Why is there something instead of nothing? [View all]

Is the universe a divine gift or glorious accident? Does it come from God or God-knows-where?

This question is the most basic of all the unanswerable questions that we must answer. By “unanswerable,” I mean “cannot be answered with certainty,” unless that certainty is manufactured by the answerer. By “must answer,” I mean that we answer the question with our very lives: how we interpret them, feel them, and act within them. We inevitably choose. For this reason, we should choose consciously.

Our traditions cannot make the decision for us. Fundamentalists may insist on a literal reading of Scripture and claim that Genesis is perfectly accurate as a historical and scientific text. In so doing, they reject scientific claims about the origins of the cosmos, creating an artificial conflict between science and religion.

But science cannot make the decision for us either. Science-believing Christians accept our powers of observation and reason as divine gifts. For these Christians, science is a sacred practice. At this point the Big Bang seems to be the best explanation for the origin of our universe, but we still have a hard time explaining what produced the Big Bang. In attempting to explain the origin of the universe, we end up in an infinite regress: If the multiverse produced our universe, then what produced the multiverse? Or, even more intractably: What produced the physical laws that govern the multiverse?

Eventually, our powers of inference reach their limit. Theists stop the infinite regress by positing God as Creator and Sustainer of the unceasing process. Science can neither prove nor disprove this claim, leaving us, as rational beings, with the freedom, necessity, and consequence of choosing our religious orientation.

A question is an opportunity.

For many people the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” begins a spiritual search. The question invites us to consider the very real possibility that there could be nothing instead of something, and this nothingness would be absolute. Instead of this vibrant, pulsing universe, and our living experience within it, there could be naught but a cold, dark silence, with no one to lament its emptiness.

But even the words cold, dark, and silent are only metaphorical descriptors of this desolation, which cannot be thought or spoken. Absolute nothingness lies beneath all qualities and beyond the reach of language. It is the tomb of being, and it is a very real possibility. We, and this cosmos that we inhabit, might never have been. At any moment, we could not be, were it not for our Creator and Sustainer.

What is the Creator and Sustainer of our universe like?

Our Creator is our divine parent. In keeping with the warmest strains of his own religious tradition, Jesus calls God the Creator “Abba,” Aramaic for “Father” or, more warmly, “Dad.” In Jesus’s Bible, Hosea provides one of the most affectionate descriptions of God as Abba, writing in Abba’s own words:

When Israel was a youth, I loved them dearly, and out of Egypt I called my children. . . . I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arm—but they don’t acknowledge that I was the one who made them whole. I led them on a leash of human kindness, with bonds of caring. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks; I bent down to them and fed them. (Hos 11:1–4)

Abba—the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, our divine Parent—is not cold, distant, or unfeeling; Abba is present, compassionate, and attentive. In choosing the symbol of YHWH as Father (and Mother, as we shall later see), Jesus is declaring that the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos cares for each individual. The full attention of the ever-increasing infinite is directed at every one of us, personally. Thus, Abba is omnipresent in two ways: Abba is everywhere, and Abba is undistracted. We may feel forgotten in the numberless masses, but we are precious in the sight of Abba—so Jesus assures us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 64-66)