The appearance of God in Genesis is extremely difficult to comprehend. In the beginning God is just “the Word,” a notion, a concept [1]. Then he becomes sort of a personified “big bang” that starts everything off. The rest is story and his tory. From no-thing , and out of no-where He came, and not leaving well-enough alone, He started creating things that led to us (and some people call this “intelligent design”?)
What’s impossible about this is that something comes out of nothing. From the very beginning in religious teaching in the Judeo-Christian tradition we are asked to accept a logical impossibility. Now you can go ahead and be a jerk and reply that God does not have to be logical. But my main premise is that even God can’t escape logic; even He can’t escape that basic premise of philosophy that “ a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. Go ahead, try it. Could an all-powerful God, for example, make a stone so heavy that even He couldn’t life it? Either way He can’t be all-powerful.
So why am I bugging you with this? Because it’s the basis for a philosophical position I want to advance, called Nilhilology. The point of nihilology is, by the way, not to get rid of God (Nietzsche had a lot of trouble with that), but to examine the question of what He hath wrought, i.e., creation. It is a point of view that alleges that if you begin with nothing, as do all creation myths, then all that is created can only, logically, sum up to nothing.
OK, so you don’t give a rat’s ass about that . . . I can’t say that I’m going to spend a lot of time worrying about the implications of this either, because as a nihilologist I think that there is not much we can do about it. So let’s try a different angle on the subject; this one is anecdotal, so try to bear with it.
Let’s take computers, for instance. They are a marvel, aren’t they. Match them with the Internet and a student today can do a book report on say Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain by going online, picking a few reviews and downloading them. Then with a little facile cutting and pasting he can make a reasonable amalgam, go into that cool Thesaurus application and find apt synonyms for about a third of the nouns and a quarter of the verbs, a little more paraphrasing and, hit print. Voila! a book report without ever having turned a page. What a time saver! [2]
Compare that to when I was in graduate school. I had a manual typewriter (I got a Smith-Corona electric the second year). At the time there were only clunky old mainframe computers that you used only if you had some data to run, and then you had to punch out all these cards and carry them to the computer place and you would get a quarter-ton of perforated paper print-out that was almost impossible to decipher. If I wanted to read a journal article I got in my car, drove to campus, searched for a parking space, walked to the library, looked up the journal in the card catalog, filled out a request form, took it to the desk and gave it to the librarian assistant, [3] waited until they got the journal for me, took it to a desk, read the article if it was there (see note 3) and , if I wanted to copy any of the material, I did it by handinto my notebook since there were no copiers and the little stored value cards that students use to make copies these days. Then, back home, I could type it out into my paper. [4]
But my point is not about cheating students; it’s about time. Sure, in one sense there seems to have been a lot of time saved as technology (computers, copiers, the Internet) has advanced. But we are not counting up time the way a nihilologist counts time. That is, you have to count all the time and effort that goes into making computers, printers, building the Internet, the software and operating systems, all of the research and study and information that goes into getting you sitting in front of your computer, logged on to the internet with you email application open, and connected to your printer— that all took time , lots of it. You even have to learn the software, and that takes some time. A nihilologist would contend that when you sum up all he that time that goes into saving time the time saved is zero . So, if you use technology to save time, in the overall scheme of things it is no different than without the technology.
Nihilology also raises the question of whether this whole business of creation is of any worth or consequence in any scheme of things (see the problem here; you have to invoke categories that nihilology would seem to deny relevance – oh, well . . . ). If it all amounts to nothing , then why bother to care about the consequences of our existence and our behavior. A host of vexing questions flow out of this. Will all of human experience –the history, the art, the literature, the experience, all the questioning and pondering, the good, the bad, the ugly, the whole “kit and kaboodle,” the “whole shebang” (even words like kaboodle and shebang) will at some future time just collapse into a void of nothing-ness , the nothing from whence it came. It’s not a terrifying thought, but one of frustration and sadness. Frustration because we have evolved some sense of “justice” about life. Does nilhilology mean that all the nasty stuff that has been done by some people will go unpunished? Does it mean that all the human achievements will disappear, that all the effort has been for nothing? That’s kind of depressing.
And does this mean that everything is countervailed by its opposite, by that which negates it? For example, does this mean that there is just as much evil in the world as there is good? Seems there would have to be for them to sum up to zero in the final accounting. In physics every action, we learn, has an equal and opposite reaction . So why shouldn’t this apply to everything, like good and evil, love and hate, life and death, etc. This would also square with aspects of chaos theory, which posits that every action no matter how minor (the wagging of a puppy’s tail) factors into events. Then there is systems theory; nihilology views creation as a “closed system” in which everything, from the molecular to the molar is a “little (or larger) bang,” a cycle to and from nothing-ness. And, if we take this into the temporal dimensions, all time is folded into this cycle to the extent that, at some point, history collapses back into nothing happened!
Yikes! That is depressing. No wonder Nihilology doesn’t seem to be taking off as a post-modern philosophy. It implies that it doesn’t seem to matter whether you do good or evil in the scheme of things because eternity is not an endless ticking of time, but a cycle in which there is (perhaps) and endless cycle of bangs between nothing and existence. It all seems so meaningless, so pointless, or as I heard a young lady bemoan the other day, “it’s like really sooooh not fun.” [5]
And the really soooooh not fun part about it is that the whole process doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about you. It’s sooooh not like my First Grade Catcehism that answers the question “Why did God make me?” with “God made me to know, love and serve Him in this world and be with him in the next.” See, that’s got some purpose and hope to it, and guidance, too. People sooooh want meaning. They sooooh want purpose. They want something to shoot for, they want to be “all that they can be,” be a Nobel laureate, a movie star, to be on Oprah . . . . they want some form of immortality. They want a good story, whether it’s true, or not; the last thing they want is some nihilologist unloading some sooooh not fun cosmology on them.
So you are about to say, enough of this Dragon City Journal depressing crap. It’s, it’s, it’s like soooooh not fun, dude. Let’s check the surf, see a movie, and go out for some beers and wash this depressing stuff out of our system.
Then, you hear some guy a few bar stools down talking about sports or politics, it doesn’t matter; but you perk up when hear him say, “What goes around, comes around, man” with such assurance and conviction. And you say to yourself, “Hmmmmm . . . and drain your bottle of “tastes great, less filling.” Then you snap out of it: Bartender! Drinks all around, on me !
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.4.2005)
[1] This by John (1:1), not from Genesis, whoever wrote that one; but it only muddles things rather than clarifies.
[2] Yes, this can all be done without a computer, or the Internet, but I am not writing a confessional here, just trying to make a comparative point.
[3] Actually, when I was a grad student I was allowed to go into the reference stacks by myself and find the journal. Sometimes there were other grad students in there, cutting articles out of journals with razor blades. These days such behavior has been transferred to illegally downloading music.
[4] Moral: Students today don’t have a clue. But I’m not doing moral philosophy here.
[5] She was referring to school, not Nihilology.