Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing

I can’t remember, if the title to this post, was a song by The Ohio Players or some other band.  And it really isn’t important when related to this post, but the title of that song did pop into my head this morning as I read a review of Bede Rundle’s book WHY THERE IS SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING. The review is written by Thomas Nagel and published in The Times Literary Supplement. The review is titled “Philosophy’s first question."

From the review.

"The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” provoked one of Sidney Morgenbesser’s memorable comebacks: “If there was nothing, you’d still be complaining!” Bede Rundle’s response is somewhat longer but just as uncompromising. He argues that the question is ill-formed because there could not have been nothing. He offers general reflections on causality, eternity, God, mind, matter and agency, in order to evaluate the idea that the existence of anything at all, while it cannot be explained by science, might be explained by theology. His strategy in Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing is to argue in detail that the question, and the attempts to answer it, consistently take language beyond the bounds of meaningfulness, detaching familiar words from their usual conditions of application so that they no longer express intelligible possibilities. He is following the method of Wittgenstein, as he conceives it, though with results more destructive to religious language than Wittgenstein’s own view."

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Posted by on 05/08 at 03:45 AM

  1. If theology explains the _why_ of something rather than nothing, then what explains the _why_ of theology?

    Theology can’t answer the question, because the very concept or notion of theology subsumes that there is something (as do all concepts).

    Again, you can’t get there from here. It’s reduction ad infinitum.

    Posted by Richard Nikoley  on  05/08  at  07:41 AM

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