I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel.
The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either! And then the strangeness supervened as the boy lay in bed staring at the ceiling. There would then have been nothing, absolutely nothing! How strange!
The giddiness arose by a double subtraction. The boy subtracted creation leaving only God. Then he subtracted God leaving only nothing. The boy was innocent of philosophy and nothing from that field impeded the supervenience of strangeness as he tried to apprehend this 'nothing.'
'Necessary being' was not in the ten-year-old's vocabulary. The nonexistence of God is impossible if God is a necessary being. And surely the ens realissimum, the ens absolutum, the apha and omega of the alphabet of Being, could not be a merely contingent being. That much seems very clear to the old man.
Unfortunately, the divine necessity is not transparent to our intellects. We cannot see into the divine necessity. We have no INsight in this instance. We cannot see with indubitable evidence that God exists and cannot not exist. Why not? I conjecture that it is because of the structure of the discursive intellect.
We think in opposites. In the present case, the opposites are essence and existence. We say that in God, essence entails existence, or essence is (identically) existence, or it is the nature of God to exist. Or perhaps we say, as I recall Saint Bonaventura saying, that if God is God, then God exists: the divine self-identity entails the divine existence. But the sense of these claims rests on the logically prior distinction of essence and existence as two opposing factors that the discursive intellect must keep apart if it is to think clearly. And so the very sense of the claims militates against apodictic insight into their truth.
We cannot help but bring the distinction between essence and existence to God when we try to think about him. This distinction that we cannot help but bring prevents us from rendering the divine necessity transparent to our intellects in such a way that we cannot doubt the existence of God. The objects of the finite intellect are finitized objects in which essence and existence fall asunder. They are objects among objects subject to distinctions among distinctions. God or the ens absolutum cannot but be a finitized object to our ectypal intellects. God himself, however, is nothing finite, no object among objects, no token of a type, no instance of an eidos. We cannot get what want: objective certainty of the existence of the Absolute in which there is such a tight coalescence between the intellect and its Infinite Object that no conceivable logical wedge can be driven between intellect and Object. We want objective certainty! Husserl: Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben!
According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God.
Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.
I grant that if God exists, then he necessarily exists. But this concession does not help. For one cannot infer from the divine modal status -- necessarily existent if existent -- that God exists. For God might be impossible. Necessarily existent if existent, but, contrapositively: impossibly existent if not existent. Anselm's Insight -- that than which no greater can be conceived is either necessary or impossible -- does not validate Anselm's Argument.
"But surely God is possible!"
How do you know that? There is no apodictic transition from conceivability by a finite mind to possibility in reality. Besides, you cannot mean by 'possible' 'merely possible,' possible but not actual. You must mean that God is possible in a sense of 'possible' that does not exclude actuality. But then your argument begs the question.
I am not maintaining that the ens necessarium (God) does not exist. I am maintaining that we have no insight into God's existence that allays all possible doubts. And so we are left with the seeming possibility of absolute nothingness, and the giddiness or (Heideggerian) Angst that it elicits in some of us.
If God almighty cannot ban the specter of absolute nothingness, or hold it at bay, can anything? Let's see.
The 'thought' that there might have been nothing at all is unthinkable. It is self-cancelling. Here is an argument:
The following are contradictory propositions:
1) Something exists.
2) Nothing exists.
(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false. So much for truth value. What about modal status? Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true. If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.
Is it possible that (2) be true, that nothing exist? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.
Think about it, muchachos!
Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist. This of course is not a proof of God, but of something rather less impressive, a state of affairs. The state of affairs, There is something, necessarily obtains. It cannot not obtain. And it cannot obtain necessarily without existing necessarily. Not a proof of God, but a starting point for a proof of God; in any case an important result: we seem to have achieved a knock-down proof of the necessary existence of something by sheer thinking. Thought makes certain contact with reality 'by its own power' without the mediation of the senses, or anything else for that matter, including divine revelation. Parmenides vindicatus est.
If this is right, then the thought of absolute nothingness is an unthinkable thought, hence no thought at all, a product of confusion, a 'ghost' to be dispelled by clear thinking. My ten-year-0ld self was perhaps 'spooked' by an unthinkable thought. Hence, the eldritch quality, the strangeness the old man cannot forget. It was perhaps only an emotional state induced by an attempt to overstep the bounds of intelligibility. Perhaps the boy succumbed to a purely subjective emotional state bare of cognitive content, bereft of intentionality, revelatory of nothing. Hence the giddy strangeness, a close cousin to Heidegger's Angst.
Up to this point Father Parmenides would agree.
But then what of the Humean reasoning? Does it not clamor for 'equal time'? An aporia threatens:
(H) Nothing is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.
(P) Something is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.
I don't know how to resolve this contradiction. I am of two minds. Parmenides and Hume are battling for hegemony in my shallow pate.
Can I conceive (think without internal logical contradiction) the nonexistence of what is the case, or a total way things are?
The Humean-Heideggerian part of my mind says Yes: you are thinking the thought of radical contingency. Everything is contingent including there being anything at all. There really might have been nothing at all. And this real possibility is a live one, moment to moment. There is no ultimate metaphysical support anywhere. That there is anything at all is a brute fact, a fact without cause or explanation, and thus a fact wholly unintelligible, hence ab-surd, We are hanging in the Void. Ich habe Angst vor dem Nichts! Heidegger's Angst and Sartre's nausea are revelatory emotions: they reveal, respectively, the ultimate nothingness at the base of all that exists, and the ultimate absurdity or unintelligibility of the existing of what exists.
The Parmenidean part of my mind says No: Thought and Being are 'the same.' You have grasped by sheer thought alone the absolute necessity of there being a way things are, an ultimate context. And so you were indeed 'spooked' as a boy when it seemed you looked into the abyss of utter nothingness and contextlessness.
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