Maker

It baffles me when I think about it – who made the one who made me? How did the first life, the first consciousness arise? Where did that something that is not nothing come from? How could there be something, the something I call a maker or creator or God? Could it be that there is nothing from which anything comes? Do I come from nothing? And go to nothing? What would suggest otherwise? Does the notion of an uncaused first cause make any sense?
These seem unanswerable questions at first glance. But reflecting on a question does not always end with an answer to the question but can raise other more basic questions. Here I want to raise those basic questions

Are my notions of made-ness, firstness, caused, cause, being and non-being, thinking itself and, in short, all the notional content of thought, notions that I just happen to have ( as if from nothing and “naturally”) or should these notions exist, as notions/knowledge and must there be someone whose knowledge these are? What is possible in thought must be possible as existent (as something existing and known) prior to being present to my thought. And so, when I think about a maker and notions of being made ( who made the maker), I must already assume that there is something or someone from whose knowledge I am getting notions of being made, caused-ness, sourcehood and so on. In asking “ who made me” and “who made the one who made everything else” I am already using the notion of “whoness” and I must ask where I got this notion from? How did this question about a “who” or “what” become possible for me to ask or think in relation to the notion of “made-ness”? In this I find a clue to the rationality of asking who made God. It is rational to ask about the whoness in relation to made-ness because/when made-ness and who-ness exists as a relation in the knowledge of the one who knows whoness and made-ness as a relation. My asking this question “who made” is only possible after I affirm the existence of a knowledge in which this relation exists. Hence this question is not rational to ask about the existence of one whose existence is pre-supposed as the source of the relation that the question assumes ( between whoness and made ness). Hence, I find it rational to remain baffled by the existence of one whose knowledge encompasses all who-made relations and I submit that I cannot logically ask, let alone answer, who made the maker?

Published by Faraz Sheikh

Faraz Sheikh

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