More from the argument I cited:
"It is, it seems to me, quite anomalous to hold that while it is legitimate and valid to ask 'How come?' about any particular thing or event in the world, it is illegitimate and invalid to ask it about the whole world. To say that we aren't allowed to ask it merely because we can't answer it seems to me to be begging the question. The question is: Is there an unanswered question about the existence of the world? Can we be puzzled by the existence of the world instead of nothing? I can be and am...
"The question 'How come?' can have a whole lot of different meanings and be asked at several levels, and the deeper the question you ask about an individual thing the more it is a question about a world to which that thing belongs; there is finally a deepest question about a thing which is also a question about everything. Let me explain that enigmatic remark.
"Supposing you ask 'How come Fido?' You may be asking whether his father is Rover or whether it was that promiscuous mongrel down the lane. In such a case the answer is satisfactorily given by naming Fido's parents. At this level no more need be said; the question is fully answered at this level. But now suppose you ask: 'But how come Fido's a dog?' The answer could be: 'His parents were dogs, and dogs just are born of other dogs'. Here you have moved to what I call a deeper level of questioning and begun to talk about what dogs are. You are saying: for Fido to be is for him to be a dog, and Fido's parents are the sort of things whose activities result in things being dogs. Now your original question 'How come Fido?' has deepened into a question about the dog species. It remains a question about this individual dog Fido, but it is also a question about dogs -- not about dogs in the abstract, but about the actual dog species in the world. Your question 'How come Fido?' at this new level is a question 'How come dogs anyway?'
"And of course there is an answer to that too in terms of things like genetics and natural selection and what not. Here we have a new and deeper level of the question 'How come Fido?' -- still a question about this particular puppy, but one that is answered in terms of its membership of a still wider community; no longer now simply the community of dogs, but the whole biological community within which dogs come to be and have their place. Then of course we can ask a question about Fido at a deeper level still. When we ask how come the biological community, we no doubt answer in terms of biochemistry. (I am not of course pretending that we actually have the answers to all these questions, as though we fully understood how it came about, and had to come about, that there are now dogs around the place, but we expect eventually to answer these questions.)
"And now we can go on from the level of biochemistry to that of physics and all the time we are asking more penetrating questions concerning Fido and each time we go further in our questioning we are seeing Fido in a wider and wider context.
"We can put this another way by saying that each time we ask the question we are asking about Fido over against some other possibility. Our first question simply meant: How come Fido is this dog rather than another; he's Rover's son rather than the mongrel's son. At the next level we were asking: How come he's a dog rather than, say, a giraffe. At the next level: How come he's a living being rather than an inanimate, and so on.
"Now I want to stress that all the time we are asking about this individual Fido. It is just that we are seeing further problematics within him. Fido's parents brought it about that he is this dog not another, but in that act they also brought it about that he is this dog (not a giraffe), that he is this living dog, that he is this biochemically complex, living dog; that he is this molecularly structured, biochemically complex, living dog, and so on. We are probing further into what it is for Fido to come to be and always by noting what he is not, but might have been. Every 'How come' question is how come this instead of what is not. And every time, of course, we answer by reference to some thing or state of affairs, some existing reality, in virtue of which Fido is this rather than what he is not.
"Now our ultimate radical question is not how come Fido exists as this dog instead of that, or how come Fido exists as a dog instead of a giraffe, or exists as living instead of inanimate, but how come Fido exists instead of nothing, and just as to ask how come he exists as dog is to put him in the context of dogs, so to ask how come he exists instead of nothing is to put him in the context of everything, the universe or world.
"And this is the question I call the God-question, because whatever the answer is, whatever the thing or state of affairs, whatever the existing reality that answers it we call 'God'.
"Now of course it is always possible to stop the questioning at any point; a man may refuse to ask why there are dogs. He may say there just are dogs and perhaps it is impious to enquire how come -- there were people who actually said that to Darwin. Similarly it is possible to refuse to ask this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the universe is just there. This seems to me just as arbitrary as to say: dogs are just there. The difference is that we now know by hindsight that Darwin's critics were irrational because we have familiarised ourselves with an answer to the question, how come there are dogs? We have not familiarised ourselves with the answer to the question, how come the world instead of nothing? but that does not make it any less arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is to enter on an exploration which Russell was simply refusing to do, as it seems to me. It is of course perfectly right to point out the mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said 'Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery'..." --CGE
Shane Mage wrote:
> On Jan 14, 2008, at 6:34 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> Why is there anything instead of nothing? The Judeo-Christian
>> notion of creation is that we call the answer to that question
>> (which we do not know) "God." ("Et hoc dicimus deum," says
>> Aquinas.)
>
>
> At least since Parmenides it has been well known that this question
> cannot be asked (ie., is meaningless) because one of its dichotomous
> possibilities (there is something/there is nothing) is
> selfcontradictory. *Nothing* cannot exist.