The Universe May Be Fundamentally Absurd

Absurdism is a philosophy—largely attributed to Albert Camus—who wrote such works as The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. In his work, Camus challenged the concept that the world made sense or had any meaning to it. He said that human beings cannot avoid asking “What is the meaning of existence?” But he rejected the idea that this question has an answer. Thus, human existence is paradoxical: we are driven to ask a question on which the universe is silent as to the answer. This is what is absurd about existence.

He captured his version of absurdity in the image of the mythical figure of Sisyphus, damned to push a rock up a mountainside only to watch it roll down again upon nearing the top, returning to the bottom to push it up again for all eternity. Hence, not unlike later Wittgenstein, Camus’s viewpoint is anti-philosophical, i.e., the world provides no answers we crave so deeply to philosophical questions. All philosophical debates between realism and anti-realism, for example, are fundamentally absurd.

Note that what Camus is pointing out is not a logical absurdism, i.e., that p and not p are true at the same time. Rather, it is an emotional (and perhaps even a moral) absurdism. The human being screams into the void for answers and receives nothing but the echo of his own voice.

Quantum physics may reinforce this idea because it too offers no answers to the questions we ask about what is and is not true. We make calculations and then measurements and are given answers—that is true—but we cannot rightly interpret what the answers mean in view of our calculations. Thus, while we have an adequate model for reality, it does not offer any answers to our philosophical questions about what is and is not real.

Quantum interpretations are attempts to fill in the gaps between prediction and measurement and explain what is really happening, yet nothing indicates that one is more true than another.

We crave a single ontology for reality, but quantum physics is silent. To leap to believing in Many Worlds, Minds, Copenhagen, Bohm-de Broglie Pilot Wave Theory, Superdeterminism, or any other is a leap of faith. It is an attempt to relieve tension instead of existing within it. As Sisyphus, it is an attempt to pretend that the stone does not, in fact, roll back down to the bottom, but somehow that one is making progress.

Classical physics suggested that the universe was like a clock, a machine with complex interacting parts. Thus, this offered a single ontology about reality. The Born rule, which explains that outcomes occur according to a probability proportional to the square of the wave function, explodes that comforting myth.

Lest we rely only on quantum physics, we can also look to cosmology for non-answers. Why does the universe exist? Those who leap to multiverses, eternal inflation, Cosmic Natural Selection, or other such explanations are likewise trying to resolve this tension. Even the Anthropic Principle (the idea that the universe is the way it is because we are here to observe it) is a non-answer dressed up as an answer. Why aren’t we Boltzmann Brains if the Anthropic Principle is the guiding reason? Why don’t we appear for a few seconds with our memories intact, observe the universe, and blink out of existence? (How do we know we aren’t?)

The universe is heading towards a heat death, according to our best guesses for the future. All the stars will slowly die out. The cosmos will become replete with black holes. No life will be possible. Yet it will go on for trillions of years. As far as we know, it will remain forever unresponsive to us and not even give us the benefit of winking out of existence in dramatic fashion (unless a false vacuum bubble wipes us out at the speed of light).

Moreover, we can’t even see the entire universe. All we see is the observable universe, which is akin to what we can see from our vantage point on Earth out to the distant horizon. The universe could be infinite (which is where the title for this publication comes from, by the way). And all that infinity is inaccessible to us. The universe (as far as we know) is flat, and inflationary theory posits that it is so large that—even if it is globally curved—it would appear flat to us (or only very minutely curved). Yet, we have no idea what shape the universe as a whole is, and we can never know.

Even my own work on objective collapse theories may not be resolving any of these questions, but attempting to shift the burden of silence to some deep, inaccessible dimension.

“But Tim,” you say, “aren’t you a Christian? Don’t you believe that reality fundamentally has meaning in God?”

I do, and yet I am also a mystic—which means that I don’t fully accept the Aristotelian/Thomist idea that the universe has an order and reason to it that one can discern from revelation and the natural world. I am fully capable of embracing both Christ and the absurd together.

Consider briefly the Book of Job, which, if you are not familiar with it, is the story of a righteous man whose life is effectively destroyed by Satan, all with God’s explicit permission. His children are killed, his health and livelihood taken. He loses everything he has. And although he remains faithful to God, he constantly, throughout the book, questions God and why he has done this to him, an innocent man. All the while, his “friends” accuse him of being an unrepentant sinner who deserved what he got.

In the end, God speaks to Job and effectively says, I’m God; you are not. How can you question my decisions? And Job agrees. Yet, God also explicitly rejects the accusations of his friends, saying that they have acted wrongly while Job has not. God is saying: yes, you are innocent, and yet who are you to question why I let your life be destroyed? Stop complaining.

What Job does not know, however, is the whole backstory to why this all happened in the first place, which is placed at the beginning of the story. Satan comes to God, and God praises the faithfulness of Job. Satan scoffs and says that Job is only faithful because he has a good life and that as soon as his life turns sour, Job will curse God.

God says, OK, Satan, see for yourself. You can do anything you want to Job except kill him.

In the end, God turns out to be right. Job complains a lot, but he never curses God. He remains faithful. And so, logically, the message seems to be: bad things happened to a good person, Job, because God wanted to defend Job’s honor before Satan’s accusations or perhaps to make a point to the rest of the host of heaven about his faithfulness. Many make this argument, but it doesn’t answer the question about why God had anything to prove to Satan in the first place. What the story lacks is a clear understanding of what God has in mind for allowing Job to experience such suffering or what that suffering actually accomplishes.

Likewise, for all our theories of atonement, like our explanations of quantum theory, the Cross may be fundamentally inexplicable to us. God is silent on that question. All we know is that Christ suffered for us; why he had to do so to save us from our sin, we are not to know. If anything, this makes Christianity far more of a natural and less artificial religion than others which offer logical mechanisms for personal salvation.

There is a higher, supernatural order that Job and we are not allowed to be made aware of. Hence, God and the universe are silent to many of our questions, yet we differ from Camus in that we do not believe God to be indifferent to our sufferings, for if he were, why did he offer his only begotten Son for our sake? What we cannot understand is the greater why? Why do the innocent suffer? Why do we need the cross?

God’s answer is to offer himself to us, only himself.

Hence, while Camus’s absurdism is full of despair while living in the tension of silence, Christian absurdism is full of hope despite the silence because, amid that silence, we have God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Human beings are finite, fleshy beings carrying a longing for the infinite. 

Camus says that this is meaningless, and we will never have answers but die alone. We must find happiness not in leaps of faith but in our own striving. 

Christ says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Mt. 11:28). He does not say, “I will give you answers.” 

I, for one, prefer rest to striving.

Some Christian absurdists argue that the Fall, i.e., the entry of sin into the world, is what broke the universe. That is why we cannot have answers to our questions and longings. The universe is not silent because there is no God but because meaning is transcendent, hidden, and is, perhaps, so glorious and so dangerous to us that it must remain deferred until we rise in glory ourselves. At best, one can gain glimpses of it deep in prayer, resting in the presence of the Almighty.

This may be true whether we are talking about the atonement or quantum measurement theory or why the universe seems finely tuned. We can offer our ideas and explanations, yet ours is not necessarily to have answers but to struggle, like Job, to remain faithful, in spite of them.