Alternative Theology, Lesson One

Diptherian Ontology: The Orthodoxymoronic Position

First Assumption: nothing comes from nothing.

This is a denial of the concept of creation ex nihlo. The natural extension of this concept is that anything currently existing has necessarily existed in a previous time period. Things change form, change state, rearrange themselves in multiple ways, but in some sense the same “things” exist now as existed at the beginning of the universe. Anything that exists or comes into existence has necessarily been created from some thing or things that already exist, and so even the Big Bang, the supposed beginning of our universe, must have originated in some thing which had existence prior to it. That infinitesimal point-particle that exploded into what we now know as our universe did not come from nothing; it was not created ex nihlo. Nothing comes from nothing*.

Physicists cannot look back further in time than the Big Bang, they cannot see what may have come before it, since the very fabric of time itself is wrapped up in that tiny particle. But just because the mathematics that physicists use to look back in time breaks down at the moment of explosion, it does not follow that there is nothing beyond that moment to see, nor that other methods of looking might not yield more satisfying results.

First Conclusion: we have always existed and will always exist.

Nothing comes from nothing, and we did not come from nothing either.

It happens every so often that water falls, of its own accord, from the sky. Of course, the water doesn't just come from nowhere, it comes from clouds which are composed of water vapor. And that water vapor just didn't happen either, it came from evaporation off of lakes and oceans. And those lakes and oceans didn't come from nothing, they are created and maintained by rivers and streams which, of course, get their water from the rain, which every so often falls from the sky.

In all of this, the water molecules themselves remain ever the same and always exactly what they are. In certain states they are perceptible to our senses and useful for our purposes, while in other states they are imperceptible and therefore useless to us. Nonetheless, they remain forever themselves, unchanging.

In the same way we ourselves change state and move from imperceptibility to perceptibility and back again, perhaps more than once, but we ourselves never change. Being and non-being are themselves two different states through which we, and everything else, moves. Any thing, any entity, may exist in the state of potential (non-being) or the state of actuality (being). The entity itself remains unchanged regardless of it present state. The unenlightened on these matters view birth as a beginning and death as an end, but this view, as we have seen, violates the First Assumption. Nothing comes from nothing.

*It may be objected that the discovery of “quantum foam,” i.e. of particles popping into and out of existence on the quantum level, proves the reality of creation ex nihlo. The Orthodoxymoronic view, however, holds that these particles are, in fact, not popping into and out of existence but rather moving back and forth between our dimension and one abutting or overlapping it. Regardless, even if the particles are popping into and out of existence, existence itself is merely one form of being, as is explained below.