Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (9 page)

What’s more, nothingness is the most
symmetrical
of realities. Many things, like faces and snowflakes, are symmetrical in a limited way. A square has lots of symmetries, because you can flip it about an axis or rotate it by ninety degrees without altering its form. A sphere has still more symmetries: any rotation at all leaves its form unchanged. Infinite space is more symmetrical yet: you can rotate it, reflect in a mirror, or shift it in any direction without changing it a bit. Our own universe is not very symmetrical on a small scale—look at what a mess your living room is! On a cosmic scale it’s more symmetrical, appearing pretty much the same whatever direction you look in. But no universe, our own included, can compete with nothingness in this respect. The Null World’s utter lack of particularity makes it utterly invariant under any kind of transformation. There’s nothing to shift or reflect or rotate. Fearful symmetry, indeed!

But what sort of virtue is that? Well, it may be an aesthetic one. From the time of the Greeks, with their emphasis on balance and order, symmetry has been deemed a component of objective beauty. That is not to say that the Null World is the most beautiful one (although it may be to those who prefer minimalist decor or have a taste for desert landscapes). But it is the most sublime. If Being is like the blaze of the noonday sun, then nothingness is like a starless night sky, inspiring a sort of pleasurable terror in the adventurous thinker who contemplates it.

There is a final, and rather more esoteric virtue that nothingness possesses. It has to do with
entropy
. The concept of entropy is among the most fundamental in science. It explains why some changes are irreversible and why time has a direction, an “arrow” pointing from past to future. The notion of entropy arose in the nineteenth century from the study of steam engines, and originally concerned the flow of heat. Soon, however, entropy was rethought along more abstract lines, as a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. In the twentieth century, entropy became still more abstract, merging with the idea of pure information. (When Claude Shannon was laying the foundations of information theory, he was advised by John von Neumann that if he used “entropy” in his theory he’d never lose a debate, since nobody really understands what it means.)

Everything has an entropy. The entropy of our universe, considered a closed system, is always increasing, as things move from order to disorder. That is the second law of thermodynamics. And what about Nothingness? Can it be assigned an entropy? The computation is not hard. If a system—anything from a cup of coffee to a possible world—can exist in
N
different states, its maximum entropy equals log(
N
). The Null World, being perfectly simple, has only a single state. So its maximum entropy is log(1) = 0—which also happens to equal its minimum entropy!

So Nothingness, in addition to being the simplest, the least arbitrary, and the most symmetrical of all possible realities, also has the nicest entropy profile. Its maximum entropy equals its minimum entropy equals zero. No wonder Leonardo da Vinci was moved to exclaim, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, “
Among the great things
which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest.”

But if Nothingness is so great, why didn’t it prevail over Being in the reality sweepstakes? The virtues of the Null World are manifold and undeniable when you think about them, but they only serve to make the mystery of existence all the more mysterious.

Or so it seemed to me until, one day back in 2006, I received in the mail a wholly unexpected letter that announced, “There is no mystery of existence.”

4

THE GREAT REJECTIONIST

T
he letter bearing the news that “there is no mystery of existence,” though unexpected, did not exactly come out of the blue. A week earlier, the
New York Times
had published a review I had written of Richard Dawkins’s book
The God Delusion
. In the review, I had suggested that the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
might be the theist’s final bulwark against the encroachments of science. “
If there is
an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world,” I had observed, “it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label ‘God.’ ” And this observation had touched a nerve in my correspondent, a man called Adolf Grünbaum.

The name was hardly unknown to me. In the philosophical world, Adolf Grünbaum is a man of immense stature. He is arguably the greatest living philosopher of science. In the 1950s, Grünbaum became famous as the foremost thinker about the subtleties of space and time. Three decades later, he achieved a wider degree of fame—and some notoriety—by launching a sustained and powerful attack on Freudian psychoanalysis. This brought down on him the wrath of much of the psychoanalytic world and landed him on the front page of the science section of the
New York Times
.

All of this I did know about the man. What I hadn’t been aware of was Grünbaum’s implacable hostility to religious belief. He was particularly irked, it seemed, by cosmic mystery-mongering as a strategy for shoring up belief in a supernatural creator. As far as he was concerned, the question
Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?
was not a path to God or to anything else. It was, to borrow a term from his native German, a
Scheinproblem
—a pseudo-problem.

What made Grünbaum such a fierce rejectionist? I could understand why someone might think the mystery of existence was, by its very nature, insoluble. But to laugh it off as a pseudo-problem seemed a bit too cavalier. Still, if Grünbaum turned out to be right, the whole quest to explain the existence of the world would be a colossal waste of effort, a fool’s errand. Why bother trying to solve a mystery when you can simply dissolve it? Why go on a hunt for a Snark if all that’s out there is a Boojum?

So, not without trepidation, I wrote back to Grünbaum. Could we chat? He responded with characteristic brio, inviting me to come see him in Pittsburgh, where he has lived and taught for the last five decades. He’d be delighted to explain why the mystery of existence was a nonstarter, he said in his letter, even if it took a few days to convince me. When it came to his philosophical tutelage, I could “write my own ticket.”

I had never been to Pittsburgh, a city I knew only from the movie
Flashdance
. But I was eager to meet Grünbaum, and to see the Monongahela River. So I caught the first flight I could from New York and, a couple of hours later, checked into a chain hotel that conveniently stood in the shadow of the University of Pittsburgh’s soaring neo-Gothic Cathedral of Learning. My eager mentor Grünbaum was waiting for me in the lobby when I arrived, grinning amiably and looking like an octogenarian cross between Danny DeVito and Edward G. Robinson.

That evening, over drinks and dinner at a downtown Pittsburgh restaurant called the Common Plea, Grünbaum told me about the origins of his antipathy to theism. He traced it back to his childhood in Cologne, Germany, where he was born in 1923, during the tumultuous era of the Weimar Republic. Cologne, with its famous cathedral, was a predominantly Roman Catholic city. Grünbaum’s family was part of a small Jewish minority, numbering around twelve thousand. They lived on Rubensstrasse, a street named after the Dutch painter. By the time Grünbaum was ten, the Nazis had come to power. He vividly recalls being beaten up in the street by young thugs who announced to him that
die Juden haben unseren Heiland getötet
—“the Jews killed our Savior.” He also recalls his athletic development being “psychologically stunted” because of the close association between Nazi mass rallies and athletic parades.

While still a boy, Grünbaum began to doubt the existence of God. He was repelled by the “ethically monstrous” biblical story in which Abraham is called on to sacrifice his innocent son as a test of his fealty to God. He found it absurd that there was a taboo against mentioning the name of God, Yehovah. When he blithely pronounced the word out loud in Hebrew class, the teacher pounded the table and told him it was the worst thing a Jew could do.

Grünbaum’s disenchantment with religion, he told me, coincided with the beginnings of his interest in philosophy. The rabbi at the family’s synagogue often alluded to Kant and Hegel in his sermons. Grünbaum was motivated to pick up an introductory book about philosophy, which, among other speculations, dealt with the origin of the universe. He also began to read Schopenhauer, admiring the philosopher both for his compassionate atheistic Buddhism and for his literary flair. By the time of Grünbaum’s bar mitzvah in 1936, at the age of thirteen, he was a confirmed atheist. The next year, his family escaped Nazi Germany for the United States, fetching up in a neighborhood in southern Brooklyn. Grünbaum commuted to high school in the Bronx—an hour and a half each way on the subway—where he mastered English by means of a bilingual edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

Drafted into the army during the Second World War, Grünbaum became an intelligence officer. At the age of twenty-two he was back in Germany with the American army, interrogating captured Nazis in Berlin. Among those he was in charge of questioning, I was amazed to hear, was Ludwig Bieberbach—the man behind the “Bieberbach conjecture,” for decades one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, ranking just below Fermat’s last theorem. The idea that Bieberbach was an actual flesh-and-blood human—let alone one who customarily lectured to his students at the University of Berlin decked out in a Nazi SA uniform—was slightly staggering to me. Grünbaum’s contempt for this Nazi mathematician was more than moral. It was also intellectual. In supporting Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Bieberbach publicly argued that Nordic mathematicians took a wholesome geometrical approach to their subject, whereas the Jewish mind operated in a morbidly abstract way. The fact that Bieberbach had willfully overlooked the “glaring counterexample” to this generalization—namely, the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein, whose relativity theory showed that gravity was really geometry—enraged Grünbaum. It left him, he said, with a low threshold of indignation when it came to “sloppy, dishonest, and tendentious argument”—including arguments about why the universe exists.

Despite his advanced age and diminutive size, Grünbaum ate with a hearty appetite. He made his way through an entrée of veal and then an enormous plate of angel-hair pasta, followed by another plate of portobello mushrooms. Forgoing wine, which he said made him sick, he continued to drink Cosmopolitans (“that’s my speed”) through the meal, as he regaled me, in his precise diction and vestigial German accent, with philosophical gossip. When it was over, he kindly drove me back to my hotel. On the way, we passed a rather imposing church, presumably one of Pittsburgh’s architectural jewels. “Do you worship there?” I asked him, trying not to sound too puckish.

“Oh,
every day
,” he replied.

IN MY HOTEL
room the next morning, foggily working through the formidable pile of reprinted papers from various philosophy journals the professor had given me—papers with intellectually belligerent titles like “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology” and “The Pseudo-Problem of Creation”—I tried to fathom why Grünbaum was so disdainful of the mystery of existence. His contempt for those who took it seriously leapt off the page. They were not just “obtuse,” but “exasperatingly obtuse.” Their reasoning was “gross,” “crude,” “bizarre,” and “inane,” amounting to “mere farce.” It was beyond “fatuous”: it was “ludicrously fatuous.”

It didn’t take long for me to understand why he felt this way. Unlike Leibniz and Schopenhauer, unlike Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dawkins and Hawking and Proust, unlike any number of contemporary philosophers and scientists and theologians and just about any ordinary reflective person, Grünbaum finds the existence of the world utterly
unastonishing
. And he is utterly convinced that it is
rational
for him to be unastonished.

Consider again the basic mystery as originally stated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? Grünbaum dubs this, with appropriate grandeur (and perhaps a hint of irony), the Primordial Existential Question. But what makes it legitimate? Like any other
why
question, he observes, it rests on hidden presuppositions. Not only does it presuppose that there must be some explanation for the existence of the world. It also takes for granted that the world
needs
an explanation—that, in the absence of some overriding cause or reason, nothingness would be expected to prevail.

But why
should
nothingness prevail? Those who profess puzzlement at the existence of a world like ours—one teeming with life and stars and consciousness and dark matter and all kinds of stuff we haven’t even discovered yet—seem to have an intellectual prejudice, one that favors the Null World. Nothingness is the natural state of affairs, they implicitly believe, the ontological default option. It is only deviations from nothingness that are mysterious, that require an explanation.

And where did they get this belief in what Grünbaum derisively labels the Spontaneity of Nothingness—a belief which seems so obvious to them that they don’t even bother to defend it? Whether they realize it or not, he argues, they got it from religion. Even atheists like Dawkins unwittingly imbibed it “with their mother’s milk.” The Spontaneity of Nothingness is a distinctly Christian precept, Grünbaum claims. It was inspired by the doctrine of creation
ex nihilo
, which arose in the second century after Christ. According to Christian dogma, God, being all-powerful, had no need of any preexisting materials out of which to fashion the world. He brought it into being out of sheer nothingness. (Presumably the Genesis account of creation, in which God created the world by imposing order on a sort of watery chaos, can be dismissed as mythopoetic license.)

But God, according to Christian dogma, is not only the creator of the world. He is also its sustainer. Once created, the world is utterly dependent on him for its continuing existence. He works around the clock to keep it in a state of being. If God ceased existentially supporting the world, even for a moment, it would, to use a phrase from the twentieth-century British archbishop William Temple, “
collapse into non-existence
.” The world is not like a house, which, once the builder is finished with it, continues to stand. Rather, it is like a car balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff. Without divine power to maintain its balance, it would plunge into the precipice of nothingness.

The ancient Greeks did not share this Christian idea of creation
ex nihilo
. Nor did the ancient Indian philosophers. Thus it is hardly surprising, Grünbaum observes, that they failed to worry about why there is something rather than nothing. It was churchly philosophers like Augustine and Aquinas who insinuated the idea into Western thought. The doctrine of the world’s ontological dependence on God—Grünbaum calls it the Dependency Axiom—molded the intuitions of rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz, predisposing them to believe that, were it not for God’s continuous activity of sustaining the world in existence, nothingness would prevail. Being without a cause was thus unthinkable to them. Even today, when we ask why there is something rather than nothing at all, we are, wittingly or not, heirs to a way of thinking that is a vestige of early Judeo-Christianity.

So the Primordial Existential Question rests on the assumption of the Spontaneity of Nothingness. The Spontaneity of Nothingness rests on the Dependency Axiom. And the Dependency Axiom turns out to be a bit of primitive and groundless theological bluster.

And that was only the beginning of Grünbaum’s brief. He was not content to observe that what he called the Primordial Existential Question rested on dubious premises. He wanted to show that these premises were just plain
false
. There is no reason, in his view, to be astonished, puzzled, awed, or mystified by the existence of the world. None of the virtues claimed for Nothingness—its supposed simplicity, its naturalness, its lack of arbitrariness, and so on—made it the
de jure
favorite in the reality sweepstakes: such was his conviction. In fact, if we look at the matter empirically—the way modern, scientifically minded people ought to—we’d find that the existence of a world is very much to be expected. As Grünbaum himself put it, “What could possibly be more commonplace empirically than that something or other does exist?”

Here was a man who thought
Why is there something rather than nothing?
was as much of a cheat as the question
When did you stop beating your wife?

LATER THAT DAY,
as I made my way across the bosky campus of the University of Pittsburgh toward my next rendezvous with Grünbaum, I was determined to champion the mystery of existence and the ontological claims of Nothingness. His office was atop the Cathedral of Learning—which, I was informed, was the tallest academic structure in the Western Hemisphere. It looked like an amputated and monstrously gigantified spire of a Gothic church. Entering the lobby, with its ribbed groin vaulting, I looked instinctively for a knave, an apse, an altar. But this was a secular cathedral, devoted not to the worship of some deity but to the pursuit of knowledge. All I saw instead was a bank of elevators. I took one of them to the twenty-fifth floor, where my mentor-turned-interlocutor was waiting for me.

After some small talk about psychoanalysis, I asked him whether he would be willing to concede that the concept of nothingness at least made sense. Isn’t it possible that, instead of the world we see around us, there might have been nothing at all?