This approach fails when it is applied to the universe as a whole. Yet it is precisely knowledge about the universe as a whole (rather than about patches of space-time) that we require to defeat or to circumscribe speculative groundlessness. When the subject matter is cosmological rather than local, the distinction between initial conditions and explained phenomena within a configuration space cannot be maintained. The observer can no longer imagine himself as standing outside the boundaries of the configuration; there is nowhere outside the universe to stand. He cannot observe or prepare copies of the states of affairs that he investigates; there is only one universe, or at least one observable universe, at a time.
The second limitation of the dominant practice of natural science as a model of cosmological inquiry is that it assumes a historically provincial view of how nature works. It pictures the relatively settled and cooled-down universe. In this universe, the constituents of nature, as described by the standard model of particle physics, are unchanging and, for all practical purposes, eternal. States of affairs can be clearly distinguished from the laws governing them. We can think of the laws of nature as the indispensable warrants of all our causal explanations, and of causal connections as particular instances of the workings of these unchanging laws. The range of the adjacent possible is tightly drawn: the ways in which, and the extent to which, some things can turn into others.
What science has already discovered, however, suggests that nature did not, and does not, always appear in this form. It has another, fiery and unsettled variant, in which it presented itself in the very early history of the universe and may present itself again. In this variant, what we now think of as the elementary and eternal constituents of nature did not yet exist, or were not organized distinctly, as they now are, as a differentiated structure. The laws of nature may not have been distinguishable from the states of affairs that they governed. Indeed, causal connections or successions may not have assumed a law-like form at all. The susceptibility of the phenomena to transformation may have been much greater than it subsequently became in the relatively settled and cooled-down universe that the science founded by Galileo and Newton takes for granted.
When we cast aside feel-good metaphysics, with its disposition to claim more than we can pretend to know, recognize the incompleteness of that scientific tradition as a basis for thinking about the universe, and nevertheless attend to the revolutionary empirical discoveries of twentieth-century science, we reach a view reaffirming our speculative groundlessness rather than overcoming it. According to this view, everything changes sooner or later: the types of things that exist as well as the regularities connecting them. Change changes. Causal succession, rather than being simply a construction of the mind, is a primitive feature of nature. It sometimes exhibits law-like regularity (in the relatively settled, cooled-down variations of nature), and sometimes fails to exhibit it.
What there is then at the limit of our understanding is not a universe that could not be other than it is, or a framework of timeless laws. What there is is impermanence, which we also call time, and which Anaximander described some 2,500 years ago at the beginning of both Western science and Western philosophy: “All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another, according to necessity … under the dominion of time.” Nothing in this view explains away our speculative groundlessness. On the contrary, everything converges to make its meaning both more precise and more acute.
The world has a history, extending backward and forward in time, even beyond the present universe. No final system of laws could tell us what this history was, or will be, or must be; the regularities of the nature are the products of this history even more than they are its source.
When we come to understand this history much better than we now do, we shall still be confined to play a tiny part in it. It remains foreign to our concerns. Its message continues to be that nothing is for keeps, and that everything turns into everything else.
What about us? That is the question lying at the heart of the problem of existential groundlessness. A response to our existential groundlessness would make sense of our situation in the world in ways that provide guidance for the conduct of life and for the organization of society. We may first seek outside ourselves a basis for an orientation to existence in our general understanding of the world and of our place in it. If such an understanding yields no clues, we are driven back on ourselves: on our biographical and historical experience and on our self-understanding. The question then becomes whether the very lack of a grounding outside ourselves can be turned into an incitement and a justification for our self-grounding.
Only if all these attempts fail are we then left face to face with our existential groundlessness. In every instance, a response to the threat of existential groundlessness must take account of the most frightening aspect of our situation: that we will die. If such a response cannot show us how we are to achieve eternal life, it must suggest at least the beginnings of an approach to how we are to live, given our mortality, our manifest human nature or the human nature that we can bring about, our fundamental needs and desires, and the intractable limits to what we can hope to discover about the world and about our place within it.
The problem of existential groundlessness can be restated simply: all attempts to ground an orientation to existence in an understanding of the world tend to fail. To say that they must forever fail would be to make an unjustifiable claim about the future of human insight and initiative. What we have to instruct us is the history of our struggles to deal with the threat of existential groundlessness, in the space in which philosophy passes over into religion.
Consider three families of efforts to manage this threat. They are the three major spiritual options, dominant over the last two millenniums, that I explore in the next three chapters of this book. The consequences of this survey can be succinctly summarized. The better the news, the less reason there is to believe it. The more credible the news, the less satisfactory it is as a response to the perplexities and anxieties motivating the experience of existential groundlessness.
There appears to be an adverse sliding scale, which opposes our desire to see things as they are to our search for encouragement as well as for guidance. Moreover, even the more credible positions on this sliding scale, the ones that least require us to assent to the unbelievable, are unsatisfactory; if they do not tax our credulity, they nevertheless make light of our powers of resistance and self-transformation.
The most encouraging, and the least believable, news is that we have a friend in charge of the universe. That is the news delivered by the Semitic monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our friend made both the world and us. He did so out of an abundance of his creative, life-giving love. We are formed in his image. Not satisfied to make us, and stand aside, he has a plan for our salvation. In the implementation of that plan, he may even, according to one version of this narrative, have become incarnate in a man a couple of thousands of years ago. He calls us to eternal life and to participation in his being and requires that we change how we live and deal with one another. A community of the faithful will uphold and spread this good news.
This message is not without its terrors. Our spiritual freedom creates the risk that we may fail to heed the message and follow the path. We may be cut off and suffer estrangement from him. Like our salvation itself, this separation may become irreversible and eternal. Nevertheless, the view that we have a friend in charge of the universe is the best news that we could expect to receive, given our impending death and apparent groundlessness. He is the ground of being, and particularly of our being. In him we hope to overcome death.
The trouble is that belief in this narrative may be hard to achieve or to sustain. If it is not simply acquiescence in the conventions of a family and of a culture, it must be the result of undergoing certain experiences. Although these experiences violate our ordinary beliefs about the workings of nature, they may impose themselves on us with compelling if not irresistible force. However, apart from the matter of whether we should allow ourselves to be overwhelmed in this way (in view of our tendency to mistake wishful thinking for insight), we may simply, despite all efforts, not undergo such experiences. Having undergone them, we may fall out of them.
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