Michael Mitchell: Archive

There's a proper and simple response to wildly imaginative cosmic questions like "How do you know the universe wasn't created ten seconds ago?" that's easily missed, forgotten or ignored in these millennia-long debates between the advocates and representatives of religion and philosophy and science: it's values, to remember or, if necessary, assert them.

It can be fun to reason all the what-if's and shit, but seriously, any attempt to definitively answer a question that can't be answered, one you can't possibly have any perceptual evidence by which to guide you, will only lead to other invalid questions. For instance, in order to answer this question -- in this context -- you'd have to exist outside of the universe, i.e., beyond existence, i.e., you'd have to not exist, and after you've imagined and accepted that state of being in your mind, there are no limits to where logic will lead you.

It's important to understand, fully consciously, that before you can answer a question, before you can decide to even consider it at all, you must approve of it, you must determine it's worthy of answering. I think the answer to this question isn't consequential in the least to anyone. It's merely a challenging response in a polemical argument, intended to cause doubt (in the Bible, God, religion, mystics), not to find the truth.

The standard response, from rational individuals committed to reason and reality, to creationism's answers to the "problem" of the universe's creation, is it's impossible to prove a negative, that the burden of proof is on whomever suggests such an answer, but that's a response to "How do you know?" not to "Why do you want to know?", whether the question can or should be answered. The majority of people throughout history have accepted the answer, not necessarily in this form, that God created the universe, but even those who reject the answer, in my experience, still accept the question, still determine the answer to be important. Is it?