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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.
There is no way, for example, that the finite mind of a mathematician could contain an infinity of numbers.
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?
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?
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 “
Leibniz wrote, “the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?
motivated by his infinite goodness.
necessary
The universe exists because of God.
And God exists because of God.
thanks to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. “I want to know why the universe exists,
“Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists.
why the world exists was beyond the reach of science.
I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.
the universe must be either expanding or contracting. This struck him as grotesque, so he added a fiddle-factor to his theory so that it would allow for a universe that was both eternal and unchanging.
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.
If the universe hadn’t always existed, science would be confronted by the need for an explanation of its existence,
How could something have arisen from nothing?
According to quantum theory, events at the micro-level happen in aleatory fashion; they violate the classical principle of causation.
were asking one of the best questions ever to have been asked, a question that has painfully led to much of modern science.
“from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.
When you have understood that nothing is
cosmos may have exploded into being in answer to a need for goodness. If they are right, the world, and our existence within it, may be better than it appears to us. We should be on the lookout for its subtler virtues, like hidden harmonies and dappled things.
We may feel like the mathematician Georg Cantor did when he made a profound new discovery about infinity. “I see it,” Cantor exclaimed, “but I don’t believe it.”
Heidegger distinguished between fear, which has a definite object, and anxiety, a vague sense of not being at home in the world. What, in our anxious states, are we afraid of? Nothing! Our existence issues from the abyss of nothingness and ends in the nothingness of death. Thus the intellectual encounter each of us has with nothingness is suffused with the dread of our own impending nonbeing.
He imagined nothing as “a vacuum force, sucking things into non-existence or keeping them there. If this force acts upon itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness, producing something or, perhaps, everything.
There is just no alternative to being.
The British idealist F. H. Bradley, author of the dauntingly titled Appearance and Reality,
nothingness was unthinkable.
Does the fact that we cannot imagine absolute nothingness—except, perhaps, in a state of dreamless sleep
We can’t visualize colorless objects,
Most of us, with the exception of a few preternaturally gifted mathematicians, cannot imagine curved space.
If there were nothing, then it would have been a fact that there was nothing. So at least one thing would exist after all: that fact!
Space is not nothing,” he insists, “it is something you can stare into or travel through, something of which there can be volumes.
Nothingness = a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius
if a world with n objects is possible, then a world with n–1 objects is also possible.
“collapse into nonexistence.” The world is not like a house, which, once the builder is finished with it, continues to stand. Rather, it is like a car balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff. Without divine power to maintain its balance, it would plunge into the precipice of nothingness.
“The Big Bang theory tells us that the universe came into being only around 14 billion years ago. That’s a drop in the bucket when you consider eternity. What was the universe doing in that infinite stretch of time before the Big Bang singularity, if not failing to exist? And wouldn’t that make nonexistence its natural state?
Very important point of view. But that takes us again to the point where we are asking what is nothingness.
But the lesson of the Big Bang model is that before the initial state there was no time.
You’re seated for a while fiddling with your program, and then suddenly at t = 0 the music starts. But the analogy is mistaken. Unlike the beginning of a concert, the singularity at the beginning of the universe is not an event in time. Rather, it is a temporal boundary or edge. There are no moments of time “before” t = 0. So there was never a time when Nothingness prevailed. And there was no “coming into being”—at least not a temporal one. As Grünbaum is fond of saying, even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by “always” you mean at all instants of time.
Immanuel Kant argued that a beginning-less world led to paradox: how, he asked, could the present day ever have arrived if an infinite number of days had to pass first?
Some thinkers object to the notion because it entails that an infinite series of tasks might have been completed before the present moment
Why such an absurdly busy cosmos? Why any cosmos at all, whether finite or infinite? Why not nothing?
To say that God is causa sui is really to say that he is uncaused. His existence needs no cause because it is necessary. Or, to put the point somewhat differently, his existence needs no explanation because it is self-explanatory.
By this criterion, for example, Napoléon was not truly great, since he might have died of the flu as a child in Corsica instead of growing up to conquer Europe. Indeed, if his parents had arranged their schedule of sexual congress differently, Napoléon might not have existed at all. Now, a maximally great being is one whose greatness is unexcelled in every possible world. Such a being would, if it existed, be omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good.