Lawless Universe

Lawless Universe

Samuel Bird

I don’t think he could notice. I couldn’t do anything but. The academic obligation to read these chapters, and I was likely not extracting the information that I was expected to. My cursed mind. I put my face in my hands and rocked back and forth. Couldn’t it cooperate with me? Couldn’t it fall into line? All the sacrifice to be where I was, and it wanted to be somewhere else. Finally getting to college had been a series of sacrifices. I had only achieved a third, a fifth, and half of a ninth-grade education by this point, and that was years ago. I could technically read, but somehow I was barely literate. As I read, I was not able to focus on the words at hand, but instead had the thoughts the words elucidated, impressed over my vision. My thoughts had a will of their own, and I was captive. As with any phenomenon, it varied in the extremity of its instance. Now, I could barely understand what the author wanted me to learn, over the screaming tone of the assumptions of why he wanted me to learn it. That damned word came again. “Law.” It seemed to come up in every sentence, and at least a few times in a paragraph. The words closest to it were more readily able to slip past my powerful conceptual focus. “Law of gravity,” “cosmological constant,” and many more qualifiers and instances of this man’s cherished laws. More and more, I began to grow disinterested in what this man thought, and more why he thought it. I felt as if I should be able to split the page between 256 and 257 to find a new secret page and with it, what this man really meant, or at least what undergirded his ideas. What assumed fact gave this man all these conceptual resources. Like nearly any public-facing science book I have ever read, he couldn’t help but bask in his hubris and mock the ancients. Surely he and his people were the enlightened ones. It made me sick to hear the gloating of an ideology that had destroyed the soul and world, all while not lowering their haughty brow to see their damage. Something seemed so contrasted from my being and experience that I felt ill. Still, there was that word. “Law.” Why was it so important to him and how did he have it? Had he not seen the world with his own eyes? In that moment my mind that failed to synthesize succeeded to analyze. Like many scientists, he couldn’t help but mention his religious upbringing. I find so many do this so that they are able to tell you they deeply know the foolishness of faith. Of course, when you follow the beliefs he held, you still found them to be articles of faith still, but I had already possessed that thought. What was new is that this man had a claim to something he had no right to. He had this notion of a law that was not sufficiently justified. He had a Godless gospel in a lawless universe. 

Faith is always accessible and never necessary. However, not everything available for faith is able to equally exact the nature of the world, the self, and be self-consistent. For that reason, not all faiths and their associated ideas are equal. This is more than my claim of equality making your idea naught, but that some ideas will just capture more of the world without falling apart in the process. In an experience I may well never talk about due to the painful and sickening nature of it, I have gone through a faith crisis. I killed my god for my God. I lost friends, opportunities, and had to come to grips with how a poor ideology tainted my past. Why did I leave this belief system and risk so much? It did not teach God as I knew him, it was not consistent with itself, and it was not conducive to my being. As you may have guessed, being an ideologically driven person, loyalty to concepts has made me miserable, but I do not regret the transaction. At the core of this faith crisis was a question I asked myself. What laws does God have to follow? No matter your beliefs, it is worth a meditation. When we are identifying what we believe, there is some point that we must conceptually sacrifice. My dear friend calls this “biting the bullet.” We can’t believe the best of every belief system and none of their sacrifices. Even if we could, we would never be able to commit to it. In the question of the three qualities God possesses, we find people negating different qualities for different reasons. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, our world would at least be prima facia one we wouldn’t expect. I do not wish to resolve the problem of evil today. What the belief system I was raised in did to respond to it, however, was to say that God was not omnipotent or had all power. Of course, they would get angry if you said this, but that is where they would negate this triple disjunct. How would they do so? I would read the long list of all the laws that God had to keep. Moral, physical, and metaphysical laws that the greatest possible mind had to abide by. Practically speaking this was useless as if I had a god that would need a God to make sense of Them, then it was just an unnecessary step. More than my issue with gnostics or the impotent god, it put me in the same position as the atheist where the world had to explain itself. Why was there a reality for this weak god to occupy? This also did not align with God as I knew Him. God was that being who was maximal. If He was sheer will in the nothingness, His will could will somethingness. For this reason, I would argue that if there were a God, which I have a subjective faith in, that He would obey no laws but that which He wills. There would be no value He was subject to. There would be no truth higher. I struggled to find the diagram in my notes, but a powerful conceptual tool I use is the spheres of modality. I can’t recall all the parts, but they are a sphere of possibility. When we ask if something could be, we could look at how the world is and ask which sphere it could find itself. Practically possible is the category of things we are likely to find in the world. Then we have the metaphysically possible where something could be the case given a different ordering of reality. There are more, but I can only recall three. Finally, the last is logical possibility. This is everything that is not an outright contradiction. For example, it is practically possible I see a cow, metaphysically possible I see a centaur, and logically possible I see the ghost of a cow. However, it is outside of the largest sphere that I have a cow and not a cow, both in identical senses. Which of these spheres is God able to act out of? I am alone with Leibniz in thinking that He can work outside of all of these. To make sense of the seemingness of being, I often need to revoke religious imagery, and while God is most crucial to me, I am not trying to do apologetics here, or anywhere. What we have been able to look into, is the places that these laws would fall into that this annoying scientist writer would assume when he mentioned “laws.”

Science starts in a society when they begin to look for God’s fingerprint in the world. They hear the laws He has for their lives and their consistencies. It is so perfect and structured, they wish to find it in the world. They then turn their “natural law theory” from values to nature. They are amazed by the reproducibility of reality and the degree to which it follows a priori mathematics. Then, there is a switch. To the weak, they find their grandiosity in their work and think they don’t need God. For the strong, they overstate God’s working in laws and then fear they can’t have Him. This leads to a final stage of utilitarian science that only looks into reality to get what it wants, before it dies. Here is the issue and my assertion for this article. There are no laws in our universe. There are inductions so strong that we haven’t found them being otherwise yet, but that is not to say they could never be. When I am asked if I am a nihilist, I still don’t know how to respond. I do not think there are values in the world, only in minds, though I have a hope in a privileged mind. Do they exist? Well, somewhere, just not in the world. It is the same with the laws that the world is governed by. Do they exist? Well, we have them in our mind. However, do they exist in the world? There are only instances of facts, energies, and events that we put into conceptual models that we call laws. They are always absolutely true until they are not. How can there be a law without a Lawgiver? This may seem like poor apologetics again, but outside of a central Mind, what reason do we have to believe that the world is governed by laws? Do we have sufficient reason to believe this? Imagine you came over to my house to meet my cats and you noticed that one was blue and one was red. You would likely remark, “oh, your cats are very strange looking.” You would likely ask me why they looked so strange, but I would just tell you that they are that way. You would likely not be satiated. Did I dye them? Do they have a strange diet? No, none of that. One by one I shoot down your ideas until you become frustrated. “Why are your cats weird colored, and both different?” I lean in and get quiet. I have a theory. I think they are siblings and their mother is actually purple. “But Sam, how did they uniquely and perfectly split her qualities?” I don’t know, but I'll tell you what: Let’s search around the house until we find the purple cat. Let’s say we then look around the apartment for one-hundred-years and we do not find the purple cat, what can we conclude from this? Is there certainly not a purple cat? Well, no. We can look around for another hundred years. However, can we conclude it’s less likely there is and we should instead wonder if there is not. How then can we explain the blue and red cats? I am not sure, but that one idea didn’t seem to be effective. 

The grand-unifying theory is an obsession of mine. The scope to which we approach reality either makes it relative and deterministic, or else probabilistic and viewer dependent. It is also in the reverse order that makes sense as the larger is determined and the smaller is probable. For one-hundred-years there has been a search to find the theory that bridges this. While we have not gotten closer to finding it, we have found the universe is not locally real, that we need to add infinite other worlds, new matters, and new energies, and that our own minds are a complete mystery. Why is this? Why do we assume the purple cat? But Samuel, why do we have blue and red cats? I don’t know. In fact, can we be so sure that we do? I have before said that our minds are not designed to know the world. The grammatical structure of logic and math that exists in our minds happens to coincide with the world to a degree we don’t deserve. That is not to say that reality is governed by it. Let’s say God’s system was to include a portion of reality not obeying logical possibility, let’s say electron’s positioning or quantum entanglement, is there any reason He could not if Leibniz and I were right? In that one little particle every sphere of modality is crushed. But Samuel, even if we can’t know the world, we can build our technologies. You already know how I judge those. No synthetic decadence is worth the killing of the soul. I should have defined “law” earlier, but now works as well. I like this idea of patterns of cause or base states of being that all reality is governed by. We then look for these laws, but it is far from necessary that they exist, and it is even further from necessary that they are simple. Unless you are Thomas Aquinas and have strong reason to believe God’s law governs all, how can we assume there is a law? If there was a law, how can we assume that it would be simple? A perfect explanation of what the universe is, would require a perfect description of every phenomenon that ever be in any four dimensions at least. If we make a map of our country the size of the country, we have exactness and scale! However, why not just point at the landscape? Even then, the fibers of the paper would not be like the grains of dirt and folding it up in your pocket would be a nightmare. Samuel, you mystic and anti-scientist, couldn’t there be a grand-unifying theory that gave us the whole world as a concept? Sure, that could be true, but in what modality? I recognize I am playing the easy role. It is harder to build a conceptual system than to critique. Furthermore, it is harder to look at a series of causes and identify the effect. Perhaps we just need a million years of great imaginations trying out their new ideas. However, what is gained is a maybe in knowing the world while biting the bullet of forgetting ourselves. 

I saw a plastic flower on the ground today. I stared at it for a while, feeling sickened by modern man and his hubris. In addition to the question of what laws God must abide by, another thought is ever-present in my mind. Can man be wiser than God? We try to engineer eco-systems, social structures, and even our mind. Not knowing all the parts and just correlations between desired outcomes, we go off not granting fate its rights in our lives. Life expectancy has grown at the expense of lives being worth living. When fate or God made flowers, they were self-consistent and part of the world they were in. We enjoyed their smell, their life, and even the symbolism of their wilted death. This abomination I saw today put toxins in the air, was dead while never living, and in its decay would destroy the world in part. Go on, modern man, and “learn” some more laws to manipulate without wisdom. Forget all the complex facts you could never know that makes the world so, and seek to fill your empty soul's belly at the expense of whoever comes next. Find your new planet or make the soulless technological mind. Eat and have your fill, but find it as this plastic flower. Everything you ever wanted, and it was not what you desired. Sometimes I wish I didn’t love the modern man. I could let him fall and look at it in judgment and jest. Let him process data evermore efficiently, and yet he would not have enough of it. New belief systems can explain away everything we can see, as long as we grant them something we don’t. Why is this? No matter what I read, think, or follow into meditation, this world is not self-complete. It can even seem at odds with itself. It would need something at least as real and potent as it to make it so, and something causally primitive. The world is only half of being. Where is this other portion? This is why to make sense of it, we need the nonsensical. Be careful looking for laws that are the structure of the mind. Feel held by the world that doesn't need you to operate as it does. I am the opposite of the modern man. I do the work and have the assumptions to have what he wants, and then I don’t take it. I have my God, but don’t find myself needing heaven. I have Esse Maxim, but don’t need true knowledge. Finally, I have the lawmaker, and yet I don’t think there are laws. There is only the churning, unknowable, lawless being and the non-being needed to explain it. Instead of knowing escaping into laws the next generation will ridicule, let us exist as what we are in a way they can honor.