My Questions

I have many questions, but these are the biggest ones.

1. Why is there something, rather than nothing? This pertains to the status of modal properties, in particular, whether necessity and contingency are objective features of things, and correlatively, with the ultimate significance, if any, of things being intelligible to human minds. A corollary question: how can a necessary being have contingent properties, as God does if he exists necessarily yet his existence doesn’t necessitate his choices?

2. Why does God allow seemingly gratuitous suffering and evil?

3. What is time? A corollary question: how does God's temporality relate to the possibly superficial temporality of this creation?

4. What is consciousness? Is it as strange and mysterious as it seems, or is this a cognitive illusion?

5. How much of physical reality is our observable universe?

6. What unifies gravity and quantum mechanics?

7. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? This is a more or less straightforward empirical question. Are we alone in the universe, or are there other intelligent creatures out there? Either answer is amazing, as is not knowing.

8. How best to understand the reality of freedom and responsibility and the objectivity of morals? What does it mean to be human? Some of the most important philosophical questions seem to me at bottom less theoretical than practical, viz., how can people come to understand themselves in ways that are in accord with what science tells us that does not debunk what most matters to us and dehumanize us? E.g., the question is less, “What is freedom, and do we possess it?” as “Can we reasonably be convinced that the variety of freedom being part of the causal order of nature affords us is good enough?”