The Basics
1. Where did everything come from?
2. Where is everything going?
The answer to both these questions is the same: Nothing. But note that
the Nothing I refer to is spelled with a capital N. It
is what I sometimes call the "great" Nothing. I call it this to
distinguish it from the not-so-great, or just plain ordinary nothing.
The great Nothing is the absolutely necessary counterpart of the great Something,
which is also not just any old kind of something, like rocks and
trees for example.
As suggested in the essay (Where
Did Everything Come From?), there are only two possibilities (for this
universe or any other one). There is either Something or Nothing.
All that we sense around us is actually a balance of the two.
Are you reading these words? If you are it is only because there is both
Something and Nothing.
First, there is the something of photons, the basic components of light.
Second, there is, alongside it (in attendance if you will) the equally real
"something" of Nothing.
If there were only photons, you would not be able to see anything, not a
single thing. There is no way that photons only could exist and have the
ability to present themselves to us as the phenomenon we call "light."
We know of light only because the photons of which it is comprised are carried,
as it were, in a field of Nothing. If there were no such thing as the great
Nothing the photons would not be able to move, and if they could not move
they could not exist, since motion (absolute motion) seems to be the very
essence of their existence.
The great Nothing is the great Container of the World.
All questions are based upon underlying presuppositions, and most of them
are instances of convenient speech. If you examine them closely it becomes
all too easy to see, in case after case, that we did not take the time to
"think it through."
The question, Where did everything come from?, for example, seems to be
suggesting that we believe that "everything" was once in a different
location, and we wish to know where precisely that location is, and how
it got from that place to this one.
We no sooner break it down this way than we realize that it wasn't at all
what we meant to ask. The query that we really had on our mind was a matter
of "how," not "where."
There is essentially a mystery before us and we wish to solve it. We observe
the world around us, especially the night sky, and as inquisitive beings
cannot help but wonder how it came to be.
Basically, what we really want to know is how it is exactly that
anything exists at all.
The answer to this question, in all likelihood, will not be a satisfying
one, at least not satisfying to the soul, because it will be—of strict
logical necessity—purely speculative.
There is absolutely no way that it could be anything but a matter of faith.
The source of All Things could never be a matter of knowledge, since the
possession of such knowledge would require that we be witnesses to such
an event, which is the same as suggesting that we would have to somehow
exist before we existed in order to see how we came to exist. It is difficult
to imagine a greater logical absurdity.