No Matter
Who made God?
This perceptive question asked by many precocious children deserves an answer…though a definitive answer is unlikely. This question challenges the “first cause” argument, an ontological position which asserts that there must be an initial cause of all that exists by following a chain of causality to the “first cause,” or as Aristotle termed it, the unmoved mover. Those who are theologically inclined believe this first cause to be God, while those who are secular, theorize naturalistic explanations such as the big bang, cyclic models, multiverses, or other scientifically based theoretical attempts to explain this mystery.
It is as impossible for our minds to grasp a nothingness from which something was born, as it is to grasp a something that was never born. What word we use for this ground of being, source of existence, pre-existing condition, or infinite state says something about the metaphysical paradigm we are reasoning from. Whether theological or secular, the ultimate existential question remains for all of us — why is there something rather than nothing? Why do I exist? Where did I come from? Hidden in these questions is the assumption that I do exist. Not only do I exist, but I am aware of my existence. While we can imagine that existence could be without awareness, that is not what we experience; our conscious experiencing is not seriously questioned. In actuality, our raw experience or consciousness is all any of us can be certain of.
Our minds automatically think in terms of causation, which leads us to explain our experiences by finding causes of those experiences. When this is lacking, we feel confused and out of sorts. Causal thinking works well for our day-to-day whodunits, but when it comes to finding the ultimate cause, it leads us to an infinite regress which either never ends or ends at the “first cause” — to which our causal minded minds ask, what caused the first cause or, who made God? Materialists face an additional but similar challenge as they try to solve the “hard problem of consciousness,” which involves figuring out how mindless matter thinks? This problem is similar to determining how something comes from nothing.
The most parsimonious solution is to flip the problem around by starting with the one thing most of us can agree upon, that we are conscious. Consciousness is the one thing which we all directly experience without an intermediary. This is a very satisfactory beginning point; let this be the unmoved mover from which all else stems. Given that our own personal consciousness seems endlessly creative, capable of constructing worlds and beings, what might a universal consciousness be capable of? Why do we need something else to explain where consciousness came from?
That something else is usually some form of matter, but matter is not a required link in the chain. Matter is becoming increasingly squirrely, perplexing, and a lot more like consciousness anyway. Letting go of matter’s preeminence is the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Mindless matter did not become conscious, consciousness became “matter.” Matter just happens to be what consciousness looks like. I still do not know who made consciousness — maybe it is infinite, or maybe it developed ex nihilo, but I do know it exists.
Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter…
— Sir James Hopwood Jeans
John R. Lucy, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice at Decatur Psychology, LLC.
