Philosophy of Idealism: Logos
Reminder: this series is not about teaching you what to think. It’s about helping you explore various philosophical concepts. It is your responsibility to determine the truth for yourself.
In our last post, we discussed the idea that the entire universe arose from a single Prime Cause. That raises a critical question: what is the Prime Cause like?
The Accidental Model
Suppose the universe arose by accident, from the interaction of chaotic forces that we can’t perceive. Suppose that the order we see in the universe is simply because we happen to live in a universe capable of sustaining life, rather than the zillions that can’t.
“Our universe is what it is simply because we are here. The situation can be likened to that of a group of intelligent fish who one day begin wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe, they suggest, there are many other worlds, some of them completely dry, some wet, and everything in between.” - Alan Lightman, “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”
That means order is an illusion. Everything is merely a different permutation of absolute chaos. The universe doesn’t come from ideas, ideas come from the universe. This answer doesn’t preclude idealism, but it certainly doesn’t move us toward it, either.
Logos
Suppose we instead say that the universe was created by a great cosmic intelligence.
Another disclaimer! You may be relating this concept to ideas with which you’re already familiar, like creationism. For now, try to let go of those ideas. We’re talking big-picture philosophy, not science.
You decided to make pasta. You gathered physical objects and manipulated them in various ways until you had a bowl of pasta. That means the pasta existed first as an idea, then as a physical object. And that means that the most fundamental form of pasta is the idea of pasta.
God - someone who speaks reality into being - decided to make a universe, and now here we are. If the Prime Cause was an intelligent being, then ideas existed before the universe - which is a powerful argument for idealism.
That starting idea from which the entire universe arises can be described by the Greek word Logos, which means “the word.”
One popular “proof” for the existence of Logos is the orderliness of the cosmos. The facts that the universe conforms to observable laws and can be measured with the elegant abstractness of mathematics seem to suggest that it has an intelligent origin. Going the opposite direction, the elegant abstractness of mathematics can be explained by Logos.
Logos can take a few different forms, which we’ll explore in the next post.