Yet, in both cases, quantum cosmologists must presuppose the existence of a universe. But that presupposes the very thing, the origin of which, they are attempting to explain. As philosopher of physics Willem Drees notes: “Hawking and Hartle interpreted their wave function of the universe as giving the probability for the universe to appear from nothing. However, this is not a correct interpretation, since the normalization presupposes a universe, not nothing.”22
