Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Or . . .

The Nothingness of Everything

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, G. K. Chesterton wrote the following perspicacious paragraph:

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, or even that it is a reasonable one.  The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.  Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.  It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. [G. K. Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 285.] 

The wildness of the world lies in wait.  Pagan Deism flowered in a world which told itself that everything operated with mechanical precision.  An impersonal deity had wound up the clock and walked away, leaving the clock to tick along with exact mathematical precision.  Of course there are aspects of the universe that are remarkably precise and regular--atomic clocks, for example.   And then quantum mechanics "came along".  Suddenly the inexactitude of the material world at its most basic (i.e. smallest components) became startlingly apparent.  This led Einstein, who disliked quantum mechanics and its negative implications for Deism, to grumble that he did not believe god played dice with the universe.


For the Christian, however, the complexity of the world is expected.  There will always be aspects that are surprising, and to the materialist, confounding.

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything.  It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe.  An apple or orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet it is not round after all. . . . Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and the incalculable.  It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment.  [Ibid.]

The quest for the rationalist's Theory of Everything ends up with the Theory of Nothing.  The paradox of the world--that it is so irregular yet also precise--has sucked the materialist into an inescapable black hole.  The regular-irregular nature of matter is so complex, we are told, that it necessitates the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes just to justify its existence--by chance.  Rationalism can proceed only upon the :bedrock" of irrationalism.