Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

by Jim Holt

  “A lot of people thought Spinoza wasn’t talking about God at all,” Leslie said. “They called him an atheist. And if you want to call me an atheist, that’s fine by me. Words like ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’ and ‘God,’ they’ve moved around so much that they’re practically meaningless. Who really cares? I do consider myself a Spinozist, however, for two reasons. First, I think Spinoza was right that we’re all tiny regions in an infinite mind. And I agree with him that the material world, the world described by science, is a pattern of divine thought. But I also think that Spinoza himself was really a Platonist. That’s not the standard view, of course. In his Ethics, Spinoza argues that the world exists as a matter of logical necessity. But the Ethics was not Spinoza’s best book. His best book was an earlier one, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. And there Spinoza pretty clearly runs the view that it is value that is creating everything—that the world exists because it’s good that it should. When he got to Ethics, he wanted to prove everything in geometrical fashion, so he gave what looks like a logical proof, and not a very convincing one, that there must be an infinite substance. Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.”

  Whether Platonic or Spinozistic, Leslie’s view of reality had a certain beauty about it, I thought: the beauty of an ontological pipe dream. Yet, for all the rigor of his arguments—and he was never at a loss for an argument to rebut any objection—could his axiarchism (value rules!) really be taken seriously as the ultimate explanation for all existence?

  As I was to discover, many thinkers have taken it quite seriously. Among them was the late Oxford philosopher (and staunch atheist) John Mackie. In his powerful book-length case against the existence of God, The Miracle of Theism, Mackie devoted an entire chapter, titled “Replacements for God,” to Leslie’s axiarchism. “The notion that the mere ethical need for something could on its own call that item into existence, without the operation of any person or mind that was aware of this need and acted so as to fulfil it, is, no doubt, initially strange and paradoxical,” Mackie wrote. “Yet in it lies also the great strength of extreme axiarchism.” Leslie’s theory, he went on to say, “offers the only possible answer to the question which underlies all forms of the cosmological argument, the question ‘Why is there anything at all?’ or ‘Why should there be any world rather than none?’ ”

  Obviously, Mackie observed, no explanation in terms of a “first cause” could answer the ultimate question of existence, for such an explanation would merely raise the further question of why that first cause—whether it be God, an unstable chunk of false vacuum, or some other still more exotic entity—itself existed. But Leslie’s explanation for the existence of the world did not have this defect, Mackie observed. The objective need for goodness that he posits is not a cause. It is rather a fact, a necessary fact, one that does not call for any further explanation. Goodness is not an agent or a mechanism that creates something out of nothing. It is a reason for there being a world rather than nothingness. In the end, though, Mackie remained skeptical of Leslie’s axiarchism. He was not convinced that “something’s being valuable can in itself tend to bring that thing into existence.”

  And neither was I. Metaphysics is all very nice, I said to Leslie, but what hard evidence did he have for his extraordinarily speculative claim about the existence of the world?

  He reacted with barely disguised exasperation: “I’m always a little astonished when people say, ‘Look, there’s no evidence for your view.’ Well, I say, there’s one rather striking piece of evidence: the fact that there is a world rather than just a blank. Why do they discount this? The sheer existence of something rather than nothing simply cries out for explanation. And where are the competitors to my Platonic theory?”

  Well, he had a point there. So far, at least, none of the other solutions I had heard proposed—those based on quantum cosmology, or on mathematical necessity, or on God—had held up. At this point, Platonic goodness appeared to be the only cosmic suspect out there.

  Still, there seemed to be something circular about Leslie’s use of evidence. The world was brought into existence by goodness. And how do we know that goodness can bring a world into existence? Because the world exists! If axiarchism was to amount to more than an empty tautology, Leslie was going to have to produce some additional evidence in its favor—something beyond the sheer existence of the world.

  And so he did.

  “A further bit of evidence is that the world is full of orderly patterns,” he said. “Why does the universe obey causal laws? And why laws of such simplicity, rather than vastly more complex ones? In the last century, philosophers of science have doubted whether the causal orderliness of the universe could ever be explained. But it does seem to need an explanation. After all, order is improbable, not to be expected. There are so many more ways for a world to be a complete mess than to be nice and orderly. So why do elementary particles perform their mathematically elegant pirouettes? For a Platonist like me, such regularities are accounted for in the same manner that the presence of something rather than nothing is accounted for—by their ethical requiredness.”

  “Causal orderliness” seemed to be more of an aesthetic value than an ethical one, I noted.

  “I’ve never been able to see the difference between the two,” Leslie said. “All value is about what ought to exist. By the way, there’s a third bit of evidence for my Platonic theory: the fact that the fundamental constants of nature are fine-tuned for intelligent life.”

  But, I objected, couldn’t this appearance of cosmic fine-tuning be explained by science? Suppose, as physicists like Steven Weinberg believe, our universe is but one region of a multiverse. Suppose further that the constants of nature take different values in different regions of this multiverse. Then, by the anthropic principle, isn’t it to be expected that we should find ourselves in a region where those constants are favorable to the evolution of beings like us? No need for Plato when you have a multiverse!

  “There are a couple of ways I can react to that,” Leslie said. “The fact that the multiverse hypothesis is an alternative to the axiarchic hypothesis doesn’t mean that both of them can’t be strengthened by evidence of fine-tuning. Let me tell you a little parable, the parable of the vanished treasure. You’re on a desert island, and you’ve buried a treasure chest there. The only other people on the island are Smith and Jones. One day you go to the place where you buried the treasure chest, and you try to dig it up. And it’s not there! Now, the fact that it’s not there increases the probability that Jones is a thief, but it also increases the probability of the competing hypothesis that Smith is a thief. In the same way, the discovery of cosmic fine-tuning strengthens the probability that the multiverse hypothesis is correct, but it also strengthens the probability that my axiarchic hypothesis is correct.”

  He went on to make a far more subtle point—a point that, as far as I could tell, was entirely original: the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t really solve the mystery of fine-tuning at all.

  “Notice,” Leslie said, “that for life to evolve in the universe, each of the cosmic constants needs to be fine-tuned in a particular way for many different reasons at once. The strength of the electromagnetic force, for example, has to be in a particular narrow range, first, so matter would be distinguished from radiation and you have something to make living beings out of; second, so that all quarks wouldn’t turn into leptons, meaning there never would have been any atoms; third, so that protons wouldn’t decay so quickly that there’d soon be no atoms remaining, let alone organisms to survive the radiation produced by the decay; fourth, for protons not to repel one another so strongly that there’d be no such thing as chemistry, and hence no chemically-based beings like us.”

  He continued with a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth reason, each of greater technical complexity.

  “Now,” Leslie said, having concluded the litany, “how is it that one and
the same twiddling of the cosmic knob for the strength of the electromagnetic force should satisfy so many requirements? This doesn’t seem to be a problem that can be solved by the multiverse model. The multiverse model only says that the strength of the electromagnetic force varies by chance from universe to universe. But for even a single life-permitting strength to be possible, the fundamental laws of physics themselves have to be just so. In other words, those laws—which are, by the way, supposed to be the same all across the multiverse—must have the potential for intelligent life built into them. Which is precisely why they would be the sort of laws that an infinite mind might find it interesting to contemplate.”

  It was an awfully tidy package, Leslie’s axiarchism. Whatever you thought of its mind-bending assumptions—the Platonic reality of goodness, the creative efficacy of value—you had to admire its completeness and coherence as a speculative construction. And I did admire it. But I wasn’t quite moved by it. It didn’t quite speak to my existential depths. It didn’t appease my hunger for ultimate explanation. In fact, I wondered how deeply Leslie himself was invested in it, emotionally speaking. Did he feel anything like a quasi-religious attachment to his theory?

  “Um . . . uh . . . um . . . ,” he stammered, sounding almost pained. “I feel constantly embarrassed by the idea that I ought to be attracted to my system because, well, wouldn’t it be lovely if it were true. That is just pie in the sky, and I very much dislike it. I don’t have anything like faith in my Platonic creation story. I certainly haven’t proved its truth. Almost nothing of philosophical interest strikes me as being provable. I’d say my confidence in it is just a little over 50 percent. A lot of the time, I feel that the universe just happens to exist and that’s it.”

  Was the possibility that the world might exist for no reason whatever disturbing to him?

  “Yes,” he replied, “it is—on an intellectual level, at least.”

  Still, I added, he must find it gratifying that a significant minority of other philosophers have come around to his view.

  “Or to other views that are equally crazy,” he said.

  WAS LESLIE’S AXIARCHISM the long-sought resolution to the mystery of existence? Had the answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing? been available virtually from the beginning of Western thought, in the form of Plato’s vision of the Good? If so, why did so many subsequent thinkers—Leibniz, William James, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Stephen Hawking, to name a few—fail to see it? Were they all prisoners in Plato’s cave?

  To take axiarchism seriously, you have to believe three things.

  First, you have to believe that goodness is an objective value—that there are facts about what is good and evil, and that these facts are timelessly and necessarily true, independently of human concerns, and that they would be true even in the absence of all existent things.

  Second, you have to believe that the ethical needs that arise from such facts about goodness can be creatively effective—that they can bring things into existence and maintain those things in existence without the aid of any intermediary agent or force or mechanism.

  Third, you have to believe that the actual world—the world that we ourselves are a part of, even if we can only see a very tiny region of it—is the sort of reality that abstract goodness would bring into being.

  In other words, you have to believe that (1) value is objective, (2) value is creative, and (3) the world is good. If you buy into all three of these propositions, you’ve got your resolution to the mystery of existence.

  The first of them is philosophically controversial, to say the least. The most radical of the value skeptics, who trace their lineage to David Hume, hold that there is no such thing as objective goodness. Our judgments of right and wrong, on the Humean view, are just a matter of our sentiments, which we project onto the world and imagine to be part of the fabric of reality. Such moral judgments have nothing to do with objective truth, or even with reason. As Hume himself famously put it, “ ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

  That is surely taking skepticism about value too far. Yet even philosophers on the opposite side of the issue, those who staunchly affirm the objectivity of value, have doubts about whether ethical needs could float completely free of the interests and concerns of sentient beings like ourselves. As Thomas Nagel once asked, if all sentient life were destroyed, would it still be a good thing if the Frick Collection survived?

  Leslie himself is what might be called an “objective subjectivist” when it comes to value. He is a subjectivist because he believes that value ultimately resides only in states of consciousness, not in anything outside the mind. Yet he is an objective subjectivist because he believes that happiness is objectively better than suffering, not better merely because we happen to prefer it.

  Why is a world of happy sentient beings objectively better than nothingness? Well, you might say, if there were a world of happy sentient beings, its annihilation would be ethically bad. But suppose we start from the nothingness side. If there were nothing at all, would it be objectively better if a world of happy sentient beings were to pop into existence? Perhaps it would. After all, the sum of happiness would go from zero to some positive number, which seems an objectively good thing. And it also seems objectively true that the sentient beings brought into existence were thereby benefitted (although it would be odd to say that if those sentient beings had not been brought into existence, they would thereby have been harmed).

  But—moving on to the second point—even if there are objective truths about goodness, how could those truths do anything? How could they summon up a world out of sheer nothingness? Even if values are objective, they are not “out there” the way galaxies and black holes are. (If they were, they’d be useless for explaining why there is something rather than nothing, because they would be part of the something to be explained.) To say that values are objective is to say that we have objective reasons to do certain things. And reasons require agents to act on them if they are to have any impact on reality. Reasons without agents are impotent. To believe otherwise is to flirt with the scientifically discredited Aristotelian notion of “final cause” or “immanent teleology”—that it rains in the spring because that is good for the crops.

  But perhaps this conclusion is too hasty. Can we make sense of a reason that might favor the existence of something even in the absence of any person who might act on the reason—a reason not to do but to be? What we’re looking for, remember, is an explanation of why there is anything at all—a causal explanation. Now, what styles of causal explanations are there? Well, there is event causation, where one event (say, the decay of a certain scalar field) causes another (the Big Bang). And there is agent causation, where an agent (say, God) causes an event (the Big Bang). Evidently, neither event causation nor agent causation can explain why there is something rather than nothing, since each presupposes the existence of something. There is, however, a third style of causal explanation, fact causation, where the fact that p causally explains the fact that q. In most cases of fact causation we are familiar with, the causing fact p involves something that exists—as in, for instance, “Jones died because he swallowed poison.” Yet it may be that, when q is the fact that there is something rather than nothing, the causing fact p needn’t itself cite anything that exists—any agent or substance or event. The causing fact might just be an abstract reason. And, if there is no additional fact that opposes or undermines this abstract reason, then such a reason could make for an adequate causal explanation. That, indeed, would appear to be the only hope for a noncircular resolution to the mystery of existence.

  However—and now we move on to the third part of the axiarchic case—is it really plausible that the explaining reason should be that this world is better than an ontological blank? Actually, the axiarchist is committed to a much stronger thesis. He must believe that the world is not merely better than nothing, but that it i
s maximally good, infinitely good, the nicest reality that money can buy.

  Ever since Leibniz made the fatuous-sounding claim that we live in the “best of all possible worlds” (and was mercilessly mocked by Voltaire for doing so), apologists for the goodness of creation have tried to explain away the apparent evil that permeates it. Perhaps, they say, evil has no genuine reality but is merely a negation, the local absence of goodness, the way blindness is the absence of sight. (This is the so-called privative theory of evil.) Or perhaps evil is an inevitable by-product of the good of freedom, which cannot exist without the possibility that it will be abused. Or, again, perhaps a bit of evil makes reality better as an “organic whole”—the way the dissonance in a Mozart string quartet heightens its overall beauty, or the way death is necessary to the aesthetic power of tragedy. After all, a world that is good through and through is a bland world; it is the presence of evils to be overcome through noble struggle that gives it piquancy. And sometimes evil itself can come to seem positively glamorous and romantic. What would Paradise Lost be without the rebellious pride of Satan?

  Leslie himself concedes the existence of evil. He admits that “many items in our universe are far from splendid”—ranging from headaches to mass murder to the destruction of entire galaxies through false-vacuum fiascoes. Yet he purports to render the problem of evil manageable by making our world a tiny part of a much greater reality—a reality consisting of an infinite number of infinite minds, each of them contemplating everything of value. As long as the world around us contributes at least a little net value to this infinite reality, its existence is sanctioned by the abstract need for goodness. It may not be perfect, but—with its causal orderliness, its congeniality to life, and its conduciveness to more happy states of consciousness than unhappy ones—it’s good enough to merit inclusion in a maximally valuable reality.