Comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s last show (Seinfeld) summed up the show’s previous nine years; It was much ado about nothing. It was a great nine-years of shows, and they are the only things on TV that I enjoy replaying over and over again.
Like Seinfeld, I would like to talk about nothing. Or more properly, nothingness. I’m currently reading the book “God’s Not Dead” and the whole idea of the book is to make a clear argument for the existence of God. One chapter refers to nothingness, but it does not do justice to it as a reason for the existence of a Creator.
I have to take you back to when I was four or five years old, starting a great childhood run in the southwestern part of New York State. For some reason I used to have out-of-body experiences (I did not know this is what was happening to me and that is what it was called until many years later), during which the universe would expand in my mind and I would find myself floating through space.
They were not scary. Maybe it was because I was so young and had no experience to tell me I should be scared. But what these experiences did was leave me laying in bed (and they always occurred at night) wondering if I could experience nothingness.
And I couldn’t.
Try it. Bet you can’t either.
I realize this is abstract and philosophical thinking. But I would lie in my bed and try to imagine a world, a universe, in which there was nothing. Just nothing. I always came back to the conclusion there had to be something. Just had to be.
For example, I could not be alone in a vast emptiness, a void, or a vacuum. There has to be something. I tried and tried, believe me, to experience nothing, especially on the nights I was floating through space, or at least thought I was floating through space (I can’t say for sure I was, but I sure experienced it).
The further I pushed my mind into the black void that was space the more I realized there was something to the nothingness. I have joked in previous writings that at the end of infinity billions of light years away there is a stop sign and across from that a huge mansion where God exists; of course, since I use the word infinity that means there can be no end and no stop sign, although I can’t discount that maybe God is out there.
Referencing infinity fits right in with my philosophical thinking. There has to be an ending, doesn’t there? How can space go on into infinity? There has to be an ending to nothingness, right? I mean, if you can visualize nothingness then there has to be an end to it.
Just because I could not visualize nothingness, that doesn’t mean to me there isn’t an end to it – somewhere. Maybe there is not a stop sign out there somewhere, but it has to end. It just can’t go on an on. It has to run up against something.
So I’m willing to say nothingness does not exist. Which means to me that there is a God since there is always something that makes the nothingness be something. And if there is something, it makes sense to me that God created that something.
And besides the fact nothingness may not be experienced and may not even exist, is the fact that all of us have the ability without direction or man-made laws to know when we have done something that is morally wrong. Because we all have that ability, it must come from a Creator. It certainly didn’t come because we ate an ice cream cone when we were two.
C.S. Lewis, to settle a dispute went on a crusade to debunk the existence of God. He was an atheist who would prove, by God, that God was fiction. After a long while, he came to the opposite conclusion – God did exist.
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed to be cruel and unjust,” Lewis wrote. “But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
“If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I , who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?
Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too, for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.
“Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense.
“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never had found out that it has no meaning: just as if where was no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
You got all of that?
I don’t know why I am talking about this. Maybe it’s my over reaction to guys like Bill Maher, who makes fun of religion and is an atheist and has a prime-time show to make his case there is no God. We are all here on our own private spiritual journey and because we have free will we are free to be an atheist, to take steps away from God and to do things that are morally wrong, Maher has his right to express himself this way.
But I would say this is not what God wants you to do. He has given you the freedom to do so – at your own final judgment risk, of course ‑ but He would prefer you did not Maher His being.
Now go out there and see if you can experience nothingness. Or at the very least, watch a rerun of Seinfeld.
Be well pal
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.