Knowledge, belief & agnosticism (Agnosticism)

by whitecraw, Monday, March 24, 2008, 22:15 (6086 days ago) @ David Turell

'I am totally confused by this concept. Given that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and humans and their consciousness did not appear until the past few million years, and language even more recently, perhaps the past few hundred thousand years ago, does that mean that the universe really didn't exist for 13.7 billion years, until we appeared to be aware of it, to think about it, and talk about it? Or am I to interpret the word 'exist' as meaning conscious recognition of the existence of something or object before it can be said to exist.' - Existence is a concept by which we differentiate the content of experience to render it meaningful. Historically, we have made this differentiation in several different ways in accordance with several widely different criteria; to qualify as existent, a thing has at various times been required to be present in experience, present independent of experience, a particular or 'indexical', a universal, sentient, temporal, the ground of every subsequent mode of being (the 'Being of beings')... But however we differentiate existence and non-existence, clearly nothing could be said to exist prior to the construction of a differentiation between existent and non-existent things. - Armed with a differentiation of this kind, we can of course then tell retrospectively the story of a universe that 'existed' long before we appeared on the scene as if someone were there to conceive it ... which, of course, there wasn't. The prehuman universe, we may say, was insensible (since there was no one around to experience it) and inconceivable (since there were no concepts under which any experience of it could have been made meaningful), only anachronistically describable as a 'universe' at all; it was literally (though this is also an anachronistic differentiation) a 'chaos' out of which we have since ordered a 'cosmos' through religion and science and storytelling generally. - The observation isn't that we made the universe in the way that a carpenter makes a table, but only that we make it a 'universe' ... a comprehensive whole rather than just a succession of haphazard happenings. As Wittgenstein said, the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Prior to the appearance of language, the world we inhabit as agents and knowers (the 'real' world?), its past and its possible futures, was necessarily unformed; it had no 'limits', it could not even be said to 'exist'. Only with the appearance of language and its differentiations did it come into existence in any meaningful sense.