"Why is there anything at all?" (or "why is there something rather than nothing?") is a question about the reason for basic
existence
Existence is the ability of an entity to interact with reality. In philosophy, it refers to the ontology, ontological Property (philosophy), property of being.
Etymology
The term ''existence'' comes from Old French ''existence'', from Medieval ...
which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
, and
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
, the last of whom called it "the fundamental question of
metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
".
The question is posed totally and comprehensively rather than concerning reasoning for the existence of anything specific, such as the universe or
multiverse
The multiverse is a hypothetical group of multiple universes. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. The di ...
, the
Big Bang
The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the ...
,
God
In monotheism, monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator deity, creator, and principal object of Faith#Religious views, faith.Richard Swinburne, Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Ted Honderich, Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Ox ...
,
mathematical
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
and
physical law
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. The term ''law'' has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) a ...
s,
time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
or
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
. It can be seen as an open metaphysical question, rather than a search for an exact answer.
On causation
The ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
argued that everything in the universe must have a cause, culminating in an ultimate
uncaused cause. (See
Four causes
The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, four fundamental types of answer to the question "why?", in analysis of change or movement in nature: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. Aristotle wrote th ...
)
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
took a "
brute fact" position when he said, "I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all."
Philosopher
Brian Leftow
Brian Leftow (born 1956) is an American philosopher specializing in philosophy of religion, medieval philosophy, and metaphysics. He is the William P. Alston Professor for the Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University. Previously, he held the N ...
has argued that the question cannot have a
causal
Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...
explanation (as any cause must itself have a cause) or a
contingent
Contingency or Contingent may refer to:
* Contingency (philosophy), in philosophy and logic
* Contingency plan, in planning
* Contingency table, in statistics
* Contingency theory, in organizational theory
* Contingency theory (biology) in evoluti ...
explanation (as the factors giving the contingency must pre-exist), and that if there is an answer it must be something that exists necessarily (i.e., something that just exists, rather than is caused).
Philosopher William Free argues that the only two options which can explain existence is that things either
always existed or
spontaneously emerged. In either scenario, existence is a fact for which there isn't a cause.
Arguments that there may be no need for causation
David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...
argued that a cause may not be necessary in the case of the formation of the universe. Whilst we demand that everything have a cause because of our experience of the
necessity
Necessary or necessity may refer to:
* Need
** An action somebody may feel they must do
** An important task or essential thing to do at a particular time or by a particular moment
* Necessary and sufficient condition, in logic, something that is ...
of causes, the formation of the universe is outside our experience and may be subject to different rules.
Criticism of the question
Philosopher
Stephen Law
Stephen Law (born 1960) is an English philosopher. He is currently Director of the Certificate in Higher and Education and Director of Philosophy at The Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Law was previously Reader in Ph ...
has said the question may not need answering, as it is attempting to answer a question that is outside a
spatio-temporal setting, from within a spatio-temporal setting. He compares the question to asking "what is north of the
North Pole
The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True North Pole to distinguish from the Mag ...
?"
Noted philosophical wit
Sidney Morgenbesser
Sidney Morgenbesser (September 22, 1921 – August 1, 2004) was a Jewish American philosopher and professor at Columbia University. He wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms.
Life and career
Sidney Morgenbesser ...
answered the question with an
apothegm
An adage (; Latin: adagium) is a memorable and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its longeval tradition, i.e. ...
: "If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!", or "Even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!"
Mathematical necessity
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
wrote:
Philosopher of physics
Dean Rickles
Dean Rickles (born July 17, 1977) is Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney and a Director of the Sydney Centre for Time.
Life
Dean Rickles was born in Hull, Yorkshire. He briefly trained as a concert p ...
has argued that numbers and mathematics (or their underlying laws) may necessarily exist.
Physicist
Max Tegmark
Max Erik Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute. He is also a scienti ...
wrote about the
mathematical universe hypothesis
In physics and cosmology, the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), also known as the ultimate ensemble theory and struogony (from mathematical structure, Latin: struō), is a speculative "theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by cosmologist Max T ...
, which states that all mathematical structures exist physically, and the physical universe is one of these structures. According to the hypothesis, the universe appears fine-tuned for intelligent life because of the
anthropic principle
The anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect", is the hypothesis, first proposed in 1957 by Robert Dicke, that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, beca ...
, with most universes being devoid of life.
Physics
Physicists such as
Stephen Hawking and
Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss (born May 27, 1954) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who previously taught at Arizona State University, Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project, now cal ...
have offered explanations that rely on
quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...
, saying that in a
quantum vacuum state
In quantum field theory, the quantum vacuum state (also called the quantum vacuum or vacuum state) is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. Generally, it contains no physical particles. The word zero-point field is sometimes used a ...
,
virtual particles
A virtual particle is a theoretical transient particle that exhibits some of the characteristics of an ordinary particle, while having its existence limited by the uncertainty principle. The concept of virtual particles arises in the perturbat ...
and
spacetime bubbles will spontaneously come into existence, which is mathematically proven by the Chinese physicists Dongshan He, Dongfeng Gao, and Qing-yu Cai.
Nobel Laureate
Frank Wilczek
Frank Anthony Wilczek (; born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Direct ...
is credited with the
aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by tra ...
that "nothing is unstable." However, physicist
Sean Carroll argues that Wilczek's aphorism accounts merely for the existence of matter, but not the existence of
quantum state
In quantum physics, a quantum state is a mathematical entity that provides a probability distribution for the outcomes of each possible measurement on a system. Knowledge of the quantum state together with the rules for the system's evolution in ...
s,
space-time
In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three-dimensional space, three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Minkowski diagram, Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize S ...
, or the universe as a whole. Carroll concludes, as did Bertrand Russell, that "any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation."
God
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
attributed to
God
In monotheism, monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator deity, creator, and principal object of Faith#Religious views, faith.Richard Swinburne, Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Ted Honderich, Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Ox ...
as being the necessary
sufficient reason for everything that exists (see:
Cosmological argument
A cosmological argument, in natural theology, is an argument which claims that the existence of God can be inferred from facts concerning causation, explanation, change, motion, contingency, dependency, or finitude with respect to the universe o ...
). He wrote:
"Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason... is found in a substance which... is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself."
Philosopher Roy Sorensen writes in the ''
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
'' that to many philosophers the question is intrinsically impossible to answer, like
squaring a circle, and even God does not sufficiently answer it:
Argument that "nothing" is impossible
The
pre-Socratic philosopher
Pre-Socratic philosophy, also known as early Greek philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of thes ...
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea (; grc-gre, Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia.
Parmenides was born in the Greek colony of Elea, from a wealthy and illustrious family. His dates a ...
was one of the first
Western thinkers to question the possibility of nothing. Many other thinkers, such as
Bede Rundle, have questioned whether
nothing
Nothing, the complete absence of anything, has been a matter of philosophical debate since at least the 5th century BC. Early Greek philosophers argued that it was impossible for ''nothing'' to exist. The atomists allowed ''nothing'' but only i ...
is an ontological possibility. It can be argued that nothingness is an impossibility as there is already an existence.
Non-existence
The
contemporary philosopher Roy Sorensen has argued that curiosity is possible "even when the proposition is known to be a
necessary truth
Logical truth is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic. Broadly speaking, a logical truth is a statement which is true regardless of the truth or falsity of its constituent propositions. In other words, a logical truth is a statement whic ...
." For instance, a "''
reductio ad absurdum
In logic, (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or ''apagogical arguments'', is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absu ...
'' proof that 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 + … converges to
π/4" demonstrates that not converging to π/4 is impossible. However, it provides no insight into ''why'' not converging to π/4 is impossible. Similarly, it's legitimate to ask why non-existence or "nothingness" is impossible, even if that is the case.
''Philosophical Explanations''
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, outlined in the second chapter of his ''
Philosophical Explanations
''Philosophical Explanations'' is a 1981 metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical treatise by the philosopher Robert Nozick.
The book received positive reviews. Commentators have compared ''Philosophical Explanations'' to the philosopher Richa ...
'' the following possible answers to the question:
# ''Self-Subsumption'': "a law that applies to itself, and hence explains its own truth."
# ''The Nothingness Force'': "the nothingness force acts on itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness and produces something."
# ''
The Principle of Indifference'': establishes that nothing is a possibility among the possibilities of having something. Then "the probability that there is something is n/(n +1) if n is finite and 1 if n is infinite."
# ''Fecundity'': "Every possibility—including the possibility that there is nothing—exists in its own independent noninteracting realm."
See also
References
Further reading
*
*
*
External links
Why Anything at All? ''
Closer to Truth
''Closer to Truth'' is a television series on public television originally created, produced and hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The original series aired in 2000 for two seasons, followed by a second series aired in 2003 for a single season. The ...
''
Why is there something rather than nothing? Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
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