How both Theistic and Nontheistic language fails to describe Ultimate Reality
In the constant back and forth between Theists and Nontheists, one of the frequent criticisms hurled from both sides regards the problem of language. Both sides claim that that other side slides into nonsensical or tautological language that fails to say anything about Reality. At some point, each side gets to ideas that are so foundational, so axiological, to their interpretive framework, that all they can say is "it is what it is".
WORDS FAIL TO DESCRIBE ULTIMATE ORIGINS
The first point when words fail is at the very beginning of all things, "before" there was anything. Before time and space. Before actuality or even potentiality. Before cosmic expansion or quantum vacuum. What is the Ground of All Possibilities, which existence and non-existence are simply realizations of? Why is there something instead of nothing, without reverting to an endless regression of "Some Thing(s)" to explain it?
When we talk about ultimate origins, the Theist typically falls back on a series of "proofs of God", although most thoughtful Theists would be quick to point out that these are nothing like the deductive certainties of "proofs" found in math or geometry or logic. They would say that these "proofs" are really more like abductive demonstrations of probability. Probability of what? Probability that there is an Ultimate Reality that is personal and purposive, who is the original and sustaining cause of all existence.
We could detail all of these abductive "proofs"-- cosmological, teleological, ontological, etc.-- but they all take us to a conception of Ultimate Reality which usually is labelled "God". But just as soon as the word "God" flows from the mouth or the keyboard, then we are quick to qualify what KIND of God. We make sure that we qualify that God is not a being, not even the greatest Being, but Being itself, that which grounds all other beings and upholds them in existence.
But then to avoid the Pantheistic implications of God as merely a name for the totality of reality (as the very Being of all beings), we are then quick to point out that God is transcendent as well. God is beyond any categories or limitations, whether that be time and space, or matter and energy, or causality and personality, or knowledge and power. God transcends all of it. God cannot be compared with any other concept or being or thing. God is precisely "No Thing" at all.
And Nontheists are quick to point out that this idea of God as "No Thing" sounds quite a bit like what they say when they say God is nothing. It is self-referential language that says God is so different from any other concept and category we have that we are left saying "It is what It is". But it is not only Nontheists who do this. Apophatic theologians from different traditions-- Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and others-- insist that the only real way to describe God is to describe what God is NOT. And while this approach may be helpful in a great many ways, all Apophatic theologians agree that it leads us precisely to one place linguistically: The place of meditative, reverent Silence.
Yet, this in no way implies that Nontheists have a better or deeper answer. Famed "New Atheist" Richard Dawkins is certainly no one's exemplar of careful philosophical reasoning or expertise in Big Bang Cosmology. But his techniques for providing a Nontheist alternative to Theistic creation is representative of Nontheists in general. And these techniques include either resorting to an infinite regress of causes, or to a slightly-more-than-nothing version of Nothing.
Dawkins often speaks as if quantum physics has solved the Theistic conundrum of Creation "ex nihilo" (out of nothing). This solution is to say that nothing is not nothing, but really a "quantum vacuum", which is a sea of undifferentiated potential states in which virtual particles "pop" into existence at random for infinitesimally short periods of time, before being cancelled out by anti-probabilities, when the wave function collapses. But, randomly and chaotically, the wave function can become imbalanced, leading to an explosion of nearly infinite energy, which is the "big bang" that gives rise to our universe (and probably infinite other universes as well).
This is all well and good, and sounds reasonable given our current level of knowledge in physics. But we must not fail to notice this doesn't actually answer the question of "why is there something rather than nothing". Because a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is something. It presupposes that "Some Thing" was there which gave rise to all other things. The question then, is why is there anything at all? Why not nothing? Sure, physics tells us that this "Some Thing" is an infinite sea of incredibly low-energy chaotic potential which erupts from time to time, creating spacetime. It is an eternal "Singularity" of Infinite Potential, which transcends space and time, and is prior to matter and energy, from which all possible worlds arise. But that, on anyone's read, begins to sound a great deal like God as conceived by Theistic philosophers.
Quick to distance themselves from such a "Spiritual" concept of ultimate origins, Nontheists will then retreat into qualifying what this Singularity is. It is conceptually transcendent to Theistic concepts of God, while also transcending all categories of thought and limitations of spacetime. They may insist on an endless regress of material causes, which has been shown by both Theist and Nontheist philosophers to be nonsense, and no better than the self-referential insistence that "It is what It is". Or they may insist that the Singularity is some kind of uncaused Cause which always has existed, or confess that whatever came "before" the Singularity is simply beyond empirical investigation. In the end, to avoid both a cartoonish image of ultimate origins, as well as the Theistic implications of all things depending on an "Uncaused Cause", the Nontheist is reduced to silence. All they can say is "It is what It is".
And thus, when confronted with the nature and source of existence, both the Theist and the Nontheist are forced to say "It is what it is".
WORDS FAIL TO DESCRIBE ULTIMATE VALUE
The second point when words fail is in the experience of ultimate value. We all experience value in life: The sense that certain actions, activities, and people are inherently worthwhile, meaningful, and good (while others are not). While I do not have time or space to analyze all forms of value-- economic, social, ethical, aesthetic-- I do think they are rooted in a master value or ultimate concern that is broadly shared across history and even across human evolution. This Ultimate Value is that life ought to be pursued, that potential should be actualized.
Yet, since "ought" is neither a fact in existence, nor even a possibility, but rather a preference for how possibility should be actualized in concrete existence, we come to a conundrum. Is this ultimate value of life a universal projection of sentient minds upon the reality we inhabit (and if so, why should we obey it)? Or is the Ultimate Value a feature of Reality itself, and by obeying it we somehow go "with the grain" of the Universe?
The surface answer to this from the Theistic standpoint is to simply rely on Divine Command: God made life, God values life, and God said life is "good". Thus God said it, and that settles it. But then we are open to Euthyphro's dilemma. The first horn of the dilemma is this: Is an act "good" because God commanded it? In which case God could change God's mind about goodness, and "good" becomes meaningless. God could command to destroy life, rather than uphold it. And that would be "good" because "good" is "whatever God commands".
And we see the fruition of this "Divine Command" concept of ethics in the violence done by religious extremists. Religion has been used to justify killing countless others in wars and crusades and jihads, as well as the oppression and elimination minority groups across the centuries. Furthermore, "Deus Vult" (or "God wills it") has been the rallying cry for justifying slavery, oppression of women, repressive governments, and unjust economic systems. It is precisely the case, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues, that "if God exists, anything is permissible". God can be, and has been, invoked to justify any violence, any abuse, any carnage, on the basis of Divine Command ethics. Good and evil are meaningless concepts if God can be appealed to support genocide as well as oppose it, condone slavery as well as condemn it.
Yet, the vast majority of Theists would vomit out this moral inversion as antithetical to genuine goodness. They would say that a God who orders genocide or murder or slavery or oppression is no God at all, but a counterfeit. They might say that the Scriptures used to justify such a view of God are from an earlier time in human development, when they did not see the goodness of God as clearly as we can now. Or they might say that the message got jumbled and confused, hopelessly intertwined with the perspective of societies steeped in tribalism and violence. Thus, God remains the Source and Standard of goodness, and such barbaric acts represent a betrayal of that goodness.
But this leads directly to the second horn of Euthyphro's dilemma: Does God then command an act because it is "good"? This would mean that God has to resort to an "outside standard" of goodness to name an act as "good" or "evil". In this case there is a Reality higher than God, which even God must obey. That would make God less than the "Ultimate Reality", and thus God would cease to be God. At this point, we could go with Thomas Aquinas' solution that God commands what God is. And since God is Love, thus God commands Love as good, and therefore hate and selfishness are evil. This is a fulfilling solution for those-- like myself-- already convinced of the Reality and Goodness of God. But, let's face it, this is not a particularly good solution for those who are not already convinced.
The Theist, at the end of the day, is reduced to silence before the ultimate value of life. Why is life good? Why does God command it? Why is God on the side of life, and against those things which diminish or despise or destroy life? We may say "Because this is God's nature". But this seems to be only another version of saying "It is what It is".
Likewise, the surface answer from the Nontheistic standpoint is equally fraught. At first glance we may say "The value of life and actualization of potential is an inbred evolutionary strategy to propagate our genes". All well and good, and probably even true. But it begs the question: Why life? Life, especially sentient life, is full of suffering, dread, and eventually death. In even the happiest life, if one totaled up the amount of joy and happiness they encounter, compared with the amount of suffering and dread they encounter, we would find that pain far out-scales pleasure. And this is made even worse the more sentient and conscious you are of your own suffering, and the suffering of others. So, in a very important sense, human life is precisely the worst thing that can be imagined, because humans of all creatures seem most acutely aware of suffering.
Thus, it could be rightfully argued that the evolutionary value of life should ultimately lead to its inversion and termination: That we have evolved to the point that we realize we should end as much life as possible, with as little suffering as possible. Preferably by not being born at all. Better to not be born than to experience the veil of sorrows that is life. And lest you think this absurd, this solution of painlessly terminating human existence has been put forward by philosophers as recent as the anti-natalist David Benatar, in his 2006 book "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence".
However, this need not be the only Nontheistic way to subvert or deny the supreme value of life. There is also the more narcissistic and individualistic version of the same solution put forward by people such as Ayn Rand (and other egoists) who argue that in light of the ultimate futility of everything, our moral duty is to seek whatever makes us happy, the rest of the world be damned. Since "species survival" is a fate that does not concern me (as I will not be here to know if the species has survived or not), and since the highest value to myself is whatever makes me happy, then I should simply do whatever I can get away, with which maximizes my pleasure, regardless of what it does to other people who get in my way. The life of "my" species then becomes secondary to "my" pleasure.
And I would be remiss if I did not mention that Nontheistic ideologies, like Theistic ideologies, have been used to justify the mass murder of countless millions in the name of ideology. From Stalin's USSR, to Mao's Cultural Revolution, to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge tens of millions have been sacrificed for the Party or the State or the Revolution. Thus, whether Nontheism leads to violent genocide, or we slowly and peacefully put everyone to death (as in Benatar's solution), or pursue our temporary pleasures at the cost of others (as in Rand's solution), the Nontheistic denial of the ultimate value of life seems to validate Dostoyevski's claim that "without God, anything is permissible".
But the vast majority of Nontheists would vomit out this moral inversion as antithetical to genuine ethical value. They would insist that there is some real value to life, and to actualizing potential into ever new forms of being. They would insist that this life is somehow worth the suffering implicit in sentient beings pursuing life. And they would further insist that it is our human responsibility to each other to help mitigate this suffering, and provide the social basis for the full human flourishing of as many people as possible.
And yet, in all of this insistence of moral value, the evolutionary striving toward life still presupposes the ethical value of life, it does not explain it. It observes "we naturally pursue THIS", but it does not explain why THIS is important to be pursued. It just states the tautology that life is important because we pursue it, and we pursue life because it is important. Thus, the Nontheist is ultimately left silent in trying to explain the ultimate value that animates their ethical choices. Why choose life? It is just the way it is.
And thus, both Theism and Nontheism can lead to truly evil inversions of the ultimate value of life, in which "anything is permissible". And likewise, when confronted with the ultimate nature and justification of ethical value, both the Theist and the Nontheist are forced to say "It is what it is".
WORDS FAIL TO DESCRIBE ULTIMATE DESTINY
The third point at which words fail is at the point of our Ultimate Destiny at the end of all things. What happens when we die as individuals? What happens at the end of the entire universe? An investigation of our knee-jerk answers to these questions will reveal that our certainties are not as certain as we might think, and our words don't cover as much ground as we think they do.
At first glance, Nontheism seems surprisingly clear, simple, and unequivocal about our ultimate destiny. At the end of our lives, we cease to exist. And at the end of the universe, it ceases to exist. Plain, straightforward, uncomplicated. Right?
But not so fast. What does it mean to cease to exist? What does it mean to become nothing? At a conceptual level, we really cannot put it into words. Like God, nothing is completely transcendent to any created reality, and cannot be likened to anything at all. For instance, when you ask most people to think of nothing, they often think of black space. But black is something. And space is also something. Whatever "nothing" is, it is the absence or the transcendence of both color and space.
In fact we really cannot imagine not imagining, because to imagine it we have to use imagination. In fact, even "non-being" is a problematic concept, because it implies some kind of negation of potentiality and actuality. But nothing-- the cessation of existence-- is the lack of even potentiality and actuality. And this weirdly carries us into Buddhist territory that is usually reserved for the completely transcendent realm called Nirvana: That reality that is beyond being and non-being, beyond life and death, beyond personal and impersonal, beyond time and eternity.
But that is just an analysis of our experience (or non-experience) of nothing. There is also the question of whether the phenomenon that is "personhood" can ever attain a state of zero energy and cease to exist. What I mean is this: Empirically speaking, the human "self" is a self-aware pattern of information processing. We might be more than this and have a "spiritual" aspect if Theists are right. But at an empirical level, even without positing a "spiritual" aspect of Reality, the human "self" or "soul" is a very complex algorithm which processes and interprets patterns of information, and generates responses based on the pattern of identity we experience as "myself".
Furthermore, these "patterns of self" are not confined to the brain. They radiate outward and affect reality external to the brain. This is obviously true when we speak of the nervous system: The patterns from our brain move our limbs and cause us to speak. It is also obviously true when we speak of technological extensions of our nervous system: The patterns from our brains cause planes and cars to steer, and program and control computers. But, even given the rudimentary nature of our current science, using technology such as MRI machines, we are beginning to remotely "read people's minds" by interpreting the electromagnetic patterns generated in their brains. It is conceivable that in the near future, we will have technology which can read the patterns generated by people's brains from much further away. This is because the electromagnetic patterns of our selves ripple outward, with very low energy, from every brain (and every computer) which produces a pattern.
All of this raises the question of what happens to all of that information, all of those patterns, after the "self" ceases to produce them. They become like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, expanding outward into the cosmos forever, slightly altering the fabric of reality with every ripple. And we know from the Newtonian law of conservation of mass/energy, and the Quantum law of the conservation of information, that neither mass/energy nor patterns of information just "go away" or "cease to exist". They are carried on throughout the entire system of the universe, conserved by transforming into various kinds of energy. To go back to the pond analogy: If we possessed sufficient computing power and sufficiently sensitive observational equipment, it is possible in theory to observe the state of the pond now, and be able to extrapolate back to know the time, location, velocity, and size of every object that has ever been thrown into it. Because all of this information is carried, at extremely low energy levels, in the patterns of the ripples in the pond which act as carrier waves.
Now to expand the example exponentially: On just this planet alone we have billions of lifetimes of selves, with all of their patterns of information processing, broadcasting these patterns into the universe. What happens to all of these patterns? They do not cease to exist. Even if information goes into a Black Hole, the "information paradox" seems to indicate that the information is not destroyed, but somehow transformed and translated into another form. Do these patterns of information just bounce around the Universe forever? Perhaps. But given how evolution seems to work, it would seem that information gets somehow recombined into something else, something greater than the sum of its parts. So then do these patterns become part of some Grand Pattern that is the Pattern of all patterns? Do the patterns that make up personhood get "re-membered" into something greater than the self? And if so, what could this possibly look like. Because, as we have shown above, it seems incoherent to simply call this "nothing" or "ceasing to exist".
And the limitations we come to in speaking of the ultimate destiny of the individual "self" also apply to the Universe as a whole. Perhaps the "big bang" ends in a "big crunch" when everything recedes back into the Singularity from which it erupted. But if information is not destroyed even in black holes, then neither would information which collapses back into the Singularity. Perhaps we live in an Oscillating Universe, in which the "Big Crunch" results in yet another "Big Bang", on and on, into forever. Or perhaps the Universe expands into "Heat Death" in which everything eventually becomes an undifferentiated quantum vacuum, where by the quantum ripples of the patterns of the last universe trigger the "Big Bang" for the next universe. And thus we quickly approach the limit of what we can observe and know. In terms of language, we get thrown back on saying that whatever Reality is, it goes on forever in some sense. And beyond that "It is what It is".
And thus, when pushed to the fullest extent of the implications of what we know about the Universe so far, the Nontheist is driven to silence. Because whatever is the ultimate end of the "self" and the universe, it isn't non-existence, but it also isn't existence in any form we can comprehend either.
And it is at this point that various Theisms offer a cacophony of descriptions of what happens after we have shuffled off this mortal coil. The Indian traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, speak of time as an endless loop, which results in an eternal wheel of reincarnation for both the self and the universe. And this cycle of reincarnation ends only when we attain liberation by stepping out of the wheel and becoming united with the Infinite Source of our Being.
The Mediterranean traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, speak of time as an arrow going from beginning to end, with a definite beginning and a final end, when evil will finally be vanquished, all life will be resurrected, people will be re-embodied, and the creation will be renewed and eternal.
Other religious traditions from all over the world speak of the dead going to a shadowy and disembodied afterlife, which may include reward or punishment in heavens or hells, where they are in some sense still in relation to the living, but have also transcended the world of the living. Ultimately, we become ancestors inhabiting the realm of the gods or divine beings, until we fade away into a transcendent realm beyond the highest heavens.
And not only do Theistic traditions seem to wildly diverge at this point, but even within traditions what seems clear is not so clear on deeper inspection. For instance, in Indian traditions the "self" is said to be reincarnated in life after life, until it finally attains liberation and union with the Source. But no sooner is this said than Hinduism and Buddhism begin to qualify the "self". In Hinduism, it is not the surface self, the easily experienced self, that is reincarnated. No, that self is illusory and dissolved. Rather it is the deepest self, the self that is one with the Infinite Source, that is reincarnated and which can eventually attain liberation. What happens at liberation? Complete union with the Source, like a raindrop returning to the sea. Do we then cease to exist as a separate self and merge with the Divine? No, we transcend the illusory self in the Divine Self. So what is this self? It is Divine. What is Divine? It is the Self. In other words: "It is what It is".
Buddhism goes a step further than this and says that ultimately there is no self at all. What we experience as the self is not only illusory, but is the result of five causal factors that temporarily create a sense of self, and then unravel at death, only to be recombined in different ways in other lives. For Buddhists, the Ultimate Reality that grounds our experience of self completely transcends any categories we can use to describe it.
In Buddhism this utterly transcendent realm is called Nirvana, beyond being and nonbeing, beyond life and death. Buddhist art often symbolizes it as the moon: That realm far beyond Earth that we seek escape to. And the Buddha tells a parable about the moon. He says that when we point to the moon, we must be sure not to confuse our fingers with the moon we are pointing at. By this he means that we should not confuse our limited words with the Reality of Nirvana which cannot be contained by words, but can only be pointed at. In other words, all we can say of the self and its ultimate destiny is: "It is what It is".
And so we turn to Mediterranean monotheisms such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the conceptual difficulties continue. We could pick many different issues to look at here. We could talk about the various conceptions of what happens immediately after death: Whether we go to heavens or hells or purgatory or hades or sleep until our final destiny. No Scriptures are unanimous on what happens in the "intermediary state" between death and the end of history.
Or we could focus on hell, and whether the idea of unending torment is even coherent with a God who is Love. We could speculate on how hell is probably a metaphor for a redemptive experience designed to turn us from evil and toward God, rather than a final destination where God delights in torturing sinners forever. But as soon as we open any of these cans of worms, we would have to note that there are Scriptures which can be interpreted all of these ways and more. Their words fail to give a precise description of what happens after death.
So, let's confine ourselves to describing the one singular final event said to happen at the end of history in all the Mediterranean monotheisms: The resurrection of the body and life of the world to come. All three traditions generally insist that at the end of all things, we will not merge with the Divine like a drop returning to the sea. Rather, we will be re-embodied in a perfected world where we can dwell with God forever. This, at last, sounds very concrete. Very tangible. Very precise.
Except of course for the fact that as soon as we talk about being re-embodied the sources say that this is not a body in our ordinary understanding. No, it is a transformed, glorified, spiritual body, which is somehow continuous with our body, but also like Jesus' resurrected body which was able to walk through walls and appear and disappear at will. It is an undying immortal body, which also bears the scars and marks of Earthly life. And most importantly, it may even be a collective body, in which we are members like our cells are parts of our Earthly bodies. In fact, the whole conundrum of how to describe the Resurrection body was so problematic that Saint Paul spends the better part of the 15th chapter to the Corinthians trying to describe it, only to become tongue tied in the end and declare it a mystery that we will experience when the last Trumpet of History sounds (cf. 1Corinthians 15.51-52).
And so the hope of Mediterranean monotheism is that after History and time and space have come to an end, we will be resurrected to be united forever with God, in a body which is both individual and collective, material and spiritual, transcendent and immanent, beyond all experience and yet like our experience of embodiment. And once again, words fail. Whatever happens at the end: "It is what It is". And thus we see that both Nontheists and Theists of all stripes fail to have words to adequately express what the ultimate destiny of humanity is. We are reduced to silence before the immense mystery of an experience that transcends any experiences we might use to describe it.
WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WORDS FAIL?
So then, at the beginning, the middle, and the end of Reality, we come to the place that our words fail. We lose sight of the fingers we can use to point to the moon.
At this point we might despair of being able to say anything meaningful about human existence at all. Both the Theist and the Nontheist have come to the point where we embrace Ludwig Wittgenstein's admonition that "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." And yet, "what we cannot speak about" is precisely what is ultimate or most important in our lives. We must talk about our origins, and what makes our lives meaningful. We must talk about our values, and what actions are good and evil. We must talk about our ultimate destiny, and give ourselves hope that there is a reason to keep striving for a better tomorrow. We simply can't not speak of these things.
And we should not be amazed at the limitations of language. This is all really just a function of how language describes any kind of reality, much less the ultimate realities that shape out lives. For instance, let's take an everyday certainty that we talk about every day: Matter. What is matter? Well, our knee jerk reaction is that it is solid stuff. It's a noun. A thing. Anything we can feel and touch that has "thingness" to it. But the moment we ask if water or air are matter, we immediately expand our concept. We have come to call these things matter, even though they bear little resemblance to the things we normally think of as matter: Rocks and tables and metal and flesh. Water and air flow, they are supple, and you can see through them. And yet they are matter.
So, then by centuries of observation we expand our definition of matter. We begin to talk about matter as more or less dense collections of indivisible building blocks-- a-toms, atoms-- which are grouped together to create different kinds of matter. Where are these atoms? Well, they are too small to be sensed. But we know they are there from observing the behavior of different kinds of matter. But, then we realize that different kinds of matter must be made of different kinds of atoms, se we develop ideas of different "elements" of atoms: First four or five elements, then dozens of elements, until finally we arrive at a periodic table. And furthermore, we come to realize that different kinds of elements can combine atoms to form molecules of every-increasing complexity, to make up all kinds of material substances.
And then we ask why different atoms combine in different ways, and we come to realize that atoms are not actually a-toms: They are not indivisible. They are actually made up of smaller particles such as neutrons, protons, and electrons. But then it gets even weirder, because we come to find out that these particles are made up of even smaller particles such as quarks and gluons and bosons (oh my!). And then we dig even deeper to describe what these particles are and we find that the only language we can really use to describe them is math. They are best likened to waves of probability, which function are "strings" or "membranes" across at least 11 dimensions.
And suddenly, like a probability wave observed in a double slit experiment, we notice that the language we use to describe matter totally collapses. What seemed so solid is now something completely disembodied, totally ethereal, best described by abstract and complicated mathematical patterns. But it does not, for that reason, mean we should stop using nouns, and stop referring to things, and become agnostic about the physical reality we live in every day. It just means that we use language in a way that is humble, aware of limitations, open to corrections, and based in probability rather than in certainty.
In reality, using our language humbly and probabilistically has actually worked fairly well for humans. Despite all of the flaws and limitations of human language, we still know enough about the world we live in to make incredibly exact predictions about how it functions, and then create incredibly effective technologies which make use of these predictions. In other words: We know that science and technology are effective despite the limitations of language to fully describe reality. And if language can still help us progress in science and technology, then language can also help us develop spiritually and ethically. Just as our scientific language and technical skill evolves and develops in response to the objective nature of physical reality, so also our spiritual language and ethical skill evolves and develops in response to the objective nature of metaphysical reality. We grasp more and more of the transcendent realm of possibility and value as we develop personally and socially.
We may return to the thorny problem of Ultimate Origins that we started with: Regardless of which theory of what came "before" the Big Bang, they all point to "something" which caused our Universe. A Singularity is not a "nothing". It is something. Quantum vacuum is not "nothing". It is something. Which again pushes us to another question: What was the something, that caused the something, that caused the Big Bang? Which would lead to the next level: What is the something, that caused the something, that caused the something, that caused the Big Bang? And so the questions would go on forever. In a way, this is very similar to the question of the curious child who asks her parent "Mommy, who made God?"
This leads to the problem called "Infinite Regress". If causes regress infinitely, we would never get to where we are right now. In order for causality and explanation to work, the causes must stop somewhere. There must be an uncaused Cause which exists in itself and of itself, which gives rise to everything else. Or, to put it another way: When we ask the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", every worldview resorts to a "Fundamental Fact of Being", which is unconditional, independent, and self-caused, which is the origin condition for every other thing in the universe. Every person, whether religious or secular, has an explanation for the Being that causes all other beings to be.
The spiritual question is: What is the nature of this Being? When confronted with the fundamental fact of Being, we all have a choice about whether we view this Being as impersonal or personal. Some of a Secular or Buddhist persuasion may speak of this Being as "it is what it is". It is the indescribable fact of being, which is impersonal and unable to be defined in terms of any other kind of being or concept.
Other people, such as Jews and Muslims and Christians and Hindus, will prefer to speak of this Being as a personal Ultimate Reality. This Ultimate Reality reveals itself to us, and says to us: "I AM what I AM! I am utterly unique and singular, unable to be defined in terms of anything else!" This is precisely what the Hindu Upanishads tell us about Brahman. It is also what God says God's Name is, when God speaks to the prophet Moses in a burning bush. The Hebrew personal Name of God is spelled by four Hebrew consonants YHWH, which stand for "I AM what I AM".
Whether we call the fundamental fact of Being by the impersonal "It is what It is", or by the personal "I AM what I AM", will depend greatly on how we view the evidence we have. Some will look at the evidence from their experience, their lives, and the world, and think that the most probable explanation is an impersonal origin to all things. They may think the world seems too cold and impersonal, and too filled with suffering and death, to point to a personal God. They may see the spiritual traditions of the world as a jumble of contradictions that point to nothing and no one beyond our world.
Others will look at the same evidence and come to the opposite conclusion. They may see events align in their lives in a way which indicates a purpose or plan. They may look at the rationality and order of physical laws, and the way the universe seems fine-tuned to allow life to evolve, and think there probably is a Creator of some sort. They may view the spiritual journey of the human race as the history of an Ultimate Reality of Love, who is trying to progressively reveal Itself to humanity, working through the limitations of human language and culture.
But regardless of whether we view Ultimate Reality as personal or impersonal, most humans would agree that we do not have complete certainty about it. In fact, we do not have complete certainty about almost anything we claim to know. Here are just a few things we don't know for sure: Whether our friends are trustworthy; Whether our car will safely transport us to our destination; Whether the outside world actually exists or we are imagining it; Whether we are "sane" or "crazy".
Almost everything in life is questionable and doubtable. The reality is that we cannot be certain about most things, and we usually choose what to believe based on probability: We begin with a question. We look at the evidence. We examine all the possible explanations. And we put our trust in the explanation that seems most probable. All of our knowledge and choices depend on our faith in what we think best fits the evidence we have.
To give another example: Every time we fly on a plane, we are making a judgment based on probability. We know the airline. We know their safety record. We know the weather. And we know that there is some chance we will crash. So, we weigh the probable risks of flying versus the probable rewards of travel. And then based on that probability we either choose to fly on that plane or not. This same kind of analysis of probable risks and rewards is how we live in every other aspect of life too. Based on probability, we choose to trust people or reject them. Based on probability we choose to trust (or not trust) news reporters and teachers and politicians and scientists. Based on probability we choose to trust our view of Ultimate Reality, whether it is personal or impersonal. It all comes down to how we weigh the evidence and evaluate the explanations we are offered. This is why the Anglican bishop Joseph Butler said "probability is the very guide of life".
And this leaves us with the question of our own spiritual knowledge: How do we weigh the evidence and choose what is the most probable explanation of our own spiritual experience? What language can we use which are both concise enough, yet comprehensive enough, to point to the Ultimate Reality which lies beyond words? This may not lead us to a definite answer which is acceptable to everyone, but it will lead us to humility as we stand before the Grand Mystery, and empathy for those who may use words that fail to capture its Infinite Richness.
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