Why there is something instead of nothing

Thermodynamic asymmetry in time. Zalta Ed. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Fine, K. The question of realism. Glazier, M. Laws and the completeness of the fundamental.

Jago Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter Google Scholar. Essentialist explanation. Philosophical Studies , 11 , — Goldschmidt, T. Understanding the question. Goldschmidt Ed. New York: Routledge. Hasker, W. God, time, and knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hempel, C. Science unlimited? Fetzer Ed. Hempel: Studies in science, explanation, and rationality pp.

Kotzen, M. The probabilistic explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Lange, M. Are some things naturally necessary? Leibniz, G. Principles of nature and grace, based on reason. Francks Eds. Originally published in Leslie, J. Value and existence. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield. Infinite minds: A philosophical cosmology. Lewis, D. Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 70 , — Maurin, A. Philosophical Studies , 6 , — Merricks, T. Truth and ontology.

Nozick, R. Philosophical explanations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Pearce, K. Foundational grounding and the argument from contingency. Kvanvig Ed. Pelczar, M. Defending phenomenalism. The Philosophical Quarterly , 69 , — Putnam, H.

Ethics without ontology. Raven, M. Philosophy Compass , 10 5 , — Rescher, N. The rejectionist approach from the riddle of existence.

Leslie Eds. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Rosen, G. Metaphysical dependence: Grounding and reduction. Hoffmann Eds. Ground by law. Philosophical Issues , 27 , — Schaffer, J.

On what grounds what. Chalmers, D. Wasserman Eds. The ground between the gaps. Laws for metaphysical explanation. Sider, T. Sober, E. Equilibrium explanation. Philosophical Studies , 43 2 , — Sorensen, R. Sturgeon, N. Moral explanations. Sayre-McCord Ed. Thompson, N. Grounding and metaphysical explanation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 1 , — Why is there anything at all?

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 70 , 95— Wilsch, T. The nomological account of ground. Philosophical Studies , 12 , — Download references. Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg. Work on this paper was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Andrew Brenner. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.

If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Reprints and Permissions. Erkenn Download citation. Received : 03 September Accepted : 06 April Published : 07 June Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Download PDF. Abstract It is sometimes supposed that, in principle, we cannot offer an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. Footnote 1 Two comments on these two construals of the Question: First, neither question is explicitly contrastive, while the Question, as usually formulated, is contrastive why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is the Question so Intractable? So, for example, Robert Nozick writes that The question appears impossible to answer. Grounding Answers to the Question Grounding has recently received a great deal of attention from metaphysicians. Footnote 6 The examples of grounding explanations just cited appeal to the existence of something or other in their explanans. Footnote 8 Here is a second example of a potential grounding answer to the Question.

Objections and Responses There are a few objections I would like to address. Footnote 10 Response: If the explanans of the grounding explanations for why there is something rather than nothing appeal to abstract objects, then they cannot provide an explanation for why anything whatsoever exists. Footnote 17 Notably, it is not just my proposed grounding explanations for why there is something rather than nothing which might run afoul of the alleged requirement that truths always have truthmakers, or that truth invariably depends on being.

Change history 20 August In the original publication of this article, we have missed to include second affiliation of the corresponding author in the online published article.

Notes 1. Here I assume that nothing can cause itself to exist. Thanks to Robin Stenwall for useful discussion of this point. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me. References Adams, R. Google Scholar Armstrong, D. Book Google Scholar Azzouni, J.

Article Google Scholar Bigelow, J. Google Scholar Bohn, E. Article Google Scholar Brenner, A. Article Google Scholar Callender, C. Google Scholar Glazier, M. TV Episode. Why God, Not Nothing? Why Anything at All? Part 4. Part 3. Why Not Nothing? What is Nothing? Why There is 'Something' rather than 'Nothing'? Why is There Anything at All? The Mystery of Existence Part 2.

Why Anything at All II? The Mystery of Existence Part 1. Hero of Alexandria agreed that there are no naturally occurring vacuums but believed that they can be formed artificially. He cites pumps and siphons as evidence that voids can be created. Hero believed that bodies have a natural horror of vacuums and struggle to prevent their formation.

You can feel the antipathy by trying to open a bellows that has had its air hole plugged. Try as you might, you cannot separate the sides. However, unlike Aristotle, Hero thought that if you and the bellows were tremendously strong, you could separate the sides and create a vacuum.

God could have chosen to create the world in a different spot. He could have made it bigger or smaller. God could have also chosen to make the universe a different shape. This possibilities entail the possibility of a vacuum. A second motivation is a literal reading of Genesis This opening passage of the Bible describes God as creating the world from nothing. Such a construction seems logically impossible. If creation out of nothing were indeed a demonstrable impossibility, then faith would be forced to override an answer given by reason rather than merely answer a question about which reason is silent.

All Greek philosophy had presupposed creation was from something more primitive, not nothing. Consistently, the Greeks assumed destruction was disassembly into more basic units. If destruction into nothingness were possible, the process could be reversed to get creation from nothing. The Christians were on their own when trying to make sense of creation from nothing. Ancient Chinese philosophers are sometimes translated as parallel believers in creation from nothing.

JeeLoo Liu cautions that both the Daoist and Confucians are speaking about formlessness rather than nothingness. Creation out of nothing presupposes the possibility of total nothingness. This in turn implies that there can be some nothingness. Thus Christians had a motive to first establish the possibility of a little nothingness. Their strategy was to start small and scale up. Accordingly, scholars writing in the aftermath of the condemnation of proposed various recipes for creating vacuums Schmitt One scheme was to freeze a sphere filled with water.

After the water contracted into ice, a vacuum would form at the top. Aristotelians replied that the sphere would bend at its weakest point. When the vacuists stipulated that the sphere was perfect, the rejoinder was that this would simply prevent the water from turning into ice. Neither side appears to have tried out the recipe. If either had, then they would have discovered that freezing water expands rather than contracts. To contemporary thinkers, this dearth of empirical testing is bizarre.

The puzzle is intensified by the fact that the medievals did empirically test many hypotheses, especially in optics. Hero was eventually refuted by experiments conducted by Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal. In effect, they created a barometer consisting of a tube partially submerged, upside down, in bowl of mercury.

What keeps the mercury suspended in the tube? Is there an unnatural vacuum that causes the surrounding glass to pull the liquid up? Pascal answered that there really was nothing holding up the mercury.

The mercury rises and falls due to variations in the weight of the atmosphere. The mercury is being pushed up the tube, not pulled up by anything. When Pascal offered this explanation, Descartes wrote Christian Huygens 8 December that the hasty young man had the vacuum too much on his mind. Descartes identified bodies with extension and so had no room for vacuums.

If there were nothing between two objects, then they would be touching each other. And if they are touching each other, there is no gap between them. Well maybe the apparent gap is merely a thinly occupied region of space. There is merely unevenly spread matter. This model is very good at eliminating vacuums in the sense of empty objects. However, it is also rather good at eliminating ordinary objects. What we call objects would just be relatively thick deposits of matter.

There would be only one natural object: the whole universe. Indian philosophers associate nothingness with lack of differentiation. Descartes was part of a tradition that denied action at a distance. This orthodoxy included Galileo. How could the great Kepler believe something so silly?

How else could the universe be bound together by causal chains? Hunger for ether intensified as the wave-like features of light became established.

It is tautologous that a wave must have a medium. Or is it? As the theoretical roles of the ether proliferated, physicists began to doubt there could be anything that accomplished such diverse feats. He presented his theory as a relational account of space; if there were no objects, there would be no space.

Space is merely a useful abstraction. Even those physicists who wished to retain substantival space broke with the atomist tradition of assigning virtually no properties to the void. Instead of having gravitational forces being propagated through the ether, they suggest that space is bent by mass.

To explain how space can be finite and yet unbounded, they characterize space as spherical. When Edwin Hubble discovered that heavenly bodies are traveling away from each other like ants resting on an expanding balloon , cosmologists were quick to suggest that space may be expanding. Quantum field theory provides especially fertile ground for such speculation. To say that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, is to deny that vacuums are empty.

Many physicists revel in the discovery that vacuums are far from empty. Frank Wilczek , Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow , as well as Lawrence Krauss explicitly claim that this answers the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

The basic idea goes back to an issue raised by the symmetry of matter and anti-matter. Given that the symmetry implies equality, matter and anti-matter should have annihiliated each other. Creation should have been aborted. Why is there NOW something particles rather than nothing mere energy in a quantum field? This question was answered by calculations suggesting that there was about a billionth more matter than anti-matter.

Although it is still possible for the universe to be without particles, the slight numeric imbalance biases the universe toward states in which there are many particles. A small random change can trigger a phase transition analogous to the transformation of very cold liquid beer into solid beer when the cap of the bottle is popped suddenly reducing the pressure in the bottle.

A proud physicist is naturally tempted to announce these insights through the bullhorn of metaphysics. But philosophers interested in the logic of questions will draw attention to the role of emphasis in framing requests for explanations. But for rhetorical effect, physicists anachronistically back-date their domain of discourse to the things of nineteenth century physics.

Philosophers complain of misleading advertising. They asked one question and the proud physicists answered a different question. Lawrence Krauss defends the switch as an improvement. Often scientists make progress by altering the meaning of key terms. Why stick with an intractable and arguably meaningless question?

We should wriggle free from the dead hand of the past and rejuvenate our curiosity with the vocabulary of contemporary cosmology.

Although the new terms are not synonymous with the old, they bear enough similarity to disarm the objection that the physicists are merely changing the topic. Our questions, like our children, can mature without losing their identity over time. The idea of there being two different questions being asked is pursued in Carroll , Other Internet Resources. David Albert is open to the possibility of old questions being improved by new interests and discoveries.

Pascal thinks human beings have a unique perspective on their finitude. Pascal elevates us to the level of angels by exalting in our grasp of the infinite, and then runs us down below the beasts for wittingly choosing evil over goodness. From this valley of depravity Pascal takes us up again by marveling at how human beings tower over the microscopic kingdom, only to plunge us down toward insignificance by having us dwell on the vastness of space, and the immensity of eternity.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

II, Their poetry de-emphasized salvation, seeking to immerse the reader in a raw apprehension of nature, unmediated by reason. Kant further obscured God by casting Him into the noumenal abyss, available only through practical faith rather than theoretical reason. According to Schopenhauer, religion and rationalism aim to reassure us that the universe has a design. Our astonishment that there is anything betrays awareness that it is all a meaningless accident.

Readers of Schopenhauer were presented with the awesome contingency as an actuality rather than a terrible possibility. The experience captured the attention of William James who had experimented with nitrous oxide to understand the oceanic philosophy of Georg Hegel and, in , published the phenomenological investigation in Mind.

James provides a simple recipe for eliciting the emotion:. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Another close reader of Schopenhauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, characterizes the phenomenology as exhausting the thrust of the riddle of existence.

Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Lectures on Ethics, Wittgenstein uses the language of seeing-as. This gestalt switch is not a mistake. Nor is it an insight. Even the logical positivists were willing to grant the question has emotive meaning just not cognitive meaning.

The characteristic phenomenology of the question has also been suggested as a resource in explaining why we fail to recognize the radical ambiguity of the question. Andrew Brenner , conjectures that the multiplicity of interpretations is masked by the emotional unity. Instead of tossing the question into the emotivist waste basket, like the logical positivists, or lapsing into quietism, like Wittgenstein, existentialists provide detailed treatments of the awe expressed by the ultimate question.

Emotions are intentional states; they are directed toward something. If angered, I am angry at something. If amused, there is something I find amusing. Free floating anxiety is often cited as a counterexample. But Kierkegaard says that in this case the emotion is directed at nothingness. According to Heidegger, we have several motives to shy away from the significance of our emotional encounters with nothingness. They are premonitions of the nothingness of death.

They echo the groundlessness of human existence. Some have hoped that our recognition of our rootlessness would rescue meaning from the chaos of nothing. But Heidegger denies us such solace. Heidegger does think freedom is rooted in nothingness.

He also says we derive our concept of logical negation from this experience of nothing. This suggests a privileged perspective for human beings. We differ from animals with respect to nothing. Since Heidegger thinks that animals do not experience nothingness, he is committed to skepticism about animal reasoning involving negation.

Consider the Stoic example of a dog that is following a trail. The dog reaches a fork in the road, sniffs at one road and then, without a further sniff, proceeds down the only remaining road. Sniff—he did not go down this road. Therefore, he went down that road. They deny that human beings have a monopoly on nothingness. A classic anomaly for the stimulus-response behaviorist was the laboratory rat that responds to the absence of a stimulus:.

These anomalies for behaviorism fill rationalists with mixed emotions. On the one hand, the experiments refute the empiricist principle that everything is learned from experience. On the other hand, the experiments also constitute a caution against over-intellectualizing absences. A correct explanation of emotional engagement with absences must be more general and cognitively less demanding than rationalists tend to presuppose. Even mosquito larvae see shadows. Doubts about whether they have consciousness do not make us doubt that they see shadows.

So the perception of absences cannot depend on consciousness or any other advanced mental state. Perhaps the earliest form of vision was of these absences of light.

So instead of being a pinnacle of intellectual sophistication, cognition of absences may be primal. Existentialists tend to endorse the high standards assumed by rationalists. Their disagreement with the rationalists is over whether the standards are met. The existentialists are impressed by the contrast between our expectations of how reality ought to behave and how it in fact performs. This sense of absurdity makes existentialists more accepting of paradoxes. Whereas rationalists nervously view paradoxes as a challenge to the authority of reason, existentialists greet them as opportunities to correct unrealistic hopes.

Existentialists are fond of ironies and do not withdraw reflexively from the pain of contradiction. They introspect upon the inconsistency in the hope of achieving a resolution that does justice to the three dimensionality of deep philosophical problems. For instance, Heidegger is sensitive to the hazards of saying that nothing exists. Like an electrician who must twist and bend a wire to make it travel through an intricate hole, the metaphysician must twist and bend a sentence to probe deeply into the nature of being.

This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense.

There is a difference between a failure to understand and an understanding of failure. After all, Carnap was patient with the cryptic Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein speaks like an oracle. He even characterized his carefully enumerated sentences as rungs in a ladder that must be cast away after we have made the ascent and achieved an ineffable insight.

And Wittgenstein meant it, quitting philosophy to serve as a lowly schoolmaster in a rural village. Other critics deny that What is Metaphysics? When Heidegger connects negation with nothingness and death, these logicians are put in mind of an epitaph that toys with the principle of excluded middle: Mrs Nott was Nott Alive and is Nott Dead.

The comedic effect of such errors is magnified by the fundamentality of the question. Error here comes off as pretentious error. But the question itself appears to survive tests for being merely a verbal confusion.

In any case, the question or pseudo-question has helped to hone the diagnostic tools that have been applied to it. For genuine questions become better understood when we can discriminate them from their spurious look-alikes. Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there at most one empty world? Can there be an explanatory framework for the question? The restriction to concrete entities 5.

The contingency dilemma 6. The intuitive primacy of positive truths 7. The subtraction argument 8. Ontological neutrality 9. The problem of multiple nothings Is there any nothingness? Phenomenological aspects of nothingness There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

The contingency dilemma All concrete things appear to be contingent beings. The intuitive primacy of positive truths Henri Bergson maintained that nothingness is precluded by the positive nature of reality. Epstein , —9 The hazard of drawing metaphysical conclusions from psychological preferences is made especially vivid by caricatures.

The subtraction argument Thomas Baldwin reinforces the possibility of an empty world by refining the following thought experiment: Imagine a world in which there are only finitely many objects. The problem of multiple nothings Many of the principles used to rule out total emptiness also preclude small pockets of emptiness. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves.

And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing. He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

Animal Cognition of Absences Since Heidegger thinks that animals do not experience nothingness, he is committed to skepticism about animal reasoning involving negation. A classic anomaly for the stimulus-response behaviorist was the laboratory rat that responds to the absence of a stimulus: One rather puzzling class of situations which elicit fear are those which consist of a lack of stimulation.

Some members of this class may be special instances of novelty. This is not simply quibbling with words; for there is very good evidence see Chapter 13 that the failure of a stimulus to occur at a point in time or space where it usually occurs acts like any other kind of novel stimulus. However, the intensity of the fear evoked by the sight of a dead or mutilated body is so much greater than that evoked by more ordinary forms of novelty that we perhaps ought to seek an alternative explanation of the effects of this stimulus.

Fear of the dark is also difficult to account for in terms of novelty, since by the time this fear matures darkness is no less familiar than the light. Gray , 22 These anomalies for behaviorism fill rationalists with mixed emotions. What about this Nothing? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing…. We know the Nothing…. Anxiety reveals the Nothing…. Indeed: the Nothing itself—as such—was present….

Heidegger as quoted by Carnap , 69 This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense. Hate more than death or mortal strife? That which contented men desire, The poor have, the rich require, The miser spends, the spendthrift saves, And all men carry to their graves? Leeming, , The answer, Nothing , can only be seen through a kaleidoscope of equivocations.

Paul eds. Bergson, Henri, , Creative Evolution , trans.