cphil_origins
THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS
by Ray Shelton
Science is the search for knowledge. It seeks to find the answer to three basic problems whose solutions is knowledge:
(1) The descriptive problem; science seeks to answer the question, What is there? Science is the search for a description of what is.
(2) The explanatory problem; science seeks to answer the question, Why is there what is? Science is the search for an explanation of what there is.
(3) The problem of origins: science seeks to answer the question, Whence is there what is? Science is the search for the origin of what there is.
This problem of origins is closely related to the explanatory problem; and sometimes its solution is considered to be the solution to the explanatory problem. Also the problem of origins is sometimes considered the search for causes and the solution to the problem of cause-and-effect, that is, the problem of origins is reduced to finding the immediate cause of a particular effect, and then the cause of the causes, eventually the consideration of a First and Ultimate Cause. Aristotle was the first to formulate the problem of origins in terms of the problem of cause-and-effect. As Christianty spread through the Greek-Roman world, it presented on the basis of Biblical revelation that God is the Creator of all that is. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution was presented on the basis of uniformitarianism as the alternate solution to the Problem of Origins – What is the origin of all that is? – . This produced for the Problem of Origins two aspects:
These two aspects of the problem of origins lead to the more fundamental problem of the origin of the universe –
The Problem of Cosmology.