why is there

something

rather than

nothing?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

1

When I was 12, the summer between seventh and eighth grades, a

sudden realization 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.” Why is there “Something” rather than “Nothing”?

Why does anything at all exist?

I now attack the question directly—finally in my life—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

Nothing and ultimate explanations. I ask him whether my question

is a legitimate one.

“It’s legitimate,” Leslie responds, “because it can have answers.

Even if one thinks the answer is ‘there just happens to be

something,’ that’s an answer.”

Is it the most fundamental of all questions?

“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,”

Leslie says. “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

2

this ultimate question: Why is there Something rather than

Nothing?

“I think that’s right,” Leslie says. “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. “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 possibilities which is

bound to exist even though no actual things exist.”

So it’s impossible to have purely Nothing, Leslie says. “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—even if there were no

actualities, no real possibility of any actualities ever occurring,

there would still be no contradiction in the assertion that they may

possibly or potentially occur. Their occurring would not be like

the occurrence of, say, a ‘married bachelor.’”

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. “One can even go

further and say that the condition of Nothing would have to be

infinitely rich,” Leslie adds. “There’s an infinite number of

possibilities and an infinite number of facts about them [which

cohabit Nothing]. And those possibilities and the facts about them

will be there even if there were no actual things forever and ever.”

3

To Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher at the University of Notre

Dame, Nothing is important. “What would count as an answer to

the Nothing question?” he asks. “We cannot describe a way that

nonexistent things interact with each other to produce existent

things—the nonexistent is never going to produce the existent.

This question cannot be like questions about why are there living

things, answered by 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 argues that “one sort of answer would be that it was

impossible for there to be Nothing, that ‘there being Nothing’ is

actually an impossible state of affairs. And 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 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 them 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:

“Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to

every detail. There are infinitely many such possible 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?”

Inwagen continues. “There are no variants in Nothing; there being

Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of

affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition

has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there

being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if

the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all

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such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of

any one of them is essentially zero, then the probability of ‘there

being Nothing’ is also essentially zero.”

Inwagen argues that because there are an infinite number of

potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero

probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these

potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the

probably of Nothing existing is zero. A clever argument. But

doesn’t it assume that the prior probability of Nothing is precisely

the 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. Nothing seems simpler in

that all the other kinds of worlds would require Something more,

with additional explanations required for whatever constitutes

those Somethings.

Some people would answer the question glibly and say “God”—

there is Something because God created it. “Either God is a

necessary being or he’s not a necessary being,” Inwagen responds.

“If God is a necessary being then there isn’t any possibility of

there being Nothing.” (This, in essence, is the ontological

argument, which almost every philosopher rejects as deficient and

spurious, though determining precisely why has proved to be

maddening.)

“If God is a contingent being,” Inwagen continues, “then we still

have the question of, ‘Why is there Something rather than

Nothing’ because one of the possible ways for there to be is that

there is Nothing, not even God. The doctrine of divine creation

would then be, well, if God exists and 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.”

5

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.

“The question is fascinating in that it seems impossible at first

blush to give any sort of answer at all,” Rundle says. “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: There is God and God has to

exist—God exists necessarily.

“Now what I’m interested in,” Rundle continues, “is whether or

not that makes sense and can be substantiated.” He believes that

those who “in effect 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 the general petition that there has to

be Something or other,” Rundle explains, “but the theistic solution

seems to me to have its difficulties.

“Well, what are other conditions in which you can speak of

Something as beginning to exist?” Rundle asks. “Isn’t it 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 concludes that, “Perhaps we just have to confront it [the

fact of Something] as brute fact—that there is Something. One

can’t get beyond that, there’s no explaining it, and that’s that.”

6

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 wrong, of course). 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: “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 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.

“The first thing is to recognize that when people have tried to

answer this question,” Smith says, “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, he

says, “is ‘Not Something,’ so the question becomes, ‘Why is it the

case that it is false that there is not Something?’”

There is an answer to this, Smith continues, “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.

“The answer would be this,” Smith explains. “Right now,

Something is the state of affairs. The universe is Something. So

why does this Something exist? Well, it was caused to exist by the

7

previous state of the universe, which is 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 at all, I say that I just confine myself to one example,

this state of the universe.”

After he first realized this, it took him a while to recover from the

disappointment, Smith says with some regret: “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 he 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? 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, one of the foremost

Christian philosophers, thus: “I am astonished that there is

Something, anything at all. Nothing would seem to have been the

most likely, perhaps most logical, state of affairs.”

“I share that intuition,” Swinburne begins. “It is extremely

puzzling.”

8

Swinburne’s approach is to first discern the essence of

“explanation.”

“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, “So why is there

a God?” Swinburne is clear. “There is no explanation of why there

is a God. And 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 depended on some principle of logic

which was somehow superior to God.

“If God is defined as ‘explaining everything else,’” Swinburne

continues, “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.”

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…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.”

In modern physics, Weinberg explains, “the idea of empty space

without anything at all, without fields, is inconsistent with the

principles of quantum mechanics—because the Heisenberg

uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition of empty space

where fields are zero and unchanging.”

9

But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first place,

with its fields and probabilities and ways of making things

happen? “Exactly!” Weinberg says. “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.

“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.”

_____________________________________________________

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.

Candidates for essential self-existence? These 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.

• Some overarching principle or value, like Plato’s “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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“So why is there a God?” Swinburne is clear.

“There is no explanation of why there is a God. And 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 depended

on some principle of logic which was somehow superior to God.”

“If God is defined as ‘explaining everything else,’” Swinburne continues, “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.”