Will the world end in random nothingness?

In his latest column, Norwich local government officer, author and Proclaimers church member, James Knight, wonders if the universe is just a random meaningless happening or down to Mother Nature or is another explanation?  

 

I was watching Question Time the other week, and the panel were debating Trident and Britain’s future nuclear capabilities. So I thought about the spectre of nuclear war and about people’s apprehension towards it - towards a possible event that could bring about the end of mankind. 

 

And no doubt those who have no belief in God would see it all ending in one catastrophic rapid time period and then nothingness. But has their thinking really reduced them to this hypothesis; by that, I mean, is not their whole cognitive reasoning process based on some precursory thoughts of general nothingness anyway? 

 

If they believe in naturalistic theories, that everything came about through various random processes, do they not think that it will all end in nothing anyway? Astronomers tell us that the earth is finite. Biologists tell us that organic life is finite. The Big Crunch experts tell us that the universe itself is finite. Nature (by itself) is, in the long run, inimical to progression. And it should be admitted that if there is no God, then the whole of nature will eventually follow a rather predictable course; that is, ‘nothingness’ will be nature’s valedictory aria. 

 

No doubt Trident, and the mass proliferation of nuclear weapons in other countries, might cut mankind’s duration on earth a lot shorter; but even if we live on and on, it will still be nothing by the timescale we are using. And perhaps this presents us with the most salient question of all. The question is not whether Trident, or indeed any other nuclear weapon, will precipitate the end of mankind, it is whether nature itself will run down, or whether God is watching over nature. If you think that nature is everything, then the question of Trident only amounts to a question about how long it will be before the end of mankind. 

 

But let us suppose for a second that nature is everything, that there is no God. We are talking about a nature that has, by a series of random events, produced creatures like us - beings with a cognitive reasoning process that is a result of meaningless randomness. Whatever reason would we have for trusting such a thing? For our whole consciousness would be a result of non-consciousness, therefore our reason would have been produced by non-reason.

 

In the first place, we have to admit that the world we live in, and indeed, even our own rationale, was much less reliable that we first thought it was. And this thinking cascades into other things as well. The girl we love would herself be the result of an accidental randomness within nature’s random atomic configurations. How could we trust any warm feelings towards our earthly beloved? We would be glad to feel positive emotional sensations, but surely they would be tainted by a false premise. With this type of randomness, beauty would not be beauty anymore. Your own response to beauty would be some meaningless luminescence arising from your genetic transpositions. 

 

Equally, you would not be able to enjoy literature in the same way, that is, you could not continue to derive pleasures from things that are simply responses to the irrationality of your own central nervous system. You may still claim to enjoy these things at a lower level, but there would be no claims of actual fulfilment - that is, some genuine feeling that can press the boundaries away from cold concentric sensuality into some numinous feeling that transcends reason itself. No, without God in the picture you are left with a disharmonious conflict between thoughts-from-nothingness and supposed pleasures distilled from those thoughts. The reality is - there is a choice. We can live our lives believing that our only goal is to make the best of a random meaningless existence, or we can do something else - we can look for answers beyond theories of naturalism.

 

And if any of us, even for a brief moment, claims that nature is the complete actuality, we are supposing that when the atomic impulses in our head get into certain states, they are appropriate devices for judging the chaos that is nature. We are knocking down the very house that we live in. If our thoughts are derived from random chaos, they must be random and chaotic themselves. 

 

I am afraid that if you have never thought this way before it is going to come as a bit of a shock to you. But if naturalism is true, all thoughts lead to an incongruity between our perceived selves and nature. You may now say that over millions of years, we might come to know what could be regarded as true by some micro-evolutionary standard; that time could lead us towards an understanding of truth which is able to defeat all criticism by its very timescale. But surely this cannot be so. We would never be able to identify a thought that originated from pure reason, because it would be a feeling that came upon us by the thoughtless forces of nature. How does one ever presume that time will redress this problem? After all, if the first letter in a word is wrong, the rest of the letters will never make the right word. In which case, we would never do something simply because we thought it was right; for in the grand scheme of things, we could not know the distinction - it was merely something we created. 

 

And this brings us now to the alternative proposal - one which will hopefully help non-believers to see beyond the cold steel rail of naturalism. The proposal that we are more than just matter, that consciousness is something which is a product of supernature, of God. And as soon as we accept that we are both flesh and spirit, it is easier to see how we really fit into a world created by God. And surely now we can see that our whole reasoning process belongs somewhere else. If we were merely the result of a directionless nature, we should expect to feel no thirst for another place we haven’t yet seen. And notice how our view of nature changes at this point. If nature is everything, we can perhaps all admit that she is terrifying, a beast that could, by some naturalistic disaster, assume total control of our destiny. 

 

But if nature is simply a temporary home for us, simply a place to rest our heads while we await providential homecoming, she is not really scary at all. For all Christians know that the time before we knew Christ and the time after, provides us with a significant change of thought about the spectre of nature. We are not here to worship nature, we are here to worship God; for those who worship nature find themselves making gods of many things within nature. 

 

And here we have the theme of the story of creation. We are only part of the way through. We can sense the end in a way that no sentient discernment can recognise. One day we shall see God. Right now, we are on the other side of the door waiting to get in. And when nature herself becomes a whisper, a distant echo in our hearts, we shall hear the true voice of God calling us towards Him. The very essence of our being shall be revealed to us as we shall share in His glory. 

 

Until that happens, we should keep a sharp eye out for those who are willing to listen to the good news of Christ. For those who are ready to listen, we have plenty to tell them. But this works two ways. If anyone meets someone who is ready to listen, but finds they have nothing, or feels like they have nothing, to tell them, they should turn back to Christ. They will no doubt find that it is Christ who has something to say to them. Where any of us feels a void or absence, Christ is right by or side, ready and willing to fill it. 

 

To conclude this message I will leave you with a quote which reminds us of the necessity to continually spread the good news:

 

Daniel Defoe

 

We welcome your thoughts and comments, below, upon the ideas expressed here, which are intended to stimulate debate. You can contact the author at james.knight@norfolk.gov.uk