by Jim Holt
Nothingness was alien to the Abrahamic tradition too. The book of Genesis has God creating the world not out of nothing, but out of a chaos of earth and water “without form and void”—tohu bohu, in the original Hebrew. Early in the Christian era, however, a new way of thinking began to take hold. The notion that God needed some sort of stuff to fashion a world seemed to put a limit on his presumably infinite creative powers. So, around the second or third century CE, the church fathers adduced a radical new cosmogony. The world, they proclaimed, was summoned into existence by God’s creative word alone, without any preexisting material to make it out of. This doctrine of creation ex nihilo later became part of Islamic theology, figuring in the kalām argument for the existence of God. It also entered medieval Jewish thought. In his reading of the opening passage of Genesis, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides affirmed that God created the world out of nothing.
To say God created the world “out of nothing” is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of anything. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than nothing at all.
And a few centuries later, someone finally did—a foppish and conniving German courtier who also ranks among the greatest intellects of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The year was 1714. Leibniz, then sixty-eight, was nearing the end of a long and absurdly productive career. He had, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, invented the calculus. He had single-handedly revolutionized the science of logic. He had created a fantastic metaphysics based on an infinity of soul-like units called “monads,” and on the axiom—later cruelly mocked by Voltaire in Candide—that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” Despite his fame as a philosopher-scientist, Leibniz was left behind in Hanover when his royal employer, the elector Georg Ludwig, went to Britain to become the newly crowned King George I. Leibniz was in declining health; within two years he would be dead, expiring (according to his secretary) with the release from his body of a great cloud of noxious gas.
It was in these gloomy circumstances that Leibniz produced his final philosophical writings, among them an essay titled “Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason.” In this essay, he put forth what he called the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. “This principle having been stated,” Leibniz wrote, “the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ”
For Leibniz, the ostensible answer was easy. For reasons of career advancement, he had always pretended to hew to religious orthodoxy. The reason for the world’s existence, he accordingly claimed, was God, who created it through his own free choice, motivated by his infinite goodness.
But what was the explanation for God’s own existence? Leibniz had an answer to this question too. Unlike the universe, which exists contingently, God is a necessary being. He contains within Himself the reason for His own existence. His nonexistence is logically impossible.
Thus, no sooner was the question Why is there something rather than nothing? raised than it was dispatched. The universe exists because of God. And God exists because of God. The Godhead alone, Leibniz declared, can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery of existence.
But the Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence did not prevail for long. In the eighteenth century, both David Hume and Immanuel Kant—philosophers who were at loggerheads on most issues—attacked the notion of “necessary being” as an ontological cheat. There are, to be sure, entities whose existence is logically impossible—a square circle, for instance. But no entity’s existence, Hume and Kant agreed, is guaranteed as a matter of pure logic. “Whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent,” Hume wrote. “There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction”—including God.
But if God does not exist necessarily, then a wholly novel metaphysical possibility presents itself: the possibility of absolute nothingness—no world, no God, no anything. Oddly, however, neither Hume nor Kant took the question Why is there something rather than nothing? seriously. For Hume, any proposed answer to this question would be “mere sophistry and illusion,” since it could never be grounded in our experience. For Kant, attempting to explain the whole of being would perforce involve an illegitimate extension of the concepts that we use to structure the world of our experience—concepts like causality and time—to a reality transcending this world, the reality of “things in themselves.” The result, Kant held, could be only error and inconsistency.
Chastened, perhaps, by such Humean and Kantian strictures, subsequent philosophers largely shied away from confronting the question Why is there something rather than nothing? The great pessimist Schopenhauer, who declared the mystery of existence to be “the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics,” nevertheless called those who pretended to resolve it “fools,” “vain boasters,” and “charlatans.” The German romantic Friedrich Schelling stated that “the main function of all philosophy is the solution of the problem of the existence of the world.” Yet Schelling soon decided that it was impossible to give a rational account of existence; the most we could say, he felt, was that the world arose out of the abyss of eternal nothingness by an incomprehensible leap. Hegel wrote a good deal of obscure prose about “the vanishing of being into nothing and the vanishing of nothing into being,” but his dialectical maneuvers were dismissed by the ironic Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard as little better than “spice-seller’s explanations.”
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a modest revival of interest in the mystery of existence, mainly thanks to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. “I want to know why the universe exists,” Bergson declared in his 1907 book, Creative Evolution. All existence—matter, consciousness, God himself—was, it seemed to Bergson, a “conquest over nothingness.” But after much pondering, he concluded that this conquest was not really so miraculous. The whole something-versus-nothing question was based on an illusion, he came to believe: the illusion that it was possible for there to be nothing at all. By a series of dubious arguments, Bergson purported to prove that the idea of absolute nothingness was as self-contradictory as the idea of a round square. Since nothingness was a pseudo-idea, he concluded, the question Why is there something rather than nothing? was a pseudo-question.
This killjoy conclusion certainly made no impression on Martin Heidegger, for whom nothingness was all too real, a sort of negating force that menaced the realm of being with annihilation. At the very beginning of a series of lectures delivered in 1935 at the University of Freiburg—where he had been given the job of rector after proclaiming his allegiance to Hitler’s national socialism—Heidegger declared “Why is there being rather than nothing at all?” to be the “deepest,” “the most far-reaching,” and “the most fundamental of all questions.”
And what did Heidegger do with this question as the lectures progressed? Not a lot. He dilated on its existential pathos. He dabbled in amateur etymology, piling up Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit words related to Sein, the German word for “being.” He rhapsodized about the poetic virtues of the pre-Socratics and the Greek tragedians. At the conclusion of the final lecture, Heidegger observed that “being able to ask a question means being able to wait, even one’s whole life long”—which must have had those in the audience who had been hoping for a hint of an answer wearily nodding their heads.
Heidegger was, without question, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century in continental Europe. But in the English-speaking world, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who had the greatest philosophical sway. Wittgenstein and Heidegger were born in the same year (1889). They were pretty much
opposites when it came to character: Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain. Yet they were equally seduced by the mystery of existence. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” Wittgenstein averred in one of the lapidary numbered propositions—6.44, to be precise—in the sole work he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Some years earlier, in the notebooks he kept as a soldier in the Austrian army during the First World War, Wittgenstein wrote in the entry of October 26, 1916, “Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists.” (Later that day, he made the entry, “Life is serious, art is gay”—this while fighting on the Russian front.) Wonder and amazement at the existence of the world was, Wittgenstein said, one of the three experiences that enabled him to fix his mind on ethical value. (The other two were the feeling of being absolutely safe, and the experience of guilt.) Yet, as with all truly important matters—ethical value, the meaning of life and death—attempting to explain the “aesthetic miracle” of the world’s existence was futile; it took one beyond the limits of language, Wittgenstein held, into the realm of the unsayable. While he “deeply respected” the urge to ask Why is there something rather than nothing? he ultimately believed the question to be senseless. As he starkly put it in Tractatus proposition 6.5, “The riddle does not exist.”
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.