Why anything exists |
Here’s a new answer to the old question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ (It’s neither simple nor easy)
by Andrew T Brenner BIO
Icebergs (1893-95) by Robert E Peary. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York
is associate professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Personal Ontology: Mystery and Its Consequences (2024), The Methodology of Metaphysics (2026) and Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? The Fundamental Problem of Ontology (2026).
Writing in 1714, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asked: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Philosophers have long wondered why the Universe exists, but Leibniz is credited with framing the issue in precisely these terms. The question is head-spinning when properly considered. This very obvious fact about the world – that things exist – can shift from seeming mundane and trivial to very surprising, even downright weird. Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed this astonishment when he wrote in his Tractatus (1921): ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.’ Arthur Schopenhauer in 1818 called the question ‘an unfathomable and always disquieting riddle’. And the Rigveda, one of the world’s oldest surviving religious texts, suggests that even the ‘overseer’ (adhyakṣaḥ) of the cosmos might not know the answer. Sheer existence is baffling.
Philosophers continue to discuss the question today, but there isn’t any consensus about the answer. Some have suggested that it’s the sort of question that couldn’t possibly have an answer. In 1973, the German philosopher Carl Hempel wrote:
But what kind of an answer would be appropriate? What seems to be wanted is an explanatory account which does not assume the existence of something or other. But such an account, I would submit, is a logical impossibility … No theory, no conceptual scheme, can explain the existence of anything without assuming the existence of something.
His idea is that if you were trying to explain why, for instance, any penguins at all exist, then you couldn’t appeal to a penguin in your explanation – after all, that penguin is one of the things you are trying to explain. Similarly, if we’re looking for an explanation for why anything at all exists, then our explanation cannot appeal to an existing thing, since that existing thing is one of the things we are trying to explain. But Hempel thinks that there couldn’t possibly be any other sort of explanation for why anything exists, since any explanation for why something exists has to appeal to some other existing thing.
One response to Hempel’s concern is to go ahead and do what he claimed can’t possibly be done: offer an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, an explanation that ‘does not assume the existence of something’. Many philosophers have attempted to do just that. But there is something wrong with these explanations.
Why might we expect there to be an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing in the first place? Leibniz thought there must be an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing because, as he put it, nothing would have been so much ‘simpler and easier’ than something. It is this thought that lies behind much of the astonishment people have expressed at the fact that there is something rather than nothing.
A world in which nothing exists is how we should expect the world to be if it takes what would, by our usual criteria, be its most probable state. What I have in mind here is Ockham’s Razor. Simpler accounts of the world are more likely to be correct than complex ones. For example, consider all the traits shared among the species alive today. Whales and humans have similar bone structures, despite the fact that they live in very different environments. One of Charles Darwin’s key insights was that, while it might conceivably have been true that a creator just happened to want these various species to have similar traits, despite their different environments and lifestyles, it is so much simpler to suppose that they share those traits because those traits are derived from a common ancestor. And the simplicity itself of that explanation gives us an excellent reason to think that the common traits are derived from a common ancestor. We constantly rely on the assumption that the simplest account of the world compatible with our evidence is most likely to be correct. This is something we do in science as well as in everyday life.
Many of the proposed explanations for why there is something rather than nothing that have been offered in the past do not address the apparent fact that nothing would have been so much ‘simpler and easier’ than something. The proposed explanations say that there is such-and-such a reason for why there is something rather than nothing, but they do nothing to address the thought that we should antecedently expect there to be nothing because, if there had been nothing, then reality would have been so much simpler.
There would have been a whole lot of non-ontological truths even if nothing had existed
What I’d like to do here is kill two birds with one stone: to offer an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, which simultaneously dissolves the suspicion that nothing would have been so much simpler than something. This also happens to be, as far as I can tell, a new explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, and new explanations are hard to come by given the antiquity of the question.
I would like to start with the important insight that there are truths that are not truths about existing things. Since they are not truths about existing things, we’ll call them ‘non-ontological’ truths. Contrast these with ‘ontological’ truths – truths that are about existing things, like the truth that Earth orbits the Sun, or that........