Methodical Musings

So I’ve made a discovery. After year after year after year of studying philosophy and – more often than studying – thinking about it, I have come to realize that the majority of philosophical questions are the result of mental illusions.

We all know about visual illusions and the seeming fixation that men of time past had on them. In particular it seems that men in the middle ages would spend countless hours creating these illusions that presented paradoxes. Here is one example of a visual illusion:

Which is this?

a) A vase

b) Two faces

c) An optical illusion specifically “designed” to confuse your mind into a paradox.

Of course, the question is invalid. The answer is:

d) All of the above

As we can see, a visual paradox can be created by presenting a question about an image that contains a contradiction.

I think the same thing can happen when asking philosophical questions, and I think that is exactly what happens when people ask the supposedly most important philosophical question of all time:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

This is a silly question that contains its own answer.

Let’s break the question down. At its heart, the question is asking:

What is the something that caused something to exist rather than nothing?

Now, let’s say we find something. Something is now “something that caused something to exist rather than nothing”.

Have we answered the question? Nope.

Replacing something with “something that caused something to exist rather than nothing”, the original question has now become:

What is the something that caused something that caused something to exist rather than nothing to exist rather than nothing?

As you can see, we could keep this up… forever. Ad infinitum. This question is similar, almost mathematically, to the golden ratio, which is a continued fraction.

The reason that there is an illusion created by this question is that the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is based on two contradictory premises. Those premises are:

a) Nothing could have existed at one point, but did not.

b) Something cannot come from nothing.

The mental illusion of the question is created by the fact that the premises (a) and (b) contradict each other. Why? Because if something cannot come from nothing (if b is true…), then because something exists it is absolutely impossible that nothing could have ever been a possibility (…then a is false).

The answer? Nothing was either never possible or something can come from nothing, therefore the question is invalid.

So when a theist makes some bold claim that God is the answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” they have completely missed the point, which can be demonstrated with the question:

Why was there God instead of nothing?

- Josh