational to imagine that the biological species whose complex cultures and histories they study could somehow «just be there» without the evolution of life on our planet. Similarly, cell biologists would be foolish and irrational to imagine that the molecular and genetic processes they study could somehow «just be there» without the chemical compounds made of the physical elements involved in all of those processes. So too, but for a different kind of reason, physicists and cosmologists – and all others, for that matter, who subscribe to such a view – are foolish and irrational to think that the universe itself, or its most basic laws and constituent realities antecedent to the formation of the first elements in the Big Bang, could «just be there.» «Expanded reason» includes seeing how all the disciplines contribute in diverse, different ways to our understanding of reality, not only at dissimilar spatial and temporal scales and with respect to their divergent objects of investigation, but also through their respectively appropriate methods that subvert the epistemological ideology of scientism. Starting from any expertise in any field within any of the disciplines, expanded reason means exercising our capacity to think beyond the crippling misconceptions, the distorting denials, and the dangerous dogmas born of metaphysical naturalism.

In our current intellectual circumstances and in practical academic terms, the most important implication of the conception of God broached here is its compatibility not only with all of the natural sciences and their respective findings, but with all possible natural-scientific findings, in principle. Because in principle and necessarily, the sheer fact of existence is conceptually inexplicable and therefore will always remain per se resistant to any naturalist, materialist explanation. Yet theologians, and anyone else who cares about truth, must see this, and know enough about the natural sciences to identify and criticize instances in which their legitimate findings have been confused with unjustified philosophical assertions or moral claims. The power of the sciences via technology throughout our society and culture, in government, medicine, consumerist capitalism, and more, means that there is no greater imperative for theologians than to be able to engage with the natural sciences productively – acknowledging all the extraordinary things that they have accomplished and continue to achieve with respect to explaining the natural order of which we are a part. Roman Catholic theologians in particular should continue to champion the traditional insistence on the compatibility of faith and reason – but how, in what ways, in what manner, with respect to the relationship of Catholicism to the natural sciences? Until and unless Catholic theologians can discuss this in sophisticated, persuasive ways, their influence in intellectual culture and society at large will remain negligible. Fearing the natural sciences, or resenting them, or ignoring them, is a dereliction of duty in our present circumstances, and any retreat from them in order to take refuge in a religiously safe harbor constructed of encyclical, conciliar, and biblical quotations is in effect an act of intellectual cowardice. It turns out that the institutional separation of most Catholic seminaries from universities since the nineteenth century, like the insulation of neo-scholastic philosophy and theology from other academic disciplines prior to Vatican II, did not serve the Church well with respect to the intellectual culture of the wider society. The combination of metaphysical naturalism, moral relativism, philosophical liberalism, assertive individualism, and neoliberal capitalism is indeed based on a constricted understanding of reason – but it is doing incredibly expansive and ever-expanding damage to human beings and to our planet at one and the same time. This would seem to be the bottom-line implication of Laudato Si’. For those who care about reason and truth – expanded reason and the fullness of truth – now is not the time to sit on the sidelines in quiet resignation or nostalgic torpor. The fate of souls and our shared life on the only planet we have hang in the balance.