Dr. J. Budziszewski

Now, the Greek gods, if you ask, obviously weren't first causes.

If you tried to make this idea clear to an ancient Greek, you would have said, well, no, Zeus didn't create the universe.

Well, where did the universe come from?

Where did Zeus even come from?

Well, you know, he came from the Titans.

Where did the Titans come from?

Well, they rose up out of the mist of chaos.

What is chaos?

It's meaninglessness.

It's disorder.

What you're saying is that actually everything came out of absolutely nothing.

This is a nihilism.

The classic scholar Edith Hamilton, in her introduction to a book written for ordinary readers, it wasn't one of her more scholarly books about Greek mythology, talked about the luminous reason of the Greeks.

And I thought, what a strange thing for somebody who knew all about Greek mythology to say, because at the bottom of this was the dirty secret that none of it made sense.

All of this beautiful stuff, God, you know, Apollo, God of light and reason and all that, comes from chaos!

So that means all of this stuff that you're spinning, I'm spinning my syllogisms and my theories and my arguments.

There is a God, there isn't a God.

I can build these buildings and I do the differential equations, integral equations to figure out if it's going to stand up.

all of that is based on nothing.

Now, you can do either of two things.