Why Anything at All

The oldest question in philosophy, and why the modern answers don't dissolve it.

The deepest question in philosophy, Leibniz thought, is not what is the world made of. It is why is there a world at all.¹ Why is there something rather than nothing?

You can feel the weight of this question if you sit with it for a few seconds. Imagine, as hard as you can, absolute nothing — no space, no time, no laws of physics, no quantum field, no observer to notice the absence. Now ask: why is that not the situation?

It is not enough to say because of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is part of the something. It cannot explain itself.

The contingency argument

A version of the argument that I find compelling goes like this.

Every thing we encounter in the world is contingent — it exists, but it did not have to. The chair I am sitting in could have been a different chair, or no chair. The galaxy I live in could have been a different galaxy, or no galaxy. None of these things contain the reason for their own existence inside themselves.

But the totality of all contingent things cannot itself be merely contingent, on pain of an infinite regress that explains nothing. At some point in the explanation, you must arrive at something whose existence is not the kind of thing that needed to be caused — a necessary being, one whose nonexistence is not a coherent possibility.

The theist’s claim is that this is what we mean by God. Not the white-bearded man on the cloud. Not even the watchmaker of the eighteenth century. The fundamental ground of being — the thing that does not need a reason because it is the reason — without which nothing else could be.

You can dispute the move at any step. But the question the move is trying to answer does not go away by ignoring it.

What the modern dodges actually say

Most serious philosophers do not deny that the question is real. They deny that God is the answer. The two most common moves:

The universe is itself necessary. Some physical thing — the quantum vacuum, the multiverse, the laws of physics — is what we should call necessary being. It does not need a cause; it just is.

This is a coherent move. It is not, however, an argument for naturalism against theism. It is naturalism doing the same thing theism does — locating a necessary being at the bottom of the stack — and then naming it differently. The interesting question is which candidate for “necessary being” is a better fit for the role: an impersonal physical substrate, or a personal mind. The personal mind explains more — among other things, why the necessary thing is the kind of thing that produces minds at all.

The question is malformed. Some philosophers (Hume, in places, later A. J. Ayer) said the question why is there anything is not really a question — it is a grammatical illusion, the verb why applied to a noun (anything) that won’t bear it.

I do not find this convincing. The question is not malformed for any particular contingent thing — why is there an Atlantic Ocean? is a real question. To insist that the question becomes meaningless only when scaled up to everything that contingently exists feels like a move of convenience.

The argument is not a proof

I want to be careful here. The contingency argument is not a mathematical proof that God exists. It is an argument that the world, considered honestly, points beyond itself — that the world has the shape of something dependent, and dependent things require an explanation outside themselves.

Whether that explanation is best given the name God, or some other name, depends on what else you think you know about the world. If you also think the universe is finely calibrated for life (fine- tuning), and that the information in the cell looks designed (information in the cell), and that a particular man in first-century Palestine rose from the dead (the minimal facts), then God starts to look like the explanation that pulls all of these together.

The contingency argument is the doorway. The rest of the case is what is behind the door.