The Big Bang Theory

1200 words, 5 minute read

The Big Bang Theory, the theory, not the TV show of the same name, is a solution looking for a problem. It’s the latest answer to the proverbial chestnut, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” 

The question is ‘well formed’ and it has been the focus of Western philosophy for almost 2500 years. Too bad…because it has no denotative content, i.e. it’s meaningless!

Ironically, the question was considered and dismissed 2500 years ago by our philosophical patriarchs (sic), the pre-Socratic Greeks. Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, et al. considered the matter…and moved on. Paraphrasing Descartes, I would characterize their position as Sum ergo Est. It is! They understood that it was not something that needed explanation but nothing. Let’s listen in on a few of the pre-Socratics’ greatest hits.

Parmenides: “One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is… It is and it is impossible for it not to be… it is not must needs not be… There is not and never shall there ever be anything besides what is… Nor ‘was it’ ever, nor ‘will it’ be; for ‘it is’ now, all at once…

“I will not let you say or think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not. And if it came from nothing, what need could have made it arise, later rather than sooner?

Therefore it must either be altogether (all at once and forever) or not at all… Justice does not allow anything to come into being or to pass away but holds it fast. Judgment is this: Is it or is it not?” (Fragments 2, 8)

Heraclitus: “We would not know the word Justice if things were not… This world, which is the same for all, no gods or men (sic) have made. But it always was, is, and will be, an ever-living fire… The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one…” (Fragments 10, 23, 30)

Empedocles: “Fools…are those who expect that ‘what previously was not’ comes to be or that anything dies and is utterly destroyed… It is impossible for there to be coming to be from ‘what is not’ or that ‘what is’ should be destroyed… We come together into one cosmos…from which all things that were, and are, and will be in the future have sprung…”  (Fragments 18, 23, 25)

Anaxagoras: “What is cannot not be… All things are in the whole… All things will be in everything; nor is it possible for them to be apart, but all things have a portion of everything… All things are in all things.” (Fragments 3, 4b, 6, 8, 11)

Get the drift? “It is!” What is did not come to be nor will it cease to be. ‘Nothing’ is an intellectual construct, a product of natural selection, neurology, and language, not an existential reality. ‘Nothing’ is nothing and therefore something. (As your grandmother told you, “Two negatives make a positive.”) Something is because it cannot not be. ‘Nothing’ cannot be, therefore there must be something.

There is another factor at play here. Parmenides and Heraclitus fold ethics into their ontologies. Being is not just a ‘fact’, it is a ‘virtue’. The universal and eternal value of Justice requires that Being be. Being requires neither god (sic) nor man (sic). It is Justice that requires Being to be and assures us that Being is. ‘Nothing’ is not merely logically and physically impossible, it is unethical.

Here the pre-Socratics are converging on a theme that figures prominently in the Old Testament Book of Job: Unjustly treated, Job brings YHWH to Cosmic Court and, to the surprise and consternation of Job’s companions, and the disbelief of almost every commentator since, Job prevails. His argument: God’s nature precludes complicity with injustice. God is Good by nature; Being is a virtue. Justice is Good; therefore, God must be Just and must behave justly. Therefore Being, a virtue, must be - QED: Decision for the plaintiff.

The pre-Socratic consensus emphasizes the inevitability of Being and its indestructability, the unity of the Cosmos and the interpenetration of all things. The warp and woof of ‘beings’ amounts to the rearranging of deck chairs on a certain luxury liner: real and unreal at the same time. Local variety exists only in the context of universal simplicity.

After Greece’s Golden Age (the 5^th century BCE), the era of Sophocles and Pericles as well as Parmenides, a new generation of philosophers (Socrates, Plato, et al.) turned with world inside out. Now ‘beings’ take center stage, reducing Being to an abstraction. Over the last two and a half millennia we have learned unimaginably much about ‘beings’ but we have for the most part forgotten what we once knew about Being.

‘For the most part’ – the pre-Socratic vision has never been totally extinguished. The embers continue to glow and occasionally erupt in conflagration. Most notably, the early Christian (c. 50 to 150 CE) writers rediscovered cosmic unity as a reflection of Divine nature.

No one says it better than John the Evangelist: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1)

He quotes Jesus’ words to his apostles at the Last Supper: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me… you are in me and I am in you… I am the vine (and) you are the branches.”

And Jesus prays to the Father for his disciples, “That they may be one as we are one… that all of them may be one, Father; just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…may they be one as we are one - I in them and you in me so that they may be brought to complete unity.” (John 14 – 17)

In the 15^th century CE, Nicholas of Cusa reaffirmed and extended John’s vision: the Material templates the Divine. Cosmos is the image and likeness of God. Leibniz’ monadology (c. 1700) recaptured the interpenetration of all things (Anaxagoras, above). 20^th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, bridged the wisdom of Ancient Greece, the inspiration of Galilee, with the insight of modern physics in his seminal Philosophy of Organism (Process and Reality).

So does this mean that the Big Bang never happened? Of course it happened! But it is only of interest to Leonardo DiCaprio, because it does not answer the question we thought it answered…and because it happened on the Deck of the Titanic.