One of the things JD Lyonhart argues in his book MonoThreeism: An Absurdly Arrogant Attempt to Answer All the Problems of the Last 2000 Years in One Night at a Pub, is that every argument that exists between religious and non religious thinkers ultimately is rooted in the same conundrum that frames the idea of the origins of the universe. That conundrum can be boiled down to the contradictory realities of Being (something that exists without a cause, or something that simply is) and Becoming (existence that arises from cause and effect).
Take the free will/determinism debate for example. We have become so accustomed here in the West to seeing this debate as one that is rooted in a story of sin and necessary judgment or necessary forgivness which requires some level of responsibility to uphold. We have become so conditioned to seeing the human story in light of western progress and its subsequent creation of and appeal to “individual liberty” that we have lost any and all ability to speak to the initial conundrum by which such debates emerge from. In fact, we tend to fly straight past it in favor of getting mired in subsequent conflicts that assume a whole bunch of things that would need to be argued first before something like determinism and free will can even begin to make sense as a proper argument. We can see this not least apparent in the notion of responsibility. We experience this world as humans in a way that appears to require levels of personal responsibility. Thus we assume it to be true on our way to arguing for something else. And yet responsibility cannot logically be used to argue for its own existence, it must first be argued for on its own basis. And that requires dealing with the conundrum of Being and Becoming. It’s equally easy to see how this same argument has implications for how we work through something like the problem of Evil.
In a very real sense we’ve become accustomed to making arguments for free will that require a prior belief in something called free will, and the same for determinism, that we can’t note the logical fallacies, even as we locate such claims equally in our experience of this world. It’s equally true to say that we experience this world as free persons who can seemingly shape our realities in one direction or another, and to say that the world that we experience in this way can be observed as one that is absent of a truly free will detached from nature because of the basic rule of cause and effect.
Such a conundrum ultimately takes us all the way back to the problem inherent in the origins of the universe. If we approach this problem from the vantage point of God’s existence we have the following dilemma:
“If God is just eternal Being can he begin to create? No, because he is outside of time and so cannot begin to do anything. His inherent nature of eternity prevents him from doing anything new or different. He is stuck in his timelessness, unable to act beyond it to begin to create in time… If God is just timeless Being he is not free to create the universe, because he cannot act beyond his timeless nature to begin to create in time… God cannot suddenly begin to act beyond his nature to create in time. The problem of free will is the same problem as the origins of the universe: how can something go beyond its inherent nature?”
A similar problem emerges with indeterminism (Becoming, or the problem of infinite regress):
“Indeterminism manages to avoid the causal regress of determinism. But it then suffers an equal and opposite problem. For if our actions pop out of nothing, then they can’t have a causal source in you as the chooser… the problem with determinism is our actions are determined by our nature. And the problem with indeterminism is our actions would not be determined by our nature, and so could not really be called our choices.”
Which of course all finds its basis in making sense of the origins of the universe. That becomes the place where we begin to wrestle with these same issues bearing themselves out in observable and experienced reality.
Or take the idea of love. Do we define love according to something one does? That would set it within the reality of Becoming. Can love actually Become if it has no Being? Often love is defined not only as an action but an action that bears itself out (emerges) through a distinct human responsibility. And yet people are equally prone to locating love in the actions of a creature, for example, who could not be held responsible in the same way according to this deifntion. This presents a conundrum. The same conundrum that occupies the origins of the universe and plays through into all of our disputes. In some sense who we are and this reality we know depends on what the origins of the universe says about the nature of reality (or itself), and, at least as is our tendency, how we observe and experience reality in time tends to be the driving force for our assumptions ahout the nature of reality relating back to its origins. These two things can’t help but get caught up in one another, framing how it is that ontological arguments flow in both directions at once. What gets ignored is the implications. But we can’t truly face and understand the implications of our assumptions unless we first acknowledge that Being and Becoming are tied to each other and that it represents a conundrum. The modern, western tendency is to ignore Being in favor of Becoming because the entire enterprise of western thought hinges on that not being undermined less we lose our cherished appeal to individual liberty. And in many ways we arrived there (the western narrative if you will) because of cynicism over what was percieved to be an emphasis on Being that restricted Becoming, formulating this into a philosophy of liberty and the will that no longer needed Being to justify its existence, despite this bearing the weight of a logical fallacy. At least part of the reason the West has been grappling with what has been called the “meaning crisis” for some time now.
The Stories of my Life 