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Where, Not When, Did the Cosmos ‘Begin’?

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Abstract

I examine a tension between temporal and spatial conceptualization of the genesis of the cosmos to show how chronological characterization of ‘beginnings’ occludes ontological interpretation of our existential orientations, to help my audience distinguish symbolic expressions of wonder that the cosmos exists from explanations for it. I bring together resources from multiple intellectual and religious traditions to perform a philosophy of religions that goes beyond the narrowness, intellectualism, and insularity of institutionalized (analytic) philosophy of religion. I turn to Ibn Rushd, Tillich, Pamela Sue Anderson, and Sara Ahmed to expose problems of confusing symbols with concepts. I bring Aristotle, Nagarjuna, Maimonides, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Nasr together in conversation about the notion of a ‘beginning.’ Through this, I seek to shift questions of cosmic linearity to questions of spatial symbols of inclusivity and suggest that our orientation toward chronology distracts us from inclusive ontologies, inadvertently getting us stuck in imagistic representation of a closed cosmos rather than critical conceptualization of open symbols for an inclusive cosmos.

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Notes

  1. See Weeks 2001 for mathematic and topographic attempts to account for different possibilities, where—it seems—to boil down to whether or not there is a repeating pattern within the universe.

  2. Such an assumption about transcendental conditions necessary for constituting our objective world helps bracket questions about some purported ‘mind-independent’ reality. Space is not merely a social construct, yet as a form of intuition, it is ours. We are not rejecting the possibility of space ‘out there’ but simply bracketing it to persevere in our turn to examine standpoints and orientations. The very distinction that ‘space exists outside social relations’ is our distinction, regardless of whether or not that distinction corresponds to some ‘noumenal’ reality. Of course, Kant rejects noumena as nonsense, as a problematic understanding that attempts to apply concepts beyond the domain of sensibility—in other words, an understanding that attempts to apply concepts beyond space and time (see Kant 2007, 260-261).

  3. I am trying to suggest something weird here, that should strike us as similar to asking, ‘Why does “do you see what I mean” not make us laugh but “do you smell what I mean” does?’

  4. The use of theology there is deliberate as an accusation.

  5. I take this to be just another way of saying Kant’s position that space is a form of sensibility from which we construct our objective environment, not a structure of ‘noumena.’

  6. With all the voices I bring into conversation here, but perhaps especially so with Nagarjuna, they need to be considered contextually within the larger tapestry of discourses with which they were especially engaged. Nagarjuna, for example, worked both with and against Brahmanic and Jain cosmologies and metaphysics, where we can see a shared commitment to the priority of space and a de-emphasis on time (see Bilimoria 2016; and Bilimoria 2013). Such considerations should help us broaden our inclusive cacophony of voices in further research.

  7. This approach to Kant is not always sufficiently emphasized. Craig, for example, refers to the arguments in the Transcendental Dialectic as ‘Kant’s arguments.’ That is, Craig treats the arguments in abstraction rather than preserving them in the context of their work to expose the vacuity of any knowledge claims about the three ideas of pure reason (see Craig 1979).

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank three anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript. I also want to thank the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion group of the American Academy of Religion, led by Timothy D. Knepper and Gereon Kopf, for hosting the panel discussion on the “cosmos” where we discussed an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Religion and Philosophy, Young Harris College, 1 College Street, 30582, Young Harris, Georgia

    Nathan Eric Dickman

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Dickman, N.E. Where, Not When, Did the Cosmos ‘Begin’?. SOPHIA 60, 67–81 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-00752-w

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