JA quotes:
“The question ‘Why existence?’ will forever be senseless and therefore unanswerable. ‘The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.’”
With all due respect, you are only resetting the problem I called attention to, albeit in philosophical terms that accomodate the materialist position.
“Why existence?” If one chooses to believe that question of existence is senseless, particularly (and ironically) given the significant amount of order/symmetry/code (to use Flew’s reference to DNA) in the universe, well that’s one’s choice. As we do exist, it’s a pertinent question.
The difficulty of the question does not make it senseless though, anymore than the difficulty of getting to a universal field theory or complex dimensions will dissuade the determined physicist. If physics is an infinite regression of material complexity, I suspect physicists will keep on studying it and certain physicists will keep on making pronounciations beyond science as to what it all means. One might maintain logical consistentancy in suggesting a certain meaninglessness to such physical endeavors, but it would hardly give scientific method a leg up as a broad source of support for faith in sussing out even its own material domain, much less existence in general.
As to the unanswerablity of the question, this too assumes a materialist universe, a faith in nothingness beyond the “natural” (read material) existence. Simply put, the existence of God would (does, given my own faith) shatter such presumptions, because the answers, answers that matter about the metaphysical world, would very much be within our grasp, either through communion with God or through reason based on the historical presentment of God both past and future. The question of God’s existence and the faith required therein only attest to the nature of metaphysical answers, not to the certainty of whether seeking them is senseless or not.
In other words, the notion of absurdity in seeking the metaphysical only draws strength from a contrary faith in the absence or meaningless of the metaphysical. Given the many complexities of human experience that defy easy material reduction, from religious experience to the one you’re having in your mind as you mull this over, such assumptions seem more than a bit presumptuous.
