8 beyond wishful thinkingTh e failure of the ontological argument for the existence of God in
the history of Western philosophy and theology is a par tic u lar expres-
sion of a wider problem.* Nothing in the character and content of what
we have discovered about nature alters the brute facticity of the world:
the world just happens to be one way rather than another. If there is
only one universe at a time, its most important attribute is that it is—
that it just happens to be— what it is rather than something else.
When we put aside the fi ctions of a metaphysical imagination deter-
mined to overstep the bounds of understanding, usually in the ser vice
of an eff ort to reassure us and to reconcile us to our lot, we encounter
the dominant undertaking of modern science from Galileo and New-
ton to today: to discern the immutable laws governing nature, expected
to be written in the language of mathematics. Th e unifi ed understand-
ing of these laws would then fi x the outer limit to our comprehension of
nature. Th ere are, however, two grave limitations to this approach to the
most general features of reality.
Th e fi rst limitation is that its methods are suited to the exploration
of parts of nature rather than of the universe as a whole. What one
might call the Newtonian paradigm of scientifi c inquiry studies parts
of reality, regions of the universe. In each of these regions, it distin-
guishes stipulated initial conditions marking out a confi guration space
within which phenomena change according to laws that can be expressed
as mathematical equations. What is an initial condition at one moment
may become an explained phenomenon at another. Th e scientist-
observer stands outside the confi guration space in the timeless position
of God.
Th is approach fails when it is applied to the universe as a whole. Yet
it is precisely knowledge about the universe as a whole (rather than
about patches of space- time) that we require to defeat or to circumscribe
speculative groundlessness. When the subject matter is cosmological
rather than local, the distinction between initial conditions and ex-
plained phenomena within a confi guration space cannot be maintained.
Th e observer can no longer imagine himself as standing outside the
* Th e ontological argument for the existence of God claims to show that God must exist
because his existence inheres in the idea of him. He is the perfect or absolute being.
Existence is, according to some versions of this argument, an attribute of perfection.