Yet, with all the heart-felt reassurance and moral guidance that comes with a belief in a purposefully created universe, there is a sense of absence. That which has created our universe isn’t easily seen. It is an “other” that is not easy to grasp, nor a source with which one can easily converse (other than through something such as prayer or meditation). Howard (2025, p. 128) puts it this way:
“[If the purposeful and gifted creation of our universe] was given, then the source of that gift cannot be part of the world it gave. It cannot arise from being, or from potential, or from any law it makes possible. It must stand not earlier, not elsewhere–but radically other. Beyond structure, beyond logic, beyond even the possibility of contrast. If intention exists, it must come not from within the system, but from what precedes the very conditions that make a system possible.”
So, we are left, ultimately, with two options. There is the heart-felt option that leaves us with a sense that we have the freedom (and responsibility) to create ourselves because the universe was created for us. Yet this option leaves us with an ultimate creator who necessarily exists beyond us and in a realm that often seems inaccessible. It is also a sacred realm governed by some omniscient and omnipotent entity that is subject to both good intentions and outcomes, as well as intentions and outcomes that at times seem to be ghastly (illness, hatred, violence and ultimately death).
There is instead the head-felt option that leaves us with a sense that everything is ultimately a crap-shot, given that our universe is no more than a glitch in an otherwise perfect state of nothingness. With the randomness and accidentalism inherent in this option, we are left on our own to find purpose and moral guidance. On the one hand, this leaves us with ultimate freedom (as opposed to the freedom that comes with belief in a freely created universe). However, this is freedom without foundation. And as shown to be the case many times in human history, we human beings, without some foundation, often exert our freedom by taking advantage of our people. We readily flip the golden rule (“those with the gold are those who rule”).
Nature of Nothingness (Non-Being)
Given that neither of these options seem to be without major flaws, perhaps it is better to simply move through life without giving much thought to matters of ultimate purpose, carefully crafted Big Bangs, and glitches in the fabric of nothingness. We can also reframe the matter of purposeful being versus purposeless nothingness by giving deeper consideration to the nature of nothingness as I have done in this series of essays. We can also consider the interplay between these two options as residing at the core of our existence, as did Nicholas Berdyaev (1965, p. 27), a major representative of post-World War II existentialism.
This remarkable Russian theologian framed the matter of a created world (being) versus non-created world (non-being) as the in the following manner:
“Everything compels us to admit the existence not only of being, but of non-being, of the dark abyss preceding the very beginning of the knowledge of being and the distinction between good and evil. This non-being is both lower and higher than being. It would be more exact to say that non-being does not exist, but has existential significance. Dualism, polarization, the conflict of opposing elements, is an Existential fact. We should not say that evil is non-being, but rather that the appearance of evil in the world presupposes the existence of non-being, and is inexplicably by a self-contained system of being.”
