Fifteen Eighty Four

The question of why there is something rather than nothing is supposed to be one of those “big” timeless topics in philosophy. And yet surprisingly few full-length books are published on the topic. Perhaps this is because it has a reputation for being such a difficult and mind-boggling question. But I think that we can make some progress by thinking through the issue in a systematic and careful way, and that’s what motivated me to write my book.

I start by clarifying what exactly we are asking when we ask why there is something rather than nothing. Philosophers have asked a few different questions, sometimes without realizing it. I focus my attention on a particularly broad way of understanding the question: why does anything whatsoever exist? I argue that this is both a meaningful and sensible question to ask.

But some philosophers have worried that this question could not possibly have an answer. I argue that this is not true. We are looking for an explanation for why anything exists. Any such explanation which appealed to some existing thing would be circular. But some explanations do not appeal to existing things. Perhaps if there is an explanation for why anything exists it is like those explanations. I make some proposals for how this sort of explanation might work.

But even if there could in principle be an explanation for why anything exists, should we expect there to be such an explanation? Perhaps it’s just a brute fact that anything exists. This requires a careful examination of when it is that we should expect phenomena to have explanations. I don’t think that everything must have an explanation. But the fact that there is something rather than nothing might very well be one of those phenomena which do have explanations.

I turn to consider many of the most prominent proposed explanations which have been made in the past: that there is a necessary being; that nothingness is somehow unintelligible or incoherent; that there is something rather than nothing just because it’s good for there to be something; that laws of nature explain why there is something rather than nothing; that on general probabilistic grounds we should expect there to be something; and that there is something because it is least arbitrary for there to be every way reality could be, including a form of reality in which things exist. None of these explanations is entirely satisfying, but some of them are hard to rule out.

The final three chapters present a new explanation for why anything exists. If nothing existed there would still be lots of truths. But those truths could in principle be explained by some existing thing, like God, an initial singularity, or even finite minds like us. This would simplify reality considerably. And so it may be simpler for there to be something rather than nothing. And that might very well explain why there is something rather than nothing.