"...the fleeting shock of 'ontological surprise'": when "One realizes that everything about the world that seems so unexceptional and drearily predictable is in fact charged with an immense and imponderable mystery" ( pgs. 89 & 88 in my kindle edition).
I am currently reading David Bentley Hart's excellent philosophical and theological work called The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Sitting outside J. C. Penney's last night, waiting for Herself, allowed me time to read for an hour. Hart, an Orthodox Christian, is dealing with the problem of being, the mystery: why is there something rather than nothing, especially in the face of the "world's absolute contingency."
"The question of existence...How is it that any reality so obviously fortuitous--so lacking in any mark of inherent necessity or explanatory self-sufficiency--can exist at all?" (90)
I thought I would let someone else talk today. His book is not really an easy book; I am on my second time through which I can tell by all the highlighted passages. If one is willing to read slowly, attentively, and carefully, one will find it immensely worthwhile. His discussion of the meaning of "God" is alone worth the price ten times over.
Back to the mystery: further to illustrate the idea Hart refers to another writer: "The American philosopher Richard Taylor once illustrated this mystery, famously and fetchingly, with the image of a man out for a stroll in the forest unaccountably coming upon a very large translucent sphere. Naturally, he would immediately be taken aback by the sheer strangeness of the thing, and would wonder how it should happen to be there. More to the point, he would certainly never be able to believe that it just happened to be there without any cause, or without any possibility of further explanation; the very idea would be absurd. But, adds Taylor, what that man has not noticed is that he might ask the same question equally well about any other thing in the woods too, a rock or a tree [or a Carolina wren] no less than this outlandish sphere, and fails to do so only because it rarely occurs to us to interrogate the ontological pedigrees of the things to which we are accustomed. What would provoke our curiosity about the sphere would be that it was so obviously out of place; but, as far as existence is concerned, everything is in a sense out of place. As Taylor goes on to say, the question would be no less intelligible or pertinent if we were to imagine the sphere either as expanded to the size of the universe or as contracted to the size of a grain of sand, either as existing from everlasting to everlasting or as existing for only a few seconds. It is the sheer unexpected 'thereness' of the thing, devoid of any transparent rationale for the fact, that prompts our desire to understand it in terms not simply of its nature, but of it's very existence." [91; the reference points to Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 100-103. Hart's book was published by The Yale University Press, 1913.]. I highly recommend Hart's book, though it does require care and close attention. Hart has another excellent book on the nature of evil, following the destructive tsunami of 2004 that took "a quarter of a million lives": The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? a much shorter work but quite profound. His title comes from Job 38: 8-11. Any thinking person might want to read Hart's wise consideration, his theodicy.
"...the highest vocation of reason and of the will is to seek to know the ultimate source of that mystery..." (151, The Experience of God...)