Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, August 2, 2012

The ultimate question, left a little vague

It has been said that the question Why is there something rather than nothing? is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child. I was too young then to be a metaphysician. But why had I missed the question as a child? In retrospect, the answer was obvious. My natural metaphysical curiosity had been stifled by my religious upbringing. From my earliest childhood I had been told—by my mother and father, by the nuns who taught me in elementary school, by the Franciscan monks at the monastery over the hill from where we lived—that God created the world, and that He created it out of nothing at all. That's why the world existed. That's why I existed. As to why God himself existed, this was left a little vague. Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story - Jim Holt - Google Books

No comments:

Post a Comment