Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (4 page)

Ineffable though it may have been to Wittgenstein, the mystery of existence nevertheless filled him with awe and gave him a sense of spiritual illumination. For many of the British and American philosophers in his wake, by contrast, it seemed a woolly waste of time. Typifying their dismissive attitude was A. J. “Freddy” Ayer, the British champion of logical positivism, sworn enemy of metaphysics, and self-avowed philosophical heir of David Hume. In a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, Ayer engaged Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy, in a debate on the existence of God. Much of the Ayer-Copleston debate, as it turned out, was taken up with the question of why there is something rather than nothing. For Father Copleston, this question was an opening to the transcendent, a way of seeing how God’s existence is “
the ultimate ontological
explanation of phenomena.” For Ayer, his atheist opponent, it was illogical twaddle.

“
Supposing
,” Ayer said, “you asked a question like ‘Where do all things come from?’ Now that’s a perfectly meaningful question as regards any given event. Asking where it came from is asking for a description of some event prior to it. But if you generalize that question, it becomes meaningless. You’re then asking what event is prior to all events. Clearly no event can be prior to all events. Because it’s a member of the class of all events it must be included in it, and therefore can’t be prior to it.”

Wittgenstein, who listened to the radio broadcast, later told a friend that he found Ayer’s reasoning to be “
incredibly shallow
.” Still, the debate was deemed so close that a televised rematch was scheduled a few years later. But Ayer and Copleston were plied with so much whiskey while a technical malfunction was being corrected that both men were reduced to incoherence by the time the debate commenced.

The disagreement between Ayer and Copleston on the meaningfulness of the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
came down to a dispute over the very nature of philosophy. And the vast majority of philosophers, at least in the English-speaking world, sided with Ayer in this dispute. There were two kinds of truths, the orthodoxy went: logical truths and empirical truths. Logical truths depended only on the meanings of words. The necessities they expressed, like
All bachelors are unmarried
, were merely verbal necessities. Hence, logical truths could not explain anything about reality. Empirical truths, by contrast, depended on the evidence furnished by the senses. They were the province of scientific inquiry. And it was generally conceded that the question of why the world exists was beyond the reach of science. A scientific explanation, after all, could account for one bit of reality only in terms of other bits; it could never account for reality
as a whole
. So the existence of the world could be only a brute fact. Bertrand Russell summed up the philosophical consensus:
“I should say
that the universe is just there, and that is all.”

Science, for the most part, concurred. The brute-fact take on existence is a fairly comfortable one if you assume that the universe has
always
been around. And that, indeed, was what most of the greatest scientists of the modern era—including Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton—believed. Einstein was convinced that the universe was not only eternal but also, on the whole, unchanging. So when, in 1917, he applied his general theory of relativity to spacetime as a whole, he was perplexed to find that his equations implied something radically different: the universe must be either expanding or contracting. This struck him as grotesque, so he added a fiddle-factor to his theory so that it would allow for a universe that was both eternal and unchanging.

It was an ordained priest who had the nerve to push relativity to its logical conclusion. In 1927, Georges Lemaître, of the University of Louvain in Belgium, worked out an Einsteinian model of the universe in which space was expanding. Reasoning backward, Father Lemaître proposed that at some definite point in the past the entire universe must have originated from a primeval atom of infinitely concentrated energy. Two years later, Lemaître’s expanding-universe model was confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, whose observations at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California established that the galaxies everywhere around us were indeed receding. Both theory and empirical evidence pointed to the same verdict: the universe must have had an abrupt beginning in time.

Churchmen rejoiced. Scientific proof of the biblical account of creation had, they believed, dropped into their laps. Pope Pius XII, opening a conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that this new theory of cosmic origins bore witness “
to that primordial
Fiat lux
uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation… . Hence, creation took place in time, therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!”

Those at the other ideological extreme gnashed their teeth—Marxists in particular. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted their belief in the infinity and eternity of matter, which was one of the axioms of Lenin’s dialectical materialism. Accordingly, the theory was dismissed as “idealistic.” The
Marxisant
physicist David Bohm rebuked the developers of the theory as “
scientists who effectively
turn traitor to science, and discard scientific facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church.” Atheists of a non-Marxist stripe were also recalcitrant. “
Some younger scientists
were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source,” commented the German astronomer Otto Heckmann, a prominent investigator of cosmic expansion. The dean of the profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote that “
the notion of a beginning
is repugnant to me… . I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang … the expanding Universe is preposterous … incredible … it leaves me cold.”

Even some believing scientists were troubled. The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle felt that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like “
a party girl
jumping out of a cake.” In a BBC interview in the 1950s, Hoyle sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as “the Big Bang.” The term stuck.

Einstein, not long before his death in 1955, managed to overcome his metaphysical scruples about the Big Bang. He referred to his earlier attempt to dodge it by an ad hoc theoretical device as “the greatest blunder of my career.” As for Hoyle and the rest of the skeptics, they were finally won over in 1965 when two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey accidently detected a pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the Big Bang. (At first the scientists thought the hiss was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna.) If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What greater proof of the reality of the Big Bang—you can watch it on TV.

Whether or not the universe had a creator, the finding that it came into existence at a finite time in the past—13.7 billion years ago, according to the latest cosmological calculations—appeared to make a mockery of the idea that it was ontologically self-sufficient. Anything that exists by its own nature, it seems reasonable to assume, must be eternal and imperishable. The universe now looked to be neither of these things. Just as it winked into existence with an initial Big Bang, expanding and evolving into its present form, so too it might wink out of existence in some distant future epoch with an annihilating Big Crunch. (Whether the ultimate fate of the universe will be a Big Crunch, a Big Chill, or a Big Crack-up is a wide-open question in cosmology today.) The life of the universe, like each of our lives, may be a mere interlude between two nothings.

Thus did the discovery of the Big Bang make the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
much harder to dodge. “
If the universe
hadn’t always existed, science would be confronted by the need for an explanation of its existence,” observed Arno Penzias, who shared a Nobel Prize for detecting the afterglow of the Big Bang. Not only was the original
why
question a live one, but it now needed to be supplemented by a
how
question:
How could something have arisen from nothing?
Besides giving renewed hope to religious apologists, the Big Bang hypothesis opened up a new and purely scientific inquiry into the ultimate origin of the universe. And the explanatory possibilities seemed to multiply. There were, after all, two revolutionary developments in twentieth-century physics. One of them, Einstein’s relativity theory, led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning in time. The other, quantum mechanics, had even more radical implications. It threw into doubt the very idea of cause and effect. According to quantum theory, events at the micro-level happen in aleatory fashion; they violate the classical principle of causation. This opened up the conceptual possibility that the seed of the universe might itself have come into being without a cause, supernatural or otherwise. Perhaps the world arose
spontaneously
from sheer nothingness. All existence might be chalked up to a random fluctuation in the void, a “quantum tunneling” from nothingness into being. Exactly how this could have happened has become the province of a small but influential group of physicists who are sometimes referred to as “nothing theorists.” With a mixture of metaphysical chutzpah and naivete, these physicists—who include Stephen Hawking among their number—think they might be able to resolve a mystery heretofore considered untouchable by science.

INSPIRED, PERHAPS, BY
this scientific ferment, philosophers have been showing more ontological boldness. Logical positivism, which had dismissed the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
as nonsensical, was defunct by the 1960s, a victim of its own inability to arrive at a workable distinction between sense and nonsense. In its wake, metaphysics—the project of characterizing reality as a whole—has seen a revival. Even in the Anglo-Saxon world, “analytical” philosophers are no longer embarrassed to grapple with metaphysical issues. The most audacious of the many professional philosophers who have confronted the mystery of existence in the last few decades was Robert Nozick of Harvard University, who died at the age of sixty-three in 2002. Although best known as the author of the libertarian classic
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
, Nozick was obsessed with the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
, devoting a fifty-page section of his later book
Philosophical Explanations
to the various possibilities for answering it—some of them quite wild. He invited the reader to imagine nothingness as a force “
sucking things into
non-existence.” He posited a “principle of fecundity” that sanctions the simultaneous existence of all possible worlds. He talked of having some kind of mystical insight into reality’s foundation. As for his colleagues who might have found his attempts to answer the ultimate question a little strange, Nozick was unapologetic: “
Someone who proposes
a non-strange answer shows he didn’t understand the question.”

TODAY, THINKERS REMAIN
divided into three camps by the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
The “optimists” hold that there
has to be
a reason for the world’s existence, and that we may well discover it. The “pessimists” believe that there
might be
a reason for the world’s existence, but that we’ll never know for sure—perhaps because we see too little of reality to be aware of the reason behind it, or because any such reason must lie beyond the intellectual limits of humans, which were tooled by nature for survival, not for penetrating the inner nature of the cosmos. Finally, the “rejectionists” persist in believing that there
can’t be
a reason for the world’s existence, and hence that the very question is meaningless.

You don’t have to be a philosopher or a scientist to join one of these camps. Everyone is entitled. Marcel Proust, for instance, seems to have placed himself among the pessimists. The narrator of his novel
Remembrance of Things Past
, musing on how the Dreyfus affair had split French society into warring factions, observes that political wisdom may be powerless to end the civil strife, just as “
in philosophy
, pure logic is powerless to tackle the problem of existence.”

But suppose you’re an optimist. What is the most promising approach to the mystery of existence? Is it the traditional theistic approach, which looks to a God-like entity as the necessary cause and sustainer of all being? Is it the scientific approach, which draws on ideas from quantum cosmology to explain why a universe was bound to leap into existence out of the void? Is it a purely philosophical approach, which seeks to deduce a reason for the world’s existence from abstract considerations of value, or from the sheer impossibility of nothingness? Is it some sort of mystical approach, which aims to satisfy the craving for a cosmic rationale through direct illumination?

All of these approaches have their contemporary proponents. All of them, at first blush, seem worth pursuing. Indeed, it is only by thinking of the mystery of existence from every available angle that we have any hope of resolving it. To those who consider the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
hopelessly elusive or downright incoherent, it might be pointed out that intellectual progress often consists in the refinement of precisely such questions, in ways unforeseeable to those who first ask them. Take another question, posed twenty-five hundred years ago by Thales and his fellow pre-Socratics:
What are things made of?
Asking a question of such all-encompassing generality might sound naive, even childish. But, as the Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson observed, the pre-Socratic philosophers “
were asking one
of the best questions ever to have been asked, a question that has painfully led to much of modern science.” To have dismissed it from the outset as unanswerable would have been “a feeble and unnecessary surrender to despair, philistinism, cowardice or indolence.”