Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 5.2

“I will do your pleasure,” she made answer, and thus she began to speak:

“If chance is defined as an outcome of random influence, produced by no sequence of causes, I am sure that there is no such thing as chance, and I consider that it is but an empty word, beyond shewing the meaning of the matter which we have in hand.

“For what place can be left for anything happening at random, so long as God controls everything in order? It is a true saying that nothing can come out of nothing. None of the old philosophers has denied that, though they did not apply it to the effective principle, but to the matter operated upon—that is to say, to nature; and this was the foundation upon which they built all their reasoning.

“If anything arises from no causes, it will appear to have risen out of nothing. But if this is impossible, then chance also cannot be anything of that sort, which is stated in the definition which we mentioned.”

—from Book 5, Prose 1

We live in an age where they say that “Science” is the new “God”, and while many people I know assume that “Science” and “God” are at odds, I can’t help but wonder where that supposed contradiction came from.

Is it because we foolishly think that one is a matter of reason, and the other is just a matter of faith?

Is it because we narrowly believe that understanding the natural world somehow excludes a supernatural cause, one that must of necessity transcend the very motion and change of matter?

Is it because we are limiting ourselves to a nature defined merely by the physical, while neglecting the immediate reality of the spiritual?

I can’t speak for others, and all I know is that I have grown tired of fighting over something that hardly needs to be fought over.

Science is a method, not a body of doctrine. God is a principle of universal being, not a superstition to justify my preferences. The former should, in one way or another, ultimately arrive at the latter, however we may end up understanding it.

Simply put, if science is the search for truth, and God is the fullness of truth, then science is the search for God.

My God or your God? No, just God, the measure of all things, whatever that entails. Think bigger, not smaller.

I have struggled with all sorts of questions about meaning, and I can’t claim to be as deep and profound as all the great philosophers, theologians, or physicists of the ages, but I learned fairly quickly that the use of reason requires a certain sense of consistency and order.

The first principles of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle are non-negotiable, as soon as I try to make sense of anything at all.

It is what it is, not as a platitude at all, but as the self-evident foundation both of all being and of all thinking.

Adding nothing new to that awareness, if it is one thing, it can simply not be its own opposite.

Put another way, it either is or it isn’t, but it can’t be both, at the same time or in the same sense.

I am amazed at how often people fight such rules, probably because they don’t like rules to begin with, without recognizing that they aren’t imposed from the outside. They are the very conditions of existence, and therefore the very conditions of judgment.

“Beyond” them, there is no reality, and there is no awareness, much like there is no such thing as a square circle. There is no sense, only non-sense. There are mindless worlds, without any definition, and so representing nothing at all.

The principle of causality follows clearly from the above, that if something has come into being, it follows from what already has being. Something can never proceed from nothing, or it would remain nothing, and nothing has ever created itself, as it would require it to exist before it existed.

Nevertheless, how much “Science” do I hear about that posits concepts like randomness, or chance, or chaos, as if these were, in themselves, cryptic sources of existence?

Can we rightly use such terms? Of course, but not as explanations for why things operate as they do; we may use them to describe our weak apprehensions of how things operate, but not as replacements for causality.

“I don’t know how it works” does not mean that it doesn’t work. “I can’t tell if the cat is dead or alive” does not mean the cat is both dead and alive.

We will have to read on to see more about what “chance” involves, but it certainly can’t be a cause, in and of itself.

“Well, at one moment everything was really hot and really dense, and then it just sort of blew up into something else.” Now you complain when you hear Sacred Scripture, but you accept that sort of “Science” without causality?

If “chance” means no causes, there can be no such thing; that’s the most unscientific concept you could possibly imagine.

Written in 1/2016