Richard Holloway’s book is subtitled The Human Search for Meaning, and in at least part of it he complains that it is meaning which the universe lacks. ‘Everything I once thought to be steady and enduring has disappeared into the ceaseless flux of a universe without meaning’ (p.11). He finds he has a ‘sense of bafflement at the massive indifference of the universe’ (p.13). This unease he equates with the inability to understand why things are as they are: we are ‘no closer to understanding why there is a world’ (p.31) – and although we know quite a lot about how all this came about’, there is no satisfactory explanation as to why we came about’ (p.5).
We all know what it feels like; here I want to consider briefly what it means.
It has been pointed out by several philosophers (Wittgenstein, for instance, and Carnap) that while you can perfectly well ask questions within a context, a system – what Carnap calls a framework – you cannot, within that framework, ask questions about the framework as a whole. The simple reason is that such a question would lie outside the framework. (Wittgenstein says ‘outside the world’) and so we would have to posit a sort of super-framework for the question to be in, and this process could go on for ever.
To put it another way, the problem about asking questions about everything is that one is implicitly asking questions about something which lies outside of everything, which is inherently impossible. You can see at once which way this line of thought must go.
Something, call it a First Cause, has to provide a cut-off point, if we are not to carry the matter to infinity.
Something about which no further questions can be asked. The job-specification narrows down the short-list candidates: ‘must be outside of time and space, has to be good at avoiding answering direct questions...’ So we end up with the Usual Suspect – capital U, capital S, of course – one wouldn’t wish to sound irreverent.
Yet even without this problem the question why has itself led us in that direction. Asking why is an activity relying on concepts of causal or purposive action, and so carries a motivational connotation. If one asks ‘Why does the world exist?’ one immediately proposes the possibility of a motivated force outside the world. It is the same point, with different emphasis. You can only ask a question about a system as a whole by assuming something lying in a context outside that system.
In any case there are a number of points I would wish to make about the whole business of looking for meaning in the universe (and failing, in this case, to find it). Firstly, meaning is not an attribute appropriate to universes. Meaning is a concept within our system of thought, to do with our communication and sign systems, and so a human construct. Of course we can, if we choose, apply this idea to the universe, or to anything else, by, as it were, intentionally reading it as a code, or a message. Holloway gives examples, in fact, of the way this has sometimes been done, as by supposing that the Earth was constructed as a backdrop to the human drama (p.68), which he calls ‘the classic Christian epic’ – but he dismisses such fantasies as myths, rather than adopts them. The point is that any such meaning has to be given to the universe by us, rather than being presented to us by it. There is no point in looking to the universe for meaning, unless you have already put it there.
The second point is that to contrast a universe with meaning with a universe without meaning, he would have to be able to say what such a universe would be like. What extra feature would it have, such that he would be moved to say of it ‘Ah, a universe with meaning!’ How would he able to tell the one from the other, just by looking?
A third point one might make about this business of looking for meaning, and being aggrieved not to find it, If one asks ‘Why does the world exist?’ one immediately proposes the possibility of a motivated force outside the world.
The point is that any such meaning has to be given to the universe by us, rather than being presented to us by it. would be to ask what reason he has been given to think that the universe might – he implies should – have a meaning. Clearly there is no clue there which implies that a meaning has gone missing, or somehow been omitted by oversight.
For this unsatisfactory state of affairs Richard Holloway blames the absence of God: ‘And it is God who is absent’ (p.16). God is an absent parent (p.14). Yet God could only be found absent if he could have been present. And to have that capacity, to have been able to be present, he would first of all have to exist. You cannot blame a non-existent being for being absent.
So are we to understand that God exists, but has withdrawn? If so, how did we come to know the truth of either, let alone of both, these propositions? But if all that is meant is that he does not observe God as a feature of the universe, one would have to ask: why should he expect to do so? What reason has he been given for such an expectation?
The Earth is ‘far from having a divinely ordained purpose and direction’ (p.91). ‘We find ourselves in a universe without any discernible purpose’ (p.92). Was there any clue given that it might be otherwise? All that one can complain about, in the end, is one’s own inability to impose an interpretation on a neutral state of being. And in the end the only person to whom one can address the question why, is God, with the concomitant requirement that for this purpose, if for no other, it may be necessary to invent him.
Michael Senior is a doctor of philosophy and a full-time writer. He is a long-term member of SoF Network.This article is based on the workshop he gave at the SoF Conference in July 2005. sof 74 November 2005 10 You cannot blame a nonexistent being for being absent.