Every cause or engine of construction must have had a place to hold, or it could not have worked. What preceded it, to make the engine, and its place and anchor, and give it energy, is what the mind perforce must seek in order to come to terms with existence of any present phenomena. The backward reach of time, the root of all matter and energy's existence and properties, these questions have assailed each mind and mocked its feeble constructs with ever receding question of precedence and cause of cause. Mathematics, physics or philosophy cannot justify and infinite universe, or pretend to know what must have come before its existence.
The alternative to matter and existence is just as hard to synthesize. No driving force and no creation would be impossible to realize, and if it did not exist, or was the reasonable alternate, then it could not be conceived in any mind, equally non existent. Thus non existence could not "exist". Non being cannot be. If it can't be, then it is irrelevant to existence.
Could a non-material mind exist without matter and space? Leibniz though if it did it could not contradict in its necessary properties, any property of matter or time. The mythical interfering god whose will would bind all physical law could introduce a possible contradiction with existence, unless we imbued or could observe matter and energy with magical properties that obeyed at random some loki-like ethic of willfulness. We do not observe random behaviour, but at least our illusion of an iron engine of harmonious predictable behaviour. This, paradoxically, is given as showing the evidence of grand design.
In fact an ordered interaction according to physical law predicts the opposite, that there is no necessary engine of design, because without order and law of phenomena, no continuity to energy and matter would be observed. In a random universe, matter could not convert to energy, nor matter have any hope of binding with any certainty at all. All interaction would be totally random, and chaotic destruction would have ended the universe practically before it began. It is precisely the ordered physical laws that tell us at least at the atomic macro level, the universe is on automatic, and could not exist unless this was so. The idea of a will or god like thing binding the action of every lepton in every atom throughout and willing its behaviour, is to say that the nature of that thing is the order and law of all things, but it cannot break that law without the universe disappearing in a trice. This means no being would be more bound in its behaviour or ability, and less able to communicate to the corporeal than the god being. It could have no engine of existence other than its manifestation of the actual. To step outside that to a magical being would instantly contradict all natural law it had set, which is in essence its only possible manifest. |
