As Don Howard (2025, p. 129) concludes, “[This] leaves the question not only unanswered, but entrusted to us.” Furthermore, Howard (2025, pp. 128) notes that:
” . . nearly all of [the explanations] reduce, in the end, to some version of the same two paths: either being emerged on its own, or it was given. Either it arose from nothing without cause, or it was willed by something not subject to the conditions it created. All other answers tend to defer the question, redefine it, or dissolve it into formalisms. But the question remains. And when pressed to its foundation, it seems to leave us with just these two possibilities: that we are here because nothing could not hold. Or that we are here because something wanted us to be.”
If, as Howard concludes, there are ultimately only two options, then I would suggest that the real option is between our head and our heart. Our head tells us that the only “real” answer involves some astrophysical assumption of randomness (“nothing not holding”). This option leaves us with a wounded heart.
We are left as orphans, without some devoted parent that has created the universe for our benefit. The heart-felt story of a creator leaves us with a head that is filled with doubt. As knowledgeable and thoughtful creature of the 21st Century, we are inclined to toss in the creator-story with the faulty assumption that the world was created in seven days and that human frailties are somehow assigned to the eating of a forbidden apple.
Head vs. Heart
Howard (2025, p. 128) reenters the conversation at this point, considering the implications inherent in a heart-chosen explanation for the existence of something:
“Of the two possibilities . . . , one may begin to feel more coherent with the shape of the world we inhabit. Not by proof, but by resonance. A universe in which freedom exists, in which meaning must be chosen, in which love is possible but never guaranteed–such a world feels less like an accident and more like a gift. If being was given, then silence itself may be a form of trust. And the absence of command may be what allows the presence of compassion, belief, and responsibility to emerge.”
It is almost as if the matter of heart producing an explanation is reversed. It is when we embrace a creator-made reality that our heart comes alive. It is when we believe that the universe Is created for a purpose that our individual heart itself finds a purpose. Freedom, love, compassion, belief and responsibility would seem to be the product of our belief in a purposeful creation.
Without this belief, we are truly in a state of existential despair. Much as the existential perspective of meaningless existence emerged following World War II, with survivors of this war wondering what the purpose of life really is and if human beings are really anything other than vicious thugs, an existential perspective regarding the absence of any reason for the existence of our universe.
Howard (2025, p. 128) does make the case for non-purposeful creation as a viable explanation that need not leave us in a state of despair. However, it still leaves us without a clear sense of moral standards:
“The first possibility—emergence without intention—can account for complexity, consciousness, even ethical behavior. But it cannot explain why good and evil should matter beyond function or feeling. It leaves moral experience untethered: real to us, but contingent, evolving, ungrounded. In contrast, if the world was willed into being–not by force, but by a source that gives without commanding–then goodness is not a convention, and evil is not a failure of empathy. They become features of the structure itself. Not imposed, but made possible. In such a world, freedom is not an accident of evolution. It is a condition of the gift.”
