Why Does the World Exist?: One Man's Quest for the Big Answer

by Jim Holt

In other words, if it is even possible that God exists, then it is necessary that he exists.

Finally, and not least among its virtues, the modal ontological argument holds out the hope of answering the question Why is there something rather than nothing? If God is possible, it says, then God is necessary—and hence nothingness is impossible.

“We’re bootstrapping our way toward better and better explanations. And that’s why we can never have an ultimate explanation. Anything pretending to be an ‘ultimate’ explanation would be a bad explanation, because there would be nothing left over to explain why it was the right one—to explain why reality was that way and not another way.

First, it might go in a circle: A is true because B, and B is true because A. (The circle might be widened by lots of intermediate explanatory truths: A because B, B because C, … Y because Z, Z because A.) But a circular explanation is no good. Saying “A because B because A” is a roundabout way of saying “A because A.” And no truth explains itself. Second, the explanatory chain might go on forever: A1 is true because A2, A2 is true because A3, A3 is true because A4, and so on, to infinity. But that’s no good either. Such an endless regress, Aristotle observed, supplies no ultimate explanatory foundation for knowledge.

“The ultimate principle which is true will, I have suggested, explain itself by subsuming itself,” Nozick wrote. “Being a deep fact, deep enough to subsume itself and to yield itself, the principle will not be left dangling without any explanation.” So as the terminus of an explanatory chain, a self-subsuming principle is certainly preferable to a brute fact.

Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. —ALLAN SANDAGE, the father of modern astronomy

Science can only be applied when space and time exist

The reason there is Something rather than Nothing is, as they fancifully put it, that nothingness is unstable.

I have to deeply search the instability of nothingness.

“In answer to the question of why it happened,” Tryon later commented, “I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

Imagine spacetime as the surface of a sphere. (Such a spacetime is called “closed,” since it curves back on itself; it is finite, even though it has no boundaries.)

We have arrived at nothingness. We have also arrived at a precise definition of nothingness: a closed spacetime of zero radius.

With this characterization in hand, Vilenkin was able to do an interesting calculation. Using the principles of quantum theory, he showed that, out of such an initial state of nothingness, a tiny bit of energy-filled vacuum could spontaneously “tunnel” into existence.

At the moment, the physics community is pinning its hopes on “string theory,” which seeks to interpret all of physical reality as consisting of tiny strings of energy vibrating in higher-dimensional space.

Newtonian physics offers no hint about the initial conditions of the solar system.

that a universe without conscious observers would be logically inconsistent. So he wasn’t surprised that this universe seemed improbably fine-tuned for life.

Nozick thought it was a philosophical principle that everything you can imagine existing actually does exist.

The principle says that all possibilities are realized, but the principle itself is just one of those possibilities, so by its own lights it must be realized.

I objected that the principle of fecundity, far from being self-consistent, might be so ontologically prodigal that it actually leads to contradiction. It’s like the set of all sets—which, being a set, has to contain itself. But if some sets contain themselves, one can also consider the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves. Call this set R. Now ask, Does R contain itself? If it does, then by definition it doesn’t; and if it doesn’t, then by definition it does. Contradiction! (Weinberg, of course, immediately recognized this as Russell’s paradox.) The fecundity principle, I claimed, suffered from a similarly fatal logical defect.

If all possibilities are realized, and some possibilities include themselves, whereas others don’t, then the possibility that all self-excluding possibilities are realized must itself be realized. And that possibility is as self-contr...

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern? Is the ultimate unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?

1. Why the laws exist. 2. If we know why. Then how do they make the events of life follow their rules.

The same is true, Plato held, of numbers. The number 2, for instance, must be composed of a pair of perfectly equal units; but no two things in the sensible world are perfectly equal.

Se know that pi exists but we dont know why. We also cant accurately use it because it contains an infinite fraction.

Penrose used sophisticated mathematical techniques to prove that the expansion of the universe out of the Big Bang must have been a precise reversal of the collapse of a star into a black hole. In other words, the universe must have begun as a singularity.

(I once heard the philosopher Arthur Danto say that every philosophy department should keep an impossible object around the office,

Math creates Matter, Matter creates Mind, and Mind creates Math

they compose what we call “applied mathematics.” Others, like those positing higher infinities, are purely hypothetical.

So the existence of mathematical objects is not mandated by logic, as Penrose seemed to believe. It is merely permitted by logic

Mathematics, the aged Russell wrote, “has ceased to seem to me non-human in its subject-matter.

Willard Van Orman Quine, the dean of twentieth-century American philosophy and the man who famously declared, “To be is to be the value of a variable.

Mathematical Platonism turned out to be a nonstarter as an ultimate explanation of being. But its shortcomings invite deeper reflection on the nature of reality. Of what does reality, at the most fundamental level, consist? It was Aristotle who supplied the classic answer to this question: Reality = Stuff + Structure

This Aristotelian doctrine is known as “hylomorphism,” from the Greek hyle (stuff) and morphe (form, structure). It says that nothing really exists unless it is a composite of structure and stuff. Stuff without structure is chaos—tantamount, in the ancient Greek imagination, to nothingness.

At each deeper level of explanation, what was thought to be stuff has given way to pure structure.

The Analysis of Matter, when it comes to the intrinsic nature of the entities making up the world, science is silent.

It would be a fact that this empty universe was a lot better than a universe full of people who were in immense misery. And this would mean that there was an ethical need for the emptiness to continue rather than being replaced by a universe of infinite suffering. But there might also be another ethical need in the opposite direction—a need for this emptiness to be replaced with a good universe, one full of happiness and beauty. And Plato thought that the ethical requirement that a good universe exist was itself enough to create the universe.

I fully agree with this

“you’re actually suggesting that the universe somehow exploded into being out of an abstract need for goodness?” Leslie was coolly unflappable. “Provided you accept the view that this world is, on balance, a good world, the idea that it was created by the need for the existence of a good world can at least get off the ground,

it has even provided an explanation for God’s own existence: he exists because of the ethical need for a perfect being

If a poor child is starving to death, it would be good if a bowl of rice were to come into existence to save that child’s life. Yet we never see a bowl of rice materialize for the child out of nothingness. So why should we expect an entire cosmos to do the same?

“People like me,” he said, “people who accept the Platonic view that the universe exists because it ought to exist, we aren’t saying that absolutely all ethical requirements are satisfied. We recognize that there are conflicts. If you’re going to have an orderly world that runs according to laws of nature—which is a very elegant and interesting way for a world to be—you can’t have bowls of rice suddenly appearing miraculously. Moreover, the fact that the child doesn’t have a bowl of rice may very well be the result of a misuse of human freedom, and 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.

Why do they discount this? The sheer existence of something rather than nothing simply cries out for explanation. And where are the competitors to my Platonic theory?” Well, he had a point there. So far, at least, none of the other solutions I had heard proposed—those based on quantum cosmology, or on mathematical necessity, or on God—had held up. At this point, Platonic goodness appeared to be the only cosmic suspect out there.

“Notice,” Leslie said, “that for life to evolve in the universe, each of the cosmic constants needs to be fine-tuned in a particular way for many different reasons at once. The strength of the electromagnetic force, for example, has to be in a particular narrow range, first, so matter would be distinguished from radiation and you have something to make living beings out of; second, so that all quarks wouldn’t turn into leptons, meaning there never would have been any atoms; third, so that protons wouldn’t decay so quickly that there’d soon be no atoms remaining, let alone organisms to survive the radiation produced by the decay; fourth, for protons not to repel one another so strongly that there’d be no such thing as chemistry, and hence no chemically-based beings like us.”

In other words, you have to believe that (1) value is objective, (2) value is creative, and (3) the world is good

Leibniz

Voltaire

Perhaps, they say, evil has no genuine reality but is merely a negation, the local absence of goodness, the way blindness is the absence of sight.

(This is the so-called privative theory of evil.)

Or perhaps evil is an inevitable by-product of the good of freedom, which cannot exist without the possi...

THE LAST WORD FROM ALL SOULS

Derek Parfit.