[MD] Dawkins quotes RMP on religion.

[Ron Kulp]

Craig asks:

> Which is a better explanation of why there is
> something rather than nothing:
> a) something appears out of nowhere/nothing
> or
> b) something always existed?


Ham:
Craig, I have been working on this dilemma for half a century and
consider 
it the fundamental issue in philosophy.  Heidegger began his
'Introduction 
to Philosophy' with the question, "Why is there something rather than 
nothing?"  We can't escape the paradox because we are part of it, and we

can't push it aside with intellectual integrity.

Even if "something always existed" it has a primary source.  It's not 
sufficient to say that energy or matter always existed.  We must ask:
where 
does it come from?   Things do not create themselves.
By the laws of mechanics, objects are changed by the energy or force
imposed 
on them, and there is no energy lost in the system.  In nature,
organisms 
develop and grow according to the DNA code implanted within them.  But
you 
have to start somewhere, and my considered opinion is that existence
begins 
as a negation of the source and is actualized as differentiated
experience 
in space/time.

When I say "primary" I don't mean first in a series of events that can
be 
infinitely regressed.  I mean the basic or fundamental source which
imparts 
the "necessity to be".  Thus, we exist not by virtue of our will or
choice 
but by the power that makes our existence necessary.  I call this power
the 
potentiality of Essence.  All sensibility, value, cognizance, being, and

dynamic potential is derived from this uncreated source.

So my qualified answer to your question, as well as to Krimel's 'Mu', is

(b).  But one must understand that "always" is meaningless outside the
realm 
of finite experience.  There is something because there is a source of 
something.  We don't experience the source because it is not us.  What
we 
experience is the value which is our connection to the source, and
because 
the mode of experience is reductive (finite and incremental), we
objectify 
value into things and events arranged in time and space.

Thanks for your thought-provoking question, Craig.

Ron:
All that being said, you simply confirm craigs b) something always
existed.
Since source is absolute, it always is, correct?.

You hold source as an explanation, Pirsig holds Quality, only you hold
that
Value awareness manifests as subject/object thus source is separated
from sense. 
Pirsig posits we are one with source, what we experience is patterned
 Source, from mind to matter. This concept fosters oneness and spiritual
Unity.
Essentialism fosters the concept of separateness and the inability of
reconciling this in our experience. Talk about nihilism, it's a nihilist
tease! Life has meaning! Sorry But you'll never experience it. Talk
about depressing. 

By choosing the logic of cause and effect, what's to settle at the term
"source" as "absolute"? in effect you are also casting a "mu" answer
By this explanation. The eternal cause. What caused the eternal cause?
The negation of nothing and otherness?  What caused that?

You address existence as dependant on value sensibility, how does
Essentialism account for inorganic matter, evolution, and the 
Existence of reality and time independent of living organisms?

thanks