Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why does the world exist? Or to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing? This ultimate mystery in philosophy and physics has been called the ‘Fundamental Question of Metaphysics’.
The question is stranger than it might at first seem. We are accustomed to asking why particular things exist—a tree, a country, even a planet—but here we are asking why there should be anything at all.
First, it might be that the question itself is misguided. ‘Nothing’, it is argued, is a human abstraction used to describe the absence of specific entities. The concept cannot be extended to all reality. If there truly was ‘nothing’, then nothing could ever exist, which contradicts the brute fact that we are here to pose the question.
Already in the fifth century BCE, the pre-Socratic Parmenides of Elea argued that one cannot speak or think of ‘nothing’. To think of anything at all, it must in some sense exist or pre-exist. Logically, something cannot come out of nothing, or nothing out of something. If there is something, there cannot have been nothing, and vice versa.
This line of reasoning led Parmenides to conclude, first, that reality, properly understood, cannot come into being or pass away, and, second, that all change is in some sense an illusion.
Quantum Physics
When we try to imagine nothingness, we find that we cannot. In our mind’s eye, there is still, for example, light and space. ‘Nothing’ could be a non-descript state, lacking the laws and properties enabling it to maintain itself. Thus, ‘nothing’ would be an unstable state, and bound to collapse into ‘something’. Existence, perhaps, is more stable than non-existence—with complex existence being most stable of all. Maybe that’s why you’re here, reading this essay: because you’re quite stable.
Many physicists tell us that an absolute vacuum is likely impossible. Quantum fields constantly fluctuate, creating energy and particles out of what we perceive as empty space. What we perceive as empty space is really a bubbling ‘foam’ in which virtual particles and fields constantly flicker in and out of existence. The hypothesis that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ (horror vacui) is attributed already to Aristotle.
Still, a quantum field is something. Quantum physics merely explains how to get ‘something from something’, rather than ‘something from absolute nothing’. Also, quantum physics presupposes the laws of quantum physics, without being able to account for their origin. Maybe that’s all that existence, or minimal existence, entails: simply a set of laws, or mathematics.
But the same question remains, albeit at one remove: why are there laws, or mathematics, rather than nothing at all?
Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) built his entire metaphysical system of monads on just two fundamental principles of reasoning, namely, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.
- The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa.
- The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts.
From the principle of sufficient reason follows Leibniz’s question: If everything has a cause or reason, the universe, too, must have had some first cause or reason—traditionally identified with God.
Leibniz thought that the old ontological argument for the existence of God, according to which the very concept of God as a supremely perfect being entails his existence, is incomplete, since it proves only that the perfect being exists if he is possible.
In 1697, Leibniz wrote a short treatise, On the Ultimate Origin of Things, in which he supplements and buttresses the ontological argument with a ‘cosmological argument’ founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which the cause of the cosmos, which consists in a contingent series of dependent causes, can only be a first, necessary, or uncaused cause.
The critical distinction is between contingent things, which might not have existed, and the necessary being, which could not have failed to exist. The chain of contingent explanations, Leibniz thought, must ultimately lead back to necessity.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
But that there is a God, or First Cause, does not explain why this entity created the world. Thus, in On the Ultimate Origin of Things, Leibniz also asks our question, why is there something rather than nothing—and replies, rather poetically: because good and beautiful things demand to exist.
…since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence or (so to speak) a straining toward existence in possible things or in possibility or essence itself; in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence.
Furthermore, it follows from this that all possibles, that is, everything that expresses essence or possible reality, strive with equal right for existence in proportion to the amount of essence or reality or the degree of perfection they contain, for perfection is nothing but the amount of essence. From this it is obvious that of the infinite combinations of possibilities and possible series, the one that exists is the one through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence…
Instead of asking why anything should have escaped from nothingness, Leibniz imagines possible things straining for existence, competing, as it were, to be realised.
Leibniz used this line of thought to bolster his argument that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, with moons, roses, starfish, wine, and talking monkeys like us.
In Candide, Voltaire famously mocked Leibniz’s optimism. But quantum physics seems to echo his deeper idea: that existence might not be some accident, but something towards which possibility itself inclines.
Moreover, there is something intuitively true in Leibniz’s idea. Or why else do we build cathedrals, compose symphonies, and plant gardens?
I’ll leave you with this one thought. Whenever we are able to imagine something good and beautiful, we, too, like God, conspire to bring that thing into existence.
Continue Exploring
To explore Leibniz’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.
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