WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
Jim Holt is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker—where he has written on string theory, time, infinity, numbers, truth, and bullshit, among other subjects—and the author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the London Review of Books. He lives in Greenwich Village.
ALSO BY JIM HOLT
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
An Existential Detective Story
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PROLOGUE: A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives
1. Confronting the Mystery
INTERLUDE: Could Our World Have Been Created by a Hacker?
2. Philosophical Tour d’Horizon
INTERLUDE: The Arithmetic of Nothingness
3. A Brief History of Nothing
4. The Great Rejectionist
5. Finite or Infinite?
INTERLUDE: Night Thoughts at the Café de Flore
6. The Inductive Theist of North Oxford
INTERLUDE: The Supreme Brute Fact
7. The Magus of the Multiverse
INTERLUDE: The End of Explanation
8. The Ultimate Free Lunch?
INTERLUDE: Nausea
9. Waiting for the Final Theory
INTERLUDE: A Word on Many Worlds
10. Platonic Reflections
INTERLUDE: It from Bit
11. “The Ethical Requiredness of There Being Something”
INTERLUDE: An Hegelian in Paris
12. The Last Word from All Souls
EPISTOLARY INTERLUDE: The Proof
13. The World as a Bit of Light Verse
14. The Self: Do I Really Exist?
15. Return to Nothingness
EPILOGUE: Over the Seine
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding.
Therefore, there must be something. QED.
And this grey spirit, yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Ulysses”
I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything.… To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable.
—QUEEN VICTORIA, in a letter to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse, 22 August 1883
… well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I …
—MOLLY’S SOLILOQUY, in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Ivividly remember when the mystery of existence first swam into my ken. It was in the early 1970s. I was a callow and would-be rebellious high-school student in rural Virginia. As callow and would-be rebellious high-school students sometimes do, I had begun to develop an interest in existentialism, a philosophy that seemed to hold out hope for resolving my adolescent insecurities, or at least elevating them to a grander plain. One day I went to the local college library and checked out some impressive-looking tomes: Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. It was in the opening pages of the latter book, with its promising title, that I was first confronted by the question Why is there something rather than nothing at all? I can still recall being bowled over by its starkness, its purity, its sheer power. Here was the super-ultimate why question, the one that loomed behind all the others that mankind had ever asked. Where, I wondered, had it been all my (admittedly brief) intellectual life?
It has been said that the question Why is there something rather than nothing? is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child. I was too young then to be a metaphysician. But why had I missed the question as a child? In retrospect, the answer was obvious. My natural metaphysical curiosity had been stifled by my religious upbringing. From my earliest childhood I had been told—by my mother and father, by the nuns who taught me in elementary school, by the Franciscan monks at the monastery over the hill from where we lived—that God created the world, and that He created it out of nothing at all. That’s why the world existed. That’s why I existed. As to why God himself existed, this was left a little vague. Unlike the finite world that He freely created, God was eternal. He was also all-powerful and possessed of every other perfection to an infinite degree. So perhaps He didn’t need an explanation for his own existence. Being omnipotent, He might have bootstrapped Himself into existence. He was, to use the Latin phrase, causa sui.
This was the story that was imparted to me as a child. It is a story still believed by the vast majority of Americans. For these believers, there is no such thing as the “mystery of existence.” If you ask them why the universe exists, they’ll say it exists because God made it. If you then ask them why God exists, the answer you get will depend on how theologically sophisticated they are. They might say that God is self-caused, that He is the ground of His own being, that His existence is contained in His very essence. Or they might tell you that people who ask such impious questions will burn in hell.
But suppose you ask nonbelievers to explain why there is a world rather than nothing at all. Chances are, they will not give you a very satisfying answer. In the current “God Wars,” those who defend religious belief are wont to use the mystery of existence as a cudgel to beat their neo-atheist opponents with. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and professional atheist, is weary of hearing about this supposed mystery. “Time and again,” Dawkins says, “my theologian friends return to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing.” Christopher Hitchens, another tireless proselytizer for atheism, is often confronted by his opponents with the same question. “If you don’t accept that there’s a God, how can you explain why the world exists at all?” one slightly thuggish right-wing TV host asked Hitchens, with a note of triumph in his voice. Another such host, this one of the leggy blonde variety, echoed the same religious talking point. “Where did the universe come from?” she demanded of Hitchens. “The idea that this all came out of nothing—that seems to defy logic and reason. What came before the Big Bang?” To which Hitchens replied, “I’d love to know what came before the Big Bang.”
What options do you have for resolving the mystery of existence once you let go of the God hypothesis? Well, you might expect that science will someday explain not only how the world is, but why is it. This, at least, is the hope of Dawkins, who looks to theoretical physics for an answer. “Maybe the ‘inflation’ that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe’s existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwin’s biological one,” Dawkins has written.
Stephen Hawking, who is actually a practicing cosmologist, takes a different approach. Hawking came up with a theoretical model in which the universe, though finite in time, is completely self-contained, without beginning or end. In this “no-boundary” model, he argued, there is no need for a creator, divine or otherwise. Yet even Hawking doubts that his set of equations can yield a complete resolution to the mystery of existence. “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” he plaintively asks. “Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?”
The problem with the science option would seem to be this. The universe comprises everything that physically exists. A scientific explanation must involve some sort of physical cause. But any physical cause is by definition part of the universe to be explained. Thus any purely scientific explanation of the existence of the universe is doomed to be circular. Even if it starts from something very minimal—a cosmic egg, a tiny bit of quantum vacuum, a singularity—it still starts with something, not nothing. Science may be able to trace how the current universe evolved from an earlier state of physical reality, even following the process back as far as the Big Bang. But ultimately science hits a wall. It can’t account for the origin of the primal physical state out of nothing. That, at least, is what diehard defenders of the God hypothesis insist.
Historically, when science has seemed incapable of explaining some natural phenomenon, religious believers have been quick to invoke a Divine Artificer to fill the gap—only to be embarrassed when science finally succeeds in filling it after all. Newton, for example, thought that God was needed to make little adjustments from time to time in the orbits of the planets to keep them from colliding. But a century later, Laplace proved that physics was quite capable of accounting for the stability of the solar system. (When Napoléon asked Laplace where God was in his celestial scheme, Laplace famously replied, “Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.”) More recently, religious believers have maintained that blind natural selection alone cannot explain the emergence of complex organisms, so God must be “guiding” the evolutionary process—a contention decisively (and gleefully) refuted by Dawkins and other Darwinians.
Such “God of the gaps” arguments, when they concern the minutiae of biology or astrophysics, tend to blow up in the faces of the religious believers who deploy them. But those believers feel themselves to be on safer ground with the question Why is there something rather than nothing? “No scientific theory, it seems, can bridge the gulf between absolute nothingness and a full-fledged universe,” the scientifically inclined religious apologist Roy Abraham Varghese has written. “This ultimate origin question is a metascientific question—one which science can ask but not answer.” The distinguished Harvard University astronomer (and devout Mennonite) Owen Gingerich agrees. In a lecture titled “God’s Universe,” delivered at Harvard’s Memorial Church in 2005, Gingerich pronounced the ultimate why question to be a “teleological” one—“not for science to grapple with.”
Faced with this line of argument, the atheist typically shrugs his shoulders and says the world “just is.” Perhaps it exists because it’s always existed. Or perhaps it popped into being with no cause at all. In either case, its existence is just a “brute fact.”
The brute-fact view denies that the universe as a whole requires any explanation for its existence. It thus avoids the need to posit some sort of transcendental reality, like God, to answer the question Why is there something rather than nothing? Yet, intellectually, this feels like throwing in the towel. It’s one thing to reconcile yourself to a universe with no purpose and no meaning—we’ve all done that on a dark night of the soul. But a universe without an explanation? That seems an absurdity too far, at least to a reason-seeking species like ourselves. Whether we realize it or not, we instinctively hew to what the seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz called the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This principle says, in effect, that explanation goes all the way up and all the way down. For every truth, there must be a reason why it is so and not otherwise; and for every thing, there must be a reason for that thing’s existence. Leibniz’s principle has been mocked by some as a mere “metaphysician’s demand.” But it is a bedrock principle of science, where it has been notably successful—so successful, indeed, that one might say it is true on pragmatic grounds: it works. The principle seems to inhere in reason itself, since any attempt to argue for or against it already presupposes its validity. And if the Principle of Sufficient Reason is valid, there must be an explanation for the existence of the world, whether we can find it or not.
A world that existed for no reason at all—an irrational, accidental, “just there” world—would be an unnerving one to live in. So, at least, claimed the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy. In one of his 1933 lectures at Harvard on the “Great Chain of Being,” Lovejoy declared that such a world “would have no stability or trustworthiness; uncertainty would infect the whole; anything (except, perhaps, the self-contradictory) might exist and anything might happen, and no one thing would be in itself even more probable than any other.”
Are we then doomed to choose between God and the deep brute Absurd?
This dilemma has lurked in the suburbs of my mind ever since I first hit upon the mystery of being. And it has moved me to ponder just what “being” amounts to. The philosopher’s term for the ultimate constituents of reality is “substance.” For Descartes, the world consisted of two kinds of substance: matter, which he defined as res extensa (“extended substance”), and mind, which he defined as res cogitans (“thinking substance”). Today, we have pretty much inherited this Cartesian outlook. The universe contains physical stuff: Earth, stars, galaxies, radiation, “dark matter,” “dark energy,” and so forth. It also contains biological life, which, science has revealed, is physical in nature. In addition, the universe contains consciousness. It contains subjective mental states like joy and misery, the experience of redness, the feel of a stubbed toe. (Are these subjective states reducible to objective physical processes? The philosophical verdict is still out on that question.) An explanation is just a causal story involving items from one or the other of these ontological categories. The impact of the bowling ball caused the pins to drop. Fear of a financial crisis caused a stock market sell-off.
If that’s all there is to reality—matter-stuff and mind-stuff, with a web of causal relations between them—then the mystery of being looks hopeless indeed. But perhaps this dualistic ontology is too impoverished. I myself began to suspect as much when, following my teenage flirtation with existentialism, I became infatuated with pure mathematics. The sort of entities mathematicians spend their days pondering—not just numbers and circles, but n-dimensional manifolds and Galois systems and crystalline cohomologies—are nowhere found within the realm of space and time. They’re clearly not material things. Nor do they seem to be mental. There is no way, for example, that the finite mind of a mathematician could contain an infinity of numbers. Then do mathematical entities really exist? Well, that depends on what you mean by “existence.” Plato certainly thought they existed. In fact, he held that mathematical objects, being timeless and unchanging, were more real than the world of things we perceive with our senses. The same was true, he held, of abstract ideas like Goodness and Beauty. To Plato, such “Forms” constituted genuine reality. Everything else was mere appearance.
We might not want to go that far in revising our notion of reality. Goodness, Beauty, mathematical entities, logical laws: these are not quite something, the way mind-stuff and matter-stuff are. Yet they are not exactly nothing either. Might they somehow play a role in explaining why there is something rather than nothing?
Admittedly, abstract ideas can’t figure in our usual causal explanations. It would be nonsense to say, for example, that Goodness “caused” the Big Bang. But not all explanations have to take this cause-and-effect form; think, for instance, of explaining the point of a chess move. To explain something is, fundamentally, to make it intelligible or understandable. When an explanation is successful, we “feel the key turn in the lock,” in the happy phrase of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. There are many different kinds of explanations, and each one involves a different sense of “cause.” Aristotle, for instance, identified four different kinds of cause that might be cited to explain physical occurrences, only one of which (the “efficient” cause) corresponds to our own narrow scientific notion. The most extravagant species of cause in the Aristotelian scheme is the “final” cause—the end or purpose for which something is produced.
Final causes often figure in very bad explanations. (Why does it rain in the spring? So the crops will grow!) Such “teleological” explanations were parodied by Voltaire in Candide, and they have been justly rejected by modern science as a way of accounting for natural phenomena. When it comes to accounting for existence as a whole, though, should they be automatically ruled out of court? The assumption that explanations must always involve “things” has been called by one prominent contemporary philosopher, Nicholas Rescher, “a prejudice as deep-rooted as any in Western philosophy.” Obviously, to explain a given fact—such as the fact that there is a world at all—one has to cite other facts. But it doesn’t follow that the existence of a given thing can be explained only by invoking other things. Maybe a reason for the world’s existence should be sought elsewhere, in the realm of such “un-things” as mathematical entities, objective values, logical laws, or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Maybe something along the lines of a teleological explanation might furnish at least a hint as to how the mystery of the world’s existence could be resolved.
In the very first philosophy course I took as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, the professor—a distinguished quondam Oxonian with the evocative name of A. D. Woozley—had us read David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In these dialogues, a trio of fictitious characters—Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo—debate various arguments for the existence of God. Demea, the most religiously orthodox of the three, defends the “cosmological argument,” which says, in essence, that the world’s existence can be explained only by positing a necessarily existent deity as its cause. In response, the skeptical Philo—who comes closest to being a stand-in for Hume himself—comes up with a seductive bit of reasoning. Although the world seems to be in need of a God-like cause of its existence, Philo observes, that might be due to our own intellectual blindness. Consider, Philo says, the following arithmetical curiosity. If you take any multiple of 9 (like 18, 27, 36, etc.) and add up the digits (1 + 8, 2 + 7, 3 + 6, etc.), you always get 9 back again. To the mathematically naive, this might appear a matter of chance. To the skillful algebraist, by contrast, it is immediately seen to be a matter of necessity. “Is it not probable,” Philo then asks, “that the whole economy of the universe is conducted by a like necessity, though no human algebra can furnish a key which solves the difficulty?”
I found this idea of a hidden cosmic algebra—an algebra of being!—irresistible. The very phrase seemed to expand the range of possible explanations for the world’s existence. Perhaps the choice was not God versus Brute Fact after all. Perhaps there was a nontheistic explanation for the world’s existence—one discoverable by human reason. Although such an explanation wouldn’t need to posit a deity, it wouldn’t necessarily rule one out either. Indeed, it might even imply the existence of some kind of supernatural intelligence, and in doing so furnish an answer to the precocious child’s dread question: “But mommy, who made God?”
How close are we to discovering such an algebra of being? The novelist Martin Amis was once asked by Bill Moyers in a television interview how he thought the universe might have popped into existence. “I’d say we’re at least five Einsteins away from answering that question,” Amis replied. His estimate seemed about right to me. But, I wondered, could any of those Einsteins be around today? It was obviously not my place to aspire to be one of them. But if I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order … well, that would be an excellent quest.
So that is what I set out to do. My quest to find the beginnings of an answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing? has had many promising leads. Some failed to pan out. Once, for instance, I called a theoretical cosmologist I knew, one noted for his brilliant speculations. I got his voice mail and said that I had a question for him. He called back and left a message on my answering machine. “Leave your question on my voice mail and I’ll leave the answer on your machine,” he said. This was alluring. I complied. When I returned to my apartment late that evening, the little light was blinking on my answering machine. With some trepidation, I pushed the playback button. “Okay,” the cosmologist’s recorded voice began, “what you’re really talking about is a violation of matter / antimatter parity …”
On another occasion, I sought out a certain well-known professor of philosophical theology. I asked him if the existence of the world could be explained by postulating a divine entity whose essence contained his existence. “Are you kidding?” he said. “God is so perfect He doesn’t have to exist!”
On still another occasion, on a street in Greenwich Village, I ran into a Zen Buddhist scholar I’d been introduced to at a cocktail party. He was said to be an authority on cosmic matters. After a little small talk, I asked him—perhaps, in retrospect, precipitately—“Why is there something rather than nothing?” In response, he tried to bop me on the head. He must have thought it was a Zen kōan.
In searching for enlightenment on the riddle of being, I cast my net fairly wide, talking to philosophers, theologians, particle physicists, cosmologists, mystics, and one very great American novelist. Above all, I looked for versatile and wide-ranging intellects. To have anything really profitable to say about why the world might exist, a thinker must possess more than one kind of intellectual sophistication. Suppose, for example, a scientist has some philosophical acumen. Then he or she might see that the “nothingness” philosophers talked about was conceptually equivalent to something scientifically definable—say, a closed four-dimensional spacetime manifold of vanishing radius. By feeding a mathematical description of this null reality into the equations of quantum field theory, one might be able to prove that a small patch of “false vacuum” had a nonzero probability of spontaneously appearing—and that this bit of vacuum, through the marvelous mechanism of “chaotic inflation,” would be sufficient to get a full-fledged universe going. If the scientist was also versed in theology, he or she might see how this cosmogonic event could be construed as a backward-in-time emanation from a future “Omega point” that has some of the properties traditionally ascribed to the Judeo-Christian deity. And so forth.
Engaging in such speculative flights takes a good deal of intellectual brio. And brio was amply on display in most of my encounters. One of the pleasures of talking to original thinkers about a matter as profound as the mystery of being is that you get to hear them think out loud. Sometimes they would say the most astonishing things. It was as though I was privileged to peer into their thought processes. This was a cause for awe. But I also found it oddly empowering. When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, “All of us are beggars here.”
Where did our universe come from? Doesn’t its sheer existence point to an ultimate creative force at play? This question, when posed by a religious believer to an atheist, generally elicits one of two responses. First, the atheist might say, if you do postulate such a “creative force,” you’d better be prepared to postulate another one to explain its existence, and then another one behind that, and so forth. In other words, you end up in an infinite regress. The second atheist response is to say that even if there were an ultimate creative force, there is no reason to think of it as God-like. Why should the First Cause be an infinitely wise and good being, let alone one that is minutely concerned with our inner thoughts and sex lives? Why should it even have a mind?
The idea that our cosmos was somehow “made” by an intelligent being might seem to be a primitive one, if not downright nutty. But before dismissing it entirely, I thought it would be interesting to consult Andrei Linde, who has done more than any other scientist to explain how our cosmos got going. Linde is a Russian physicist who immigrated to the United States in 1990 and who now teaches at Stanford University. While still a young man in Moscow, he came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde’s theory, called “chaotic inflation,” explained the overall shape of space and the formation of galaxies. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation left over from the Big Bang that the COBE satellite observed in the 1990s.
Among the curious implications of Linde’s theory, one of the most striking is that it doesn’t take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required, nor are supernatural powers. It might even be possible for someone in a civilization not much more advanced than ours to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?
Linde is a handsome, heavy-set man with a full head of silver hair. Among his colleagues he is legendary for his ability to perform acrobatics and baffling sleights of hand, even while a little squiffy.
“When I invented the theory of chaotic inflation, I found that the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter,” Linde told me in his Russian-accented English. “That’s enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us. It looks like cheating, but that’s how the inflation theory works—all the matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the gravitational field. So what’s to stop us from creating a universe in a lab? We would be like gods!”
Linde, it should be said, is known for his puckishly gloomy manner, and the preceding words were laced with irony. But he assured me that this cosmogenesis-on-a-lab-bench scenario was feasible, at least in principle.
“There are some gaps in my proof,” he conceded. “But what I have shown—and Alan Guth [a codeveloper of inflation theory] and others who have looked at this matter have come to the same conclusion—is that we can’t rule out the possibility that our own universe was created by someone in another universe who just felt like doing it.”
It struck me that there was a hitch in this scheme. If you started a Big Bang in a lab, wouldn’t the baby universe you created expand into your own world, killing people and crushing buildings and so forth?
Linde assured me that there was no such danger. “The new universe would expand into itself,” he said. “Its space would be so curved that it would look as tiny as an elementary particle to its creator. In fact, it might end up disappearing from his own world altogether.”
But why bother making a universe if it’s going to slip away from you, the way Eurydice slipped from the grasp of Orpheus? Wouldn’t you want to have some quasi-divine power over how your creation unfolded, some way of monitoring it and making sure the creatures that evolved therein turned out well? Linde’s creator seemed very much like the deist concept of God favored by Voltaire and America’s founding fathers—a being who set our universe in motion but then took no further interest in it or its creatures.
“You’ve got a point,” Linde said, emitting a slight snuffle of amusement. “At first I imagined that the creator might be able to send information into the new universe—to teach its creatures how to behave, to help them discover what the laws of nature are, and so forth. Then I started thinking. The inflation theory says that a baby universe blows up like a balloon in the tiniest fraction of a second. Suppose the creator tried to write something on the surface of the balloon, like “PLEASE REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU.” The inflationary expansion would make this message exponentially huge. The creatures in the new universe, living in a tiny corner of one letter, would never be able to read the whole message.”
But then Linde thought of another channel of communication between creator and creation—the only one possible, as far as he could tell. The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, would have the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. He could determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron’s mass to the proton’s will be. Such numbers, called the constants of nature, look utterly arbitrary to us: there is no apparent reason why they should take the value they do rather than some other value. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits “6673”?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde pointed out with evident relish, such a message would be legible only to physicists.
Was he joking?
“You might take this as a joke,” he said. “But perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may furnish the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird, so far from perfect. On the evidence, our universe wasn’t created by a divine being. It was created by a physicist hacker!”
From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. Of course, orthodox believers can always respond to a scenario like Linde’s by saying, “Okay, but who created the physicist hacker?” Let’s hope it’s not hackers all the way up.
The riddle does not exist.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 6.5
The crux of the mystery of existence, as I have said, is summed up in the question Why is there something rather than nothing? William James called this question “the darkest in all philosophy.” The British astrophysicist Sir Bernard Lovell observed that pondering it could “tear the individual’s mind asunder.” (Indeed, psychiatric patients have been known to be obsessed by it.) Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the academic field known as the History of Ideas, observed that the attempt to answer it “constitutes one of the most grandiose enterprises of the human intellect.” Like all deep incomprehensibilities, it lends an opening to jocularity. Some decades ago, when I put the question to the American philosopher Arthur Danto, he replied, with mock irritability, “Who says there’s not nothing?” (As will soon become apparent, this response is not entirely a joke.) A still better answer was supplied by Sidney Morgenbesser, late Columbia University philosopher and legendary wag. “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied!”
But the question cannot be laughed away. Each of us, as Martin Heidegger observed, is “grazed by its hidden power”:
The question looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time.… The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.
Ignoring this question is a symptom of mental deficiency—so, at least, claimed the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “The lower a man is in an intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence itself is to him,” Schopenhauer wrote. What raises man above other creatures is that he is conscious of his finitude; the prospect of death brings with it the conceivability of nothingness, the shock of nonbeing. If my own self, the microcosm, is ontologically precarious, so perhaps is the macrocosm, the universe as a whole. Conceptually, the question Why does the world exist? rhymes with the question Why do I exist? These are, as John Updike observed, the two great existential mysteries. And if you happen to be a solipsist—that is, if you believe, as did the early Wittgenstein, “I am my world”—the two mysteries fuse into one.
FOR A QUESTION that is supposed to be timeless and universal, it is strange that nobody explicitly asked, Why is there something rather than nothing? until the modern era. Perhaps it’s the “nothing” part of the question that makes it truly modern. Premodern cultures have their creation myths to explain the origin of the universe, but such myths never start from sheer nothingness. They always presuppose some primordial beings or stuff out of which reality arose. In a Norse myth current around 1200 CE, for instance, the world began when a primeval region of fire melted a primeval region of frost, giving rise to liquid drops that quickened into life and took the form of a wise giant called Ymer and a cow called Audhumla—whence eventually sprang the rest of existence as the Vikings knew it. According to a somewhat more economical creation myth, that of the African Bantus, the entire contents of the universe—sun, stars, land, sea, animals, fish, mankind—are literally vomited out of the mouth of a nauseated being called Bumba. Cultures that have no creation myth to explain how the world came into being are rare, but not unknown. One such is the Pirahã, an amusingly perverse Amazon tribe. When anthropologists ask Pirahã tribespeople what preceded the world, they invariably reply, “It has always been this way.”
A theory about the birth of the universe is called a cosmogony, from the Greek kosmos, meaning “universe,” and gonos, meaning “produce” (the same as the root for “gonad”). The ancient Greeks were the pioneers of rational cosmogony, as opposed to the mythopoetic variety exemplified by creation myths. Yet the Greeks never raised the question of why there is a world rather than nothing at all. Their cosmogonies always involved some sort of starting material, usually rather messy. The natural world, they held, came into existence when order was imposed on this primal mess: when Chaos became Cosmos. (It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.”) As to what this original Chaos might have been, the Greek philosophers had various guesses. For Thales, it was watery, a kind of ur-Ocean. For Heraclitus, it was fire. For Anaximander, it was something more abstract, an indeterminate material called “the Boundless.” For Plato and Aristotle, it was a formless substrate that might be taken as a prescientific notion of space. The Greeks did not worry too much about where this ur-matter came from. It was simply assumed to be eternal. Whatever it was, it was certainly not nothing—the very idea of which was inconceivable to the Greeks.
Nothingness was alien to the Abrahamic tradition too. The book of Genesis has God creating the world not out of nothing, but out of a chaos of earth and water “without form and void”—tohu bohu, in the original Hebrew. Early in the Christian era, however, a new way of thinking began to take hold. The notion that God needed some sort of stuff to fashion a world seemed to put a limit on his presumably infinite creative powers. So, around the second or third century CE, the church fathers adduced a radical new cosmogony. The world, they proclaimed, was summoned into existence by God’s creative word alone, without any preexisting material to make it out of. This doctrine of creation ex nihilo later became part of Islamic theology, figuring in the kalām argument for the existence of God. It also entered medieval Jewish thought. In his reading of the opening passage of Genesis, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides affirmed that God created the world out of nothing.
To say God created the world “out of nothing” is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of anything. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than nothing at all.
And a few centuries later, someone finally did—a foppish and conniving German courtier who also ranks among the greatest intellects of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The year was 1714. Leibniz, then sixtyeight, was nearing the end of a long and absurdly productive career. He had, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, invented the calculus. He had single-handedly revolutionized the science of logic. He had created a fantastic metaphysics based on an infinity of soul-like units called “monads,” and on the axiom—later cruelly mocked by Voltaire in Candide—that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” Despite his fame as a philosopher-scientist, Leibniz was left behind in Hanover when his royal employer, the elector Georg Ludwig, went to Britain to become the newly crowned King George I. Leibniz was in declining health; within two years he would be dead, expiring (according to his secretary) with the release from his body of a great cloud of noxious gas.
It was in these gloomy circumstances that Leibniz produced his final philosophical writings, among them an essay titled “Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason.” In this essay, he put forth what he called the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. “This principle having been stated,” Leibniz wrote, “the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’”
For Leibniz, the ostensible answer was easy. For reasons of career advancement, he had always pretended to hew to religious orthodoxy. The reason for the world’s existence, he accordingly claimed, was God, who created it through his own free choice, motivated by his infinite goodness.
But what was the explanation for God’s own existence? Leibniz had an answer to this question too. Unlike the universe, which exists contingently, God is a necessary being. He contains within Himself the reason for His own existence. His nonexistence is logically impossible.
Thus, no sooner was the question Why is there something rather than nothing? raised than it was dispatched. The universe exists because of God. And God exists because of God. The Godhead alone, Leibniz declared, can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery of existence.
But the Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence did not prevail for long. In the eighteenth century, both David Hume and Immanuel Kant—philosophers who were at loggerheads on most issues—attacked the notion of “necessary being” as an ontological cheat. There are, to be sure, entities whose existence is logically impossible—a square circle, for instance. But no entity’s existence, Hume and Kant agreed, is guaranteed as a matter of pure logic. “Whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent,” Hume wrote. “There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction”—including God.
But if God does not exist necessarily, then a wholly novel metaphysical possibility presents itself: the possibility of absolute nothingness—no world, no God, no anything. Oddly, however, neither Hume nor Kant took the question Why is there something rather than nothing? seriously. For Hume, any proposed answer to this question would be “mere sophistry and illusion,” since it could never be grounded in our experience. For Kant, attempting to explain the whole of being would perforce involve an illegitimate extension of the concepts that we use to structure the world of our experience—concepts like causality and time—to a reality transcending this world, the reality of “things in themselves.” The result, Kant held, could be only error and inconsistency.
Chastened, perhaps, by such Humean and Kantian strictures, subsequent philosophers largely shied away from confronting the question Why is there something rather than nothing? The great pessimist Schopenhauer, who declared the mystery of existence to be “the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics,” nevertheless called those who pretended to resolve it “fools,” “vain boasters,” and “charlatans.” The German romantic Friedrich Schelling stated that “the main function of all philosophy is the solution of the problem of the existence of the world.” Yet Schelling soon decided that it was impossible to give a rational account of existence; the most we could say, he felt, was that the world arose out of the abyss of eternal nothingness by an incomprehensible leap. Hegel wrote a good deal of obscure prose about “the vanishing of being into nothing and the vanishing of nothing into being,” but his dialectical maneuvers were dismissed by the ironic Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard as little better than “spice-seller’s explanations.”
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a modest revival of interest in the mystery of existence, mainly thanks to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. “I want to know why the universe exists,” Bergson declared in his 1907 book, Creative Evolution. All existence—matter, consciousness, God himself—was, it seemed to Bergson, a “conquest over nothingness.” But after much pondering, he concluded that this conquest was not really so miraculous. The whole something-versus-nothing question was based on an illusion, he came to believe: the illusion that it was possible for there to be nothing at all. By a series of dubious arguments, Bergson purported to prove that the idea of absolute nothingness was as self-contradictory as the idea of a round square. Since nothingness was a pseudo-idea, he concluded, the question Why is there something rather than nothing? was a pseudo-question.
This killjoy conclusion certainly made no impression on Martin Heidegger, for whom nothingness was all too real, a sort of negating force that menaced the realm of being with annihilation. At the very beginning of a series of lectures delivered in 1935 at the University of Freiburg—where he had been given the job of rector after proclaiming his allegiance to Hitler’s national socialism—Heidegger declared “Why is there being rather than nothing at all?” to be the “deepest,” “the most far-reaching,” and “the most fundamental of all questions.”
And what did Heidegger do with this question as the lectures progressed? Not a lot. He dilated on its existential pathos. He dabbled in amateur etymology, piling up Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit words related to Sein, the German word for “being.” He rhapsodized about the poetic virtues of the pre-Socratics and the Greek tragedians. At the conclusion of the final lecture, Heidegger observed that “being able to ask a question means being able to wait, even one’s whole life long”—which must have had those in the audience who had been hoping for a hint of an answer wearily nodding their heads.
Heidegger was, without question, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century in continental Europe. But in the English-speaking world, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who had the greatest philosophical sway. Wittgenstein and Heidegger were born in the same year (1889). They were pretty much opposites when it came to character: Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain. Yet they were equally seduced by the mystery of existence. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” Wittgenstein averred in one of the lapidary numbered propositions—6.44, to be precise—in the sole work he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Some years earlier, in the notebooks he kept as a soldier in the Austrian army during the First World War, Wittgenstein wrote in the entry of October 26, 1916, “Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists.” (Later that day, he made the entry, “Life is serious, art is gay”—this while fighting on the Russian front.) Wonder and amazement at the existence of the world was, Wittgenstein said, one of the three experiences that enabled him to fix his mind on ethical value. (The other two were the feeling of being absolutely safe, and the experience of guilt.) Yet, as with all truly important matters—ethical value, the meaning of life and death—attempting to explain the “aesthetic miracle” of the world’s existence was futile; it took one beyond the limits of language, Wittgenstein held, into the realm of the unsayable. While he “deeply respected” the urge to ask Why is there something rather than nothing? he ultimately believed the question to be senseless. As he starkly put it in Tractatus proposition 6.5, “The riddle does not exist.”
Ineffable though it may have been to Wittgenstein, the mystery of existence nevertheless filled him with awe and gave him a sense of spiritual illumination. For many of the British and American philosophers in his wake, by contrast, it seemed a woolly waste of time. Typifying their dismissive attitude was A. J. “Freddy” Ayer, the British champion of logical positivism, sworn enemy of metaphysics, and self-avowed philosophical heir of David Hume. In a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, Ayer engaged Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy, in a debate on the existence of God. Much of the Ayer-Copleston debate, as it turned out, was taken up with the question of why there is something rather than nothing. For Father Copleston, this question was an opening to the transcendent, a way of seeing how God’s existence is “the ultimate ontological explanation of phenomena.” For Ayer, his atheist opponent, it was illogical twaddle.
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