why is there
something
instead of
nothing?
Two Essays:
Tim Urban
Robert Kuhn
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Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?
By
Tim Urban
No, but seriously. Why is there something instead of
nothing?
Last night, as I was creeping around the internet at 2:43am
while the adults of the world slept, my eyes glanced by the
headline, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” on
the sidebar of a site I was on. I didn’t click the article. I
finally went to bed, planning to sleep eight hours, when at
7am I decide that actually, it was a better plan to wake up
and stare at the ceiling for three hours thinking about why
there was something. Instead of nothing.
I had heard the question before. It’s an old one that lots of
people have pondered. But until 7am today, it hadn’t fully hit
me how unbelievably boggling a question it was. It’s not a
question—it’s the question—and the more you think about it,
the less sense it makes.
First, my mind goes to “Wait—why is there anything at all?”
Why is there space and time and matter and energy at all?
Then, I think about the alternative. What if there were
just…nothing…at all…ever…anywhere? What if nothing
ever was in the first place? But what? No. That can’t—there
has to be something.
Nothing is truly a crazy concept. I’d keep thinking about a
false nothing—like a vast empty vacuum (which is
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something) or nothing here, but other universes elsewhere in
other dimensions (which is something), or nothing now, but
at some point, way before or after now, there being
something (which is something). Even in my question in the
paragraph above, I refer to “ever” and “anywhere”—two
words that themselves only exist in the world of something,
because time and space are something.
Trying to wrap my head around true, utter nothing, is what
kept my eyes extra wide as I stared at the ceiling between
7am and 10am this morning. But the
fact is, there isn’t nothing—there’s
something. We’re something. The
Earth is something. Space is
something. Time is something. The
observable universe and its 100 billion
galaxies are something. Which then
leads me to, Why? Why does all this
something exist? And where the hell
are we? If this universe is the only
thing there is, that’s kind of weird and
illogical—why would this big space
just exist by itself in an otherwise
nothing situation? More logical, to me, is the bubbling,
frothing multiverse situation—but okay, we still then have
the same problem. Why is this bubbling thing happening?
Where is it happening? In what context is it happening?
That’s our main issue—we have no context. It’s like being
zoomed in on a single letter and not knowing anything
else—is the letter part of a book? In a library somewhere? Is
Why is there space
and time and matter
and energy at all?
Then, I think about
the alternative.
What if there were
just…nothing…at
all…ever…anywhe
re? What if nothing
ever was in the first
place? But what?
No. That can’t—
there has to be
something.
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it part of a word that exists by itself? Is it a single letter all
alone? Is it part of some code we don’t understand? We have
no fucking idea, because all we can see is this one letter. We
have no idea about the context.
Religious people have a quick answer to “Why is there
something instead of nothing?” I’m not religious, but when
I’ve thought hard enough about it. I’ve realized that it’s as
plausible as anything else that life on Earth was created by
some other intelligent life, or that we’re part of a simulation,
or a bunch of other possibilities that would all entail us
having a creator. But in each possible case, the existence of
the creator still needs an explanation—why was there an
original creator instead of nothing—and to me, any religious
explanation inevitably hits the same wall.
I did a little reading this morning to
see how people who had thought
about this a lot more than I had felt
about the question. Not surprisingly,
no one has a clue. Certain scientists
believe that quantum mechanics
suggests that nothing is inherently
“unstable,” that it’s possible for little
bubbles of space-time (something) to
form spontaneously (out of nothing),
and that if a thing is not forbidden by
the laws of quantum physics, it is guaranteed to happen.
Therefore, say quantum physicists, the arising of
“something” was inevitable. I’ll file this whole paragraph in
the Whatever the Fuck That Means cabinet.
It’s like being zoomed in
on a single letter and not
knowing anything else—
is the letter part of a
book? In a library
somewhere? Is it part of
a word that exists by
itself? Is it a single letter
all alone? We have no
fucking idea, because all
we can see is this one
letter.
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Others, like Joel Achenbach, believe that there’s no such
thing as nothing in the first place. He explains:
Seems to me that “nothing,” for all its simplicity and
symmetry and lack of arbitrariness, is nonetheless an
entirely imaginary state, or condition, and we can say
with confidence that it has never existed. “Nothing” is
dreamed up in the world of something, in the brains of
philosophers etc. on a little blue planet orbiting an
ordinary yellow star in a certain spiral galaxy.
I don’t quite get Achenbach’s logic. Why does there have to
be a physical world at all? Why is a physical world an
automatic thing? But then…if there weren’t a physical
world—ever—then what, there’s just fucking nothing at all?
This is ruining me.
Someone help.
5
Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing
By
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
When I was 12, the summer between seventh and eighth
grades, I came to a sudden realization, and the thought struck
such fright that I strove desperately to blot it out:
Why not Nothing? What if everything had forever
been Nothing? Not just emptiness. Not just blankness.
But not even the existence of emptiness. Not even the
meaning of blankness. And no forever.
Lump together everything that exists and might exist—
physical, mental, platonic, spiritual, God. Everything. Call it
all “Something.” Ok, now why is there “Something” rather
than “Nothing”? Why does anything at all exist? Why not
nothing?
I now attack the question directly, finally, by speaking with
some really smart people, primarily philosophers (also one
physicist) who have thought long and hard about this
seemingly impossible question. I begin with one of my
favorite philosophers, John Leslie, who has been much
consumed with thinking about “Nothing” and the nature of
ultimate explanations. I ask him whether my question is a
legitimate one.
Leslie: It’s legitimate because it can have answers. Even if
one thinks the answer is “there just happens to be
something,” that’s still an answer.
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Is it the most fundamental of all questions?
Leslie: One could argue that all one’s views about the
nature of the universe will in the end depend on
whether the universe, which one believes exists,
could have a reason behind its existence. I myself
don’t like the theory that the universe just happens
to exist and just happens to have the characteristics
which it does.
At the end of all our strivings, after we have a final theory or
a series of final theories, and/or multiple universes with
perhaps different final theories in each, will we not still have
remaining this ultimate question: Why is there Something
rather than Nothing?
Leslie: I think that’s right. I don’t think it would be possible
to say, for example, that because quantum physics
tells us that it’s likely that a blank would at some
point fluctuate into a real world that that’s our final
answer. Because the question would then be, “Well,
why does this kind of quantum physics apply to
reality?”
I try to progress by trying to discern the nature of Nothing.
Nothing seems “simpler” than Something, I proffer, in that
Something has extra stuff to be explained, whereas nothing
does not. Leslie agrees, but amplifies the point.
Leslie: Even in a blank, there would be all sorts of facts.
Try to imagine out of existence all actual things. Is
that Nothing? In a sense, yes. But that overlooks the
fact that there’s an infinite richness of truths about
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possibilities which is bound to exist even though no
actual things exist.”
Leslie: So it’s impossible to have purely Nothing because
one always has possibilities. One always has facts
about relationships with possibilities. And one also
has the fact that certain possibilities are good and
other possibilities are bad. These are facts from
which one can never escape when think about what
exists—even if there were no actualities, no real
possibility of any actualities ever occurring, there
would still be no contradiction in the assertion that
actualities may possibly or potentially occur. Their
occurring would not be like the occurrence of, say,
a “married bachelor,” a logical contradiction.
For a philosopher to assert that anything is “impossible” is
an assertion of significance, and Leslie says that it is
impossible for there to be a Nothing without possibilities.
Leslie: One can even go further and say that the condition
of Nothing would have to be infinitely rich. There’s
an infinite number of possibilities and an infinite
number of facts about them. And those possibilities
and the facts about them will be there even if there
were no actual things forever and ever.
To Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher at the University of
Notre Dame, Nothing is important.
Inwagen: What would count as an answer to the Nothing
question? Well, we cannot describe a way that
nonexistent things could interact with each other
to produce existent things—the nonexistent is
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never going to produce the existent. Thus, this
question cannot be like questions about why
living things exist, when it gets answered there
answered by referring to the ways that nonliving
things may have interacted to produce living
things. Explaining why we have Something
would have to have a wholly different kind of
answer, if it had an answer at all.
Inwagen: One sort of answer to the question would be that
it was impossible for there to be Nothing, that
“there being Nothing” is actually an impossible
state of affairs. That, of course, would explain
why there was Something rather than Nothing,
since the impossible cannot occur. There have
been two attempts at this in the history of
philosophy. One is subsumed under the name
“ontological argument”—a greatest possible
Being must necessarily exist—and the other
under the name “cosmological argument,”
everything that exists must have a reason or an
explanation for its existence; whatever begins to
exist must have a cause. But I myself don’t find
either of these attempts convincing.
Another way of answering the question of why there is
Something rather than Nothing, Inwagen suggests, would be
to show that “it’s vastly improbable for there to be Nothing.”
Here’s his argument:
Inwagen: Think of all the possible ways that the reality or
existence might have been, right down to every
detail about the universe that could have been
different. There are infinitely many such possible
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ways. All these ways seem to be equally
probable—which means that the probability of
any one of these infinite possibilities actually
occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them
happened.
Now, there’s only one way for there to be
Nothing, right? There are no variants in Nothing;
there being Nothing at all is one single state of
affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it
settles everything. So there being Nothing that
exists was just one of the possibilities, just one
way for reality to be. And if the total number of
ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such
infinite ways are equally probable such that the
probability of any one of them occurring is
essentially zero, then the probability of there
having been “Nothing instead of something” is
also essentially zero.
If one adopts this argument, Inwagen demonstrates, it’s like
answering the “why is there something instead of nothing?”
question by arguing “the reason there is something instead of
nothing is because it would have been very improbable for
there to have been nothing instead of something (if it were
even possible at all). Because there are an infinite number of
potential worlds—potential ways in which reality could
exist—each specific world would have a (essentially) zero
probability of existing, and because “there being nothing in
existence” is just one more of these potential worlds, the
probably of Nothing existing is (essentially) zero. A clever
argument. But doesn’t it assume that the prior probability of
“Nothing existing instead of something” is precisely the
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same as that of every one of the infinite number of possible
ways the world might have been? Inwagen’s argument turns
on the assumption that a “Nothing Total World” is equally
probable to every kind of an infinite number of “Something
Total Worlds.”
But, to me, Nothing seems different. “There being nothing
which exists” seems a much simpler type of reality, in that
all the other kinds of possible realities, in which something
exists, would require additional explanations in order to
explain those somethings.
Of course, some people answer this question glibly and say
“God.” “there is Something instead of nothing because God
created it.”
Inwagen: Either God is a necessary being—which would
mean that God’s non-existence is impossible—or
he’s not a necessary being, If God is a necessary
being then “there being Nothing” would be
impossible.
This, in essence, is the ontological argument for God’s
existence, which almost every philosopher rejects as
deficient and spurious, though determining precisely why
has proved to be maddening.
Inwagen: If God is a contingent being (not a necessary
being) then we still have the question of, “Why
is there Something rather than Nothing” because
one of the possible ways for reality to be is:
“there is Nothing, not even God.” The doctrine
of divine creation would then be “God exists and
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if anything else exists, that anything else must be
because God created it.” This may explain why
there’s a physical world, but not why there is
Something rather than Nothing.
At the end of all disputations, Inwagen himself says, “I know
what I think is the right answer: I think God exists and that
God is a necessary being, and therefore it’s not possible for
there to be Nothing.”
As for God being the answer, I put the question to University
of Oxford atheistic philosopher Bede Rundle, whose book
Why There is Something Rather than Nothing rejects the God
hypothesis.
Rundle: The question is fascinating in that it seems
impossible at first blush to give any sort of
answer at all. It’s had a longish history, starting
with Gottfried Leibniz; many philosophers have
tried their hand at giving an answer. St. Thomas
Aquinas worked out his answer, arguing “There is
God and God has to exist. He exists necessarily.”
Rundle: Now what I’m interested in is whether or not that
makes sense and can be substantiated. Those who
think that “there being Nothing” is not a genuine
alternative because there has to be Something
because there has to be God” are on the right
track—except for the God part. I’m trying to agree
with their general petition that there has to be
Something or other but the theistic solution seems
to me to have its difficulties.
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Rundle: So what are other conditions in which you can
speak of Something as beginning to exist? Isn’t it
the case that there has to be a time when it (the
Something) doesn’t exist followed by a time when
it does exist? But if you don’t have anything at
all, then you don’t have “enough time”; so it
doesn’t make sense to think of a state of affairs of
Nothing being followed by a state of affairs of
Something.
Rundle: Perhaps we just have to confront it—the fact of
Something existing—as brute fact, that there just
is Something. One can’t get beyond that, and
there’s no explaining it, and that’s that.
To me, to accept “brute fact” as the final explanation of
Everything—All-There-Is—is maximally unsatisfying, which
doesn’t make a brute fact hypothesis wrong, of course, just
maximally unsatisfying. Is this just a defect of human
cognition? Certainly evolution would have no reason to
select for capacity to understand this question. Rundle
answers me thus:
Rundle: If it’s a conceptual truth that there is Something,
and if there has to be Something, then that’s an
end to your agonizing, surely. And if you could
refute all the arguments that say, “We can make
sense of the state of affairs which is Nothing at
all,” then there is no alternative. There’s no such
thing or possibility as there being Nothing.
So Rundle believes that there must be Something or other.
There cannot be Nothing. Nothing is an impossible state of
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affairs. Is this progress? Or word games? I can’t decide.
“Nothing” still haunts me. “God” would close off debate.
What are alternatives? Quentin Smith, an atheistic
philosopher who is fixated on the riddle of existence, has his
answer.
Smith: The first thing is to recognize that when people have
tried to answer this question they have defined
Nothing as this very thin sort of Something, like
empty space, quantum vacuum, the null set, a point,
and the like—but few have really talked about
Nothing. A better way to define a real Nothing
is “Not Something,” so the question becomes:
“Why is it the case that it is false that there is not
Something?”
Smith: There is an answer to this, but it’s rather trite and
trivial, whereas we’ve associated this question as
having some great, grand, magnificent metaphysical
answer—but the answer is just logically trivial and
then really quite uninteresting.
Smith: The answer would be this: Right now, there being
Something is the state of affairs. The universe is
Something. So why does this Something exist?
Well, it was caused to exist by the previous state of
the universe, which was also Something, and that
previous state was also caused by a state previous
to that, which again is also Something and the
infinite regress, the endless series of causes
backward, can continue without end. And so the
reason why there is Something is that each
Something that exists has been caused by a prior
Something, and if you ask why there is Something
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at all, I say that I just confine myself to one
example: this state of the universe.
Smith: After I first realized this, it took me a while to
recover from the disappointment. I thought to
myself: “I spent all my life wondering why there is
Something rather than Nothing…and this is the
answer?”
Smith concludes that to call existence a “brute fact” is a
more logically complete explanation than either theism or
any other theory because there are no questions left
unanswered in the “brute fact” explanation. So Smith
contends that while “No Thing existing” might have been the
case, “Some Thing existing” is the case. And the reason is
trivial: Each and every thing was caused by a prior thing.
That can’t be the answer, but might it be? I still want to
scream, “Why Not Nothing?” Every time I return to it, the
question drives me crazy. To conclude, I consider God. And
then no God. In each case, I address the question, “Why Not
Nothing?” In each case, I ask one of the world’s most
profound thinkers.
I put the question to Richard Swinburne. He is one of the
foremost Christian philosophers currently living. I describe
my intuition: “I am astonished that there is Something,
anything at all, because Nothing would seem to have been
the most likely, perhaps most logical, state of affairs.”
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“I share that intuition,” Swinburne responds, “It is extremely
puzzling.” Swinburne’s approach to the question is to first
discern the essence of “explanation.”
Swinburne: All explanation,” he says, “consists in trying to
find something simple and ultimate on which
everything else depends. And I think that by
rational inference what we can get to that’s
simple and ultimate is God. But it’s not
logically necessary that there should be a God.
The supposition “there is no God” contains no
contradiction.”
I ask the traditional skeptical follow-up question: “OK, so
why is there a God?” Swinburne is clear.
Swinburne: There is no explanation of why there is a God.
In fact, it would be theologically problematic
if there were such an explanation of any kind.
If one were to say, “well, as a matter of fact,
it is logically necessary that there is a God,”
well then that would be a theological problem
because that would mean that the existence of
God would depended on some principle of
logic which was somehow superior to God.
Swinburne: If God is defined as “explaining everything
else” then God wouldn’t be God if there were
an explanation of his existence. God to be God
is “the ultimate truth.” That’s just how it is.
We can’t go further than that.
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To Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics, the question,
“Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the
kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a
final theory of physics.
Weinberg: We will be left facing the irreducible mystery
because whatever our theory is, no matter how
mathematically consistent and logically
consistent the theory is, there will always be the
alternative that, well, perhaps there could have
been nothing at all.
Weinberg: In modern physics, the idea of empty space
without anything at all, without fields, is
inconsistent with the principles of quantum
mechanics. This is because the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition
of empty space where fields are zero and
unchanging.
But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first
place, with its fields and probabilities and ways of making
things happen?
Weinberg: Exactly! Quantum mechanics doesn’t answer
the question, “Why do we live in a world
governed by these laws? And we will never
have an answer to that.
“Does that bother you?” I ask him. “Yes,” Weinberg says
wistfully. “I would like to have an answer to everything, but
I’ve gotten used to the fact that I won’t.”
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Here’s how I see it: The primary questions people pose—
Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure,
but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at
all?” is the ultimate question.
I’ve come to only two kinds of answers. The first is that
there is no answer. Existence is a brute fact without
explanation. Something or Other has to exist. I don’t like
this, but I must accept that it may be so. The second is that at
the primordial beginning—whatever that may mean—
Something was self-existing. The essence of this Something
was its existence, such that nonexistence to it would be as
inherently impossible as physical immortality to us is
factually impossible. So, what are the candidates for
essential self-existence? They include:
Matter-energy and space-time.
Natural laws of physics or higher-order laws that
generate quantum mechanics and perhaps multiple
universes.
Forms of consciousness, cosmic or otherwise.
A creator God or an ultimate cause beyond the physical.
Or some overarching metaphysical principle or value,
like Plato’s “The Form of the Good,” which somehow
has causative powers.
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There are no doubt other candidates. And the argument that
our human brains/minds are incapable of answering this
question, or even properly addressing it, cannot be refuted.
Why is there Something rather than Nothing? If you don’t
get dizzy, you really don’t get it. Nothing is….closer to truth.
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OK, so why is there a God?” Swinburne is clear.
There is no explanation of why there is a God. In fact, it would be theologically
problematic if there were such an explanation of any kind. If one were to say,
“well, as a matter of fact, it is logically necessary that there is a God,” well
then that would be a theological problem because that would mean that the
existence of God would depended on some principle of logic which was
somehow superior to God.
If God is defined as “explaining everything else” then God wouldn’t be God if
there were an explanation of his existence. God to be God is “the ultimate
truth.” That’s just how it is. We can’t go further than that.”
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