Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

by Jim Holt

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.

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.

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?”

If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What greater proof of the reality of the Big Bang—you can watch it on TV.

The life of the universe, like each of our lives, may be a mere interlude between two nothings.

All existence might be chalked up to a random fluctuation in the void,

It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world.

Before we start delving into the mystery of existence, it seems only fair to give nothingness its due. For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.”

Nothingness = a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius

If Being is like the blaze of the noonday sun, then nothingness is like a starless night sky, inspiring a sort of pleasurable terror in the adventurous thinker who contemplates it.

Why? Because the first hypothesis is simpler. Science always reaches for the simplest hypothesis. If it didn’t, one could never move beyond the data. To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world.”

You can explain A by B, B by C, and C by D, but in the end all you can do is find the simplest hypothesis that explains as much as possible of reality. That’s where explanation has to stop. And that intellectual stopping point, I claim, is God. As to why God exists, I can’t answer that question. I can’t answer that question.”

“For that to happen, the laws of physics must have a very special property. They permit—they mandate—their own comprehensibility. And you can take this further. If it’s true that the world is comprehensible, that we’re capable of understanding it, then in order to understand the behavior of humans, you need to understand everything! Since the structure of quasars is represented in the brains of human scientists, the behavior of scientists depends on the behavior of quasars. To predict what papers a physicist will write next year, you have to know something about quasars. By the same argument, it follows that to know all truths about humans, you need to know all the truths there are.”

He even confessed to some sadness at the prospect, writing that “with the discovery of a final theory we may regret that nature has become more ordinary, less full of wonder and mystery.”

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”),

It’s part of the human tragedy: we’re faced with a mystery we can’t understand.”

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

“Actually, there are three worlds,” he replied, warming to my challenge. “Three worlds! And they’re all separate from one another. There’s the Platonic world, there’s the physical world, and there’s also the mental world, the world of our conscious perceptions. And the interconnections among these three worlds are mysterious.

But the electrons, protons, and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.

you can’t have the goodness of a world where agents are free to make decisions unless you also have the possibility that those agents will make bad decisions.”

(I) For every truth, there is an explanation of why it is true. (II) No truth explains itself.

Some things that are impossible to imagine, I pointed out, are quite easy to describe mathematically.

So my existence, from the perspective of the cosmos, has neither meaning nor purpose nor necessity. (And that is nothing to be ashamed of. For the same would be true of God, if God existed.) I am an accidental, contingent thing. I might easily not have existed at all.

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness.”

So quantum theory accounts for why there is something rather than nothing. Nôtre univers est venu par hasard d’une fluctuation quantique du vide. Our universe arose by chance from a quantum fluctuation in the void. And that’s the end of it.