(Faust Amoyo/ Marcus Minkowski)
�Well,� replied Marcus as he adjusted his old-fashioned eye-glasses on his sharp nose, �We never �explain� a phenomenon, we just analyze it into smaller �self-evident� phenomena. When we see something very new and strange we feel anxious about it, but after it has been reduced by a scientist into �building unit� events we feel relived and content.�
�Now I totally agree with you, but let�s tackle those �self-evident� phenomena, positives attracting negatives, and all the other stuff. Now we have only two ways. We can either say that those events happen in an arbitrary manner, without having any smaller details, or we can say that there is an infinite cascade of smaller and smaller events. Now if things happen arbitrarily then why do they follow the same path every time? If positives at-tract negatives and repel positives �by chance� then why do positives always attract negatives? Even for events that are more �chaotic� like nuclear decay, you don�t know when a certain atom will decay, and most scientists hold that it decays for no reason at all, yet there are still probabilities that it decays in a certain time. And this probability, usually expressed in the half life, varies from an element to another. But since there is no un-derlying equation or reason for this decay, why do the decays roughly follow a certain probability of decay for a fixed time? Now the other way involves infinite smaller and smaller events happening for each macroscopic event. But this would imply that an infinite number of smaller and smaller events happen for every of our recognizable events. That would mean that the uni-verse is infinitely small and that time, too, is infinitely small. That is, some of the events must happen at a zero time, that is, the cause and the result must happen at the very time point. And that is also an obsolete solution.�
�Oh my!� said Marcus with a blend of surprise and enthusiasm, �What you are trying to do here, Faust, Is to apply Zeno�s paradoxes to causality.�
�That�s right!� I said with a smile of admiration at my dear friend.
�I will tell you something, Faust, but I hope that you�ll be-lieve me. I did think about this problem two years ago. I could never solve it and kept on distracting myself whenever it at-tacked me. As far as I know, modern quantum physics bet on the first way. That is, the world is not infinitely small and that there are small event �building-units� that just happen without further details. We shouldn�t also forget about David Hume�s view of causality. He believed that we saw only an event following the other, but we never saw any connection between the two, further stressing his empiricism.�
�So you do believe that the world is irrational?�
�Well,� Marcus said with his eyes fixed downwards on the bed, �The universe is rational in its own sense. It is rational within the limits of its own laws but it seems that its own laws were chosen randomly at the beginning. And these laws defi-nitely may look mad or irrational, but before the universe existed there was nothing that made a law look rational and another look irrational. So each and every law could have been rational in the universe that it could describe accurately.�
�But at least you believe that the universe is paradoxical?�
�Yes, sure.� He said as he raised his head and looked towards me slightly raising his arms, too.
�So why do you believe that the world exists and don�t be-lieve in the existence of God, a paradoxical being in your opinion?�
�Because we experience the universe,� said Marcus with a faint smile, �The universe is an empirically-verified madness. God isn�t empirically-verified, although I think he shares the second feature!�
�And why did this universe, and not any other paradoxical one exist?�
�Perhaps there are infinite universes with each possible law and nature. But I don�t think that�s right. Most probably this uni-verse only exists and it happened to be with those laws, because�that�s just the way things are!�
I thanked Marcus for his thoughts and he left me to study. I opened the medicine book but I couldn�t avoid diving into my thoughts.
�Perhaps,� I thought, �The original quality of God is exis-tence and the original quality of all our worldly things is to be not. So that God would dive his hand into the infinite ocean of probabilities. In which all is equaled in non-being, then his hands would emerge holding creatures. They would then exist as he removes them from the ocean of doom that has always kept then in the darkness of non-knowledge. But God will have to keep holding them firmly, for if he ever lets them go, they would definitely fall back into the nothingness out of which they came. If that is true, then to exist is not to be paradoxical or non-paradoxical, but to be approved of by God. Perhaps existence is but a divinely-approved paradox.�