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Fifteen Eighty Four

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5
Feb
2025

Why Is There Something and Not Rather Nothing? Hey, Whatever

J. Budziszewski

According to Thomas Aquinas, knowledge of first causes is the most fundamental kind of knowledge.  Since a cause is an explanation – a reason why something is — to say things have no cause is to say that they have no explanation.  Moreover there has to be a First Cause, because the First Cause is the First Reason.  An infinite regress of reasons or explanations for things is no reason at all.  This First Cause must necessarily exist, otherwise it couldn’t be “first” – it too would require a cause.  Ultimately, then, whatever does not have to be must depend on something that does have to be.

To say that things have no First Cause, then, is to say that they don’t have to make sense.  As I explain in my new Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the One God, if nothing has to make sense, then so-called reason is no more than a special case of unreason.  All supposed causes, effects, and explanations creep from the womb of darkness; sanity perches on a twig at the edge of a chasm.  The point is not that people who don’t think that things have to make sense cannot form logical inferences – of course they can.  The point, rather, is that they cannot explain why they should.  Question:  “Why is there something and not rather nothing?”  Answer:  “Hey, whatever.”

Classical paganism didn’t believe in a First Reason.  Although the classics scholar Edith Hamilton writes that “the terrifying irrational has no place in classical mythology,”[1] this seems to be wishful thinking, for classical mythology was more or less explicit about nothing making sense.  It didn’t picture the First Reason creating all things from nothing and then calling all things back to Himself.  Rather it pictured the gods themselves – even Apollo, the god of truth — as coming either from the void itself, or from earlier things which did come from it.  Since everything was held up by Chaos, ultimately nothing was held up at all.  All light was drawn back to that unreason like dark homing pigeons.  Let us give the Greeks and Romans this:  They tried not to speak more of their dirty secret than they had to.  Though the Norsemen, their minds filled with Ragnarök, could hardly speak of anything else, let us give the Norsemen some credit too:  They were brave about it.  Though for what?

Our neo-pagans who say that everything “just is” are implying much the same thing as the ancient pagans who said that everything emerged without reason from Chaos.  For this too is a way of saying that ultimately nothing makes sense.  Curiously, although such persons may say they don’t believe in God, what they seem to mean is that they don’t believe in the First Cause of whom Jews and Christians speak – they don’t believe in that god.  For in practice, each gives everything for some dream of vastness, wealth, excitement, sex, sovereignty, control, irresponsible gratification of the will, or some combination of such things.  In the sense that they treat these things as matters of unconditional commitment, these are their gods.  However, none of these gods can be First Causes.

It is strange that neo-pagans think that the God of whom Jews and Christians speak is just another “lie of the poets,” like Zeus or Jove.  Why strange?  Because this God is the First Reason, the One who does have to be, the necessary reality on whom all other reality depends.  To reject Zeus or Jove, then, is merely to reject Zeus or Jove.  But to reject this God is to say that there don’t have to be reasons for things, that in the end, nothing has to make sense.  And let us be very clear:  No one who believes that things don’t have to make sense has any business saying that anything at all is true or false, or that anything at all exists or does not exist.  For how would he know?  Do not reproach me with chaos theory.  What mathematicians call chaos is not things not making sense, or not possessing order.  Rather it has to do with the limits of prediction in certain kinds of highly ordered systems.  The study of such systems does not require the abandonment of reason.

Moreover if nothing makes sense, then the proposition that nothing makes sense makes no sense either, so this point of view knocks its legs out from under itself.  Perhaps this is why, even though the pagan philosophers came from the same pagan culture, the greatest of them – Plato, Aristotle, some of the Stoics – did not view reason as just a special case of unreason.  In this, their radicalism has been underrated.  They grasped that reason rules.  Some of them even fought through to the realization that if this so, then yes, there must be a First Reason.  Although sometimes they borrowed pre-existing names like “Zeus” or “Jove” for the First Reason, they seem to have done so merely as a convenience – for they were well aware that if God was this, then He was far from the gods of the poets.

It never occurred to them that one could know the First Reason face to face, any more than the characters in a story could know the author.  By Revelation, St. Thomas argues, one can.  As St. Paul said to some of these thinkers in Athens, the city of philosophy, I see that you acknowledge an Unknown God.  Let me tell you Who He is.[2]

Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the One God by J. Budziszewski


[1]Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1942), pp. 9-10.

[2] Paraphrasing his speech in Acts 17:15-34.

About The Author

J. Budziszewski

J. Budziszewski is a professor in the Departments of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. Besides Thomas Aquinas, Budziszewski's greatest interest is the n...

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