Courtesy the Met Museum, New York 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: 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.
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