Why Something Rather than Nothing?

Many religious believers are hung up on existence. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" they ask, perplexed by the world around them. Here's the odd thing: many atheists are hung up on it too. I don't know how often I've heard hosts of atheist call-in shows say to a theist who raised this question: "The right answer is: I don't know." No it isn't!

If you just stare at it for a bit, you'll see that it's a very bizarre question. I have to wonder why anyone ever thought to ask it. I want to say: what did you expect? Nothing, after all, is no thing. It's not a special sort of thing. It's the void, the absence, the zero. Nothing does not exist, and so nothing can come from nothing. Why should it be thought of as the default? Why does existence itself need explaining?

Of course something exists. It's the only thing that could exist. And yes, it displays order. What would you expect of something that is subject to the laws of identity and causality? Disorder? Laptops changing into burning bushes?

But there's more to say here. Note that the question that perplexes so many people begins with why. In normal language, why is a request for an explanation. "Why do dogs bury bones?" "Why do apples drop from trees?" "Why does the earth move around the sun?" These are reasonable requests for causal explanations for natural phenomena. Such requests presuppose identity and causality: what is it about certain things that bring about other things? Entities are what they are, and what they do is determined by their natures.

But the question "Why does something exist rather than nothing?" is not reasonable. It asks what caused existence itself, but causal explanations already presuppose and can arise only within existence. 

Why in the world would anyone think that a why question could be applied to the whole of existence? Nothing -- no thing -- could exist outside of existence. That includes causes. Existence, then, does not require an explanation. It is presupposed by the very concept explanation. To ask for an explanation of existence is to drop the context in which our concepts were formed. It's a nonsense question.

"The natural universe sets the context in which explanation is possible, so the concept of explanation cannot legitimately be extended to the universe as a whole," George H. Smith writes in Atheism: The Case Against God. 

As has been pointed out many times, God can't be of any help anyway. To say that the problem of existence is solved by the God is about as legitimate an explanation as saying that Penn & Teller accomplish their amazing feats with magic. It only sounds (barely) like an explanation, but it's actually a pseudo-explanation. You know nothing after it has been uttered that you did not know before. Some explanation!

The point of an explanation is to move from the known to the as-yet unknown. "To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure," David Brooks writes in The Necessity of Atheism. "To explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy." What's worse is to try to explain the known by the unknowable!

Besides, why can't we ask: "Why is there God rather than nothing?" The theist will say that God satisfies the "principle of sufficient reason." But that's just an ad hoc arbitrary declaration. Smith writes, "If god can be his own sufficient reason, there is no basis on which to argue that the universe cannot likewise be its own sufficient reason, in which case there is no need to posit god in the first place." At least we all can experience existence.

That's the key. Theists have yet to tell us why existence itself is not self-sufficient. They just pronounce it such as though God whispered it in their ears. Yet Spinoza showed this was nonsense 400 years ago. Even then it wasn't unheard of because some of the ancient Greeks had already figured it out.

The self-sufficiency of existence has another implication, namely, that time is within the universe; the universe is not within time. Smith writes:

The universe, then, has always existed and always will exist. Some theists find this difficult to accept, and they argue that god makes the universe easier to understand. Yet, while the theist complains of the difficulty accepting the notion of an eternally existing universe, consider his alternative. We must conceive of a supernatural, unknowable, eternally existing being, and, moreover, we must conceive of this being creating matter from the void of nonexistence. It is strange that those who object to the idea of eternal matter display little difficulty in accepting the creation of something out of nothing. While the idea of an eternal universe may be initially difficult for some people to assimilate, the theist's alternative is an exercise in fantasy.

 

Why is there something rather than nothing? Now you know.