If the world consists of certain things and behaves in certain ways, we think, there must be a reason why it is so. This mistake has a name: the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The term was coined by German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, but the essential idea had been anticipated by many earlier thinkers, most notably by Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century. One way of stating it would be: Principle of Sufficient Reason: For any true fact, there is a reason why it is so, and why something else is not so instead.
