Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story Read online

  In the very first philosophy course I took as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, the professor—a distinguished quondam Oxonian with the evocative name of A. D. Woozley—had us read David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In these dialogues, a trio of fictitious characters—Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo—debate various arguments for the existence of God. Demea, the most religiously orthodox of the three, defends the “cosmological argument,” which says, in essence, that the world’s existence can be explained only by positing a necessarily existent deity as its cause. In response, the skeptical Philo—who comes closest to being a stand-in for Hume himself—comes up with a seductive bit of reasoning. Although the world seems to be in need of a God-like cause of its existence, Philo observes, that might be due to our own intellectual blindness. Consider, Philo says, the following arithmetical curiosity. If you take any multiple of 9 (like 18, 27, 36, etc.) and add up the digits (1 + 8, 2 + 7, 3 + 6, etc.), you always get 9 back again. To the mathematically naive, this might appear a matter of chance. To the skillful algebraist, by contrast, it is immediately seen to be a matter of necessity. “Is it not probable,” Philo then asks, “that the whole economy of the universe is conducted by a like necessity, though no human algebra can furnish a key which solves the difficulty?”

  I found this idea of a hidden cosmic algebra—an algebra of being!—irresistible. The very phrase seemed to expand the range of possible explanations for the world’s existence. Perhaps the choice was not God versus Brute Fact after all. Perhaps there was a nontheistic explanation for the world’s existence—one discoverable by human reason. Although such an explanation wouldn’t need to posit a deity, it wouldn’t necessarily rule one out either. Indeed, it might even imply the existence of some kind of supernatural intelligence, and in doing so furnish an answer to the precocious child’s dread question: “But mommy, who made God?”

  How close are we to discovering such an algebra of being? The novelist Martin Amis was once asked by Bill Moyers in a television interview how he thought the universe might have popped into existence. “I’d say we’re at least five Einsteins away from answering that question,” Amis replied. His estimate seemed about right to me. But, I wondered, could any of those Einsteins be around today? It was obviously not my place to aspire to be one of them. But if I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order . . . well, that would be an excellent quest.

  So that is what I set out to do. My quest to find the beginnings of an answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing? has had many promising leads. Some failed to pan out. Once, for instance, I called a theoretical cosmologist I knew, one noted for his brilliant speculations. I got his voice mail and said that I had a question for him. He called back and left a message on my answering machine. “Leave your question on my voice mail and I’ll leave the answer on your machine,” he said. This was alluring. I complied. When I returned to my apartment late that evening, the little light was blinking on my answering machine. With some trepidation, I pushed the playback button. “Okay,” the cosmologist’s recorded voice began, “what you’re really talking about is a violation of matter / antimatter parity . . .”

  On another occasion, I sought out a certain well-known professor of philosophical theology. I asked him if the existence of the world could be explained by postulating a divine entity whose essence contained his existence. “Are you kidding?” he said. “God is so perfect He doesn’t have to exist!”

  On still another occasion, on a street in Greenwich Village, I ran into a Zen Buddhist scholar I’d been introduced to at a cocktail party. He was said to be an authority on cosmic matters. After a little small talk, I asked him—perhaps, in retrospect, precipitately—“Why is there something rather than nothing?” In response, he tried to bop me on the head. He must have thought it was a Zen kōan.

  In searching for enlightenment on the riddle of being, I cast my net fairly wide, talking to philosophers, theologians, particle physicists, cosmologists, mystics, and one very great American novelist. Above all, I looked for versatile and wide-ranging intellects. To have anything really profitable to say about why the world might exist, a thinker must possess more than one kind of intellectual sophistication. Suppose, for example, a scientist has some philosophical acumen. Then he or she might see that the “nothingness” philosophers talked about was conceptually equivalent to something scientifically definable—say, a closed four-dimensional spacetime manifold of vanishing radius. By feeding a mathematical description of this null reality into the equations of quantum field theory, one might be able to prove that a small patch of “false vacuum” had a nonzero probability of spontaneously appearing—and that this bit of vacuum, through the marvelous mechanism of “chaotic inflation,” would be sufficient to get a full-fledged universe going. If the scientist was also versed in theology, he or she might see how this cosmogonic event could be construed as a backward-in-time emanation from a future “Omega point” that has some of the properties traditionally ascribed to the Judeo-Christian deity. And so forth.

  Engaging in such speculative flights takes a good deal of intellectual brio. And brio was amply on display in most of my encounters. One of the pleasures of talking to original thinkers about a matter as profound as the mystery of being is that you get to hear them think out loud. Sometimes they would say the most astonishing things. It was as though I was privileged to peer into their thought processes. This was a cause for awe. But I also found it oddly empowering. When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, “All of us are beggars here.”

  Interlude

  Could Our World Have Been Created by a Hacker?

  Where did our universe come from? Doesn’t its sheer existence point to an ultimate creative force at play? This question, when posed by a religious believer to an atheist, generally elicits one of two responses. First, the atheist might say, if you do postulate such a “creative force,” you’d better be prepared to postulate another one to explain its existence, and then another one behind that, and so forth. In other words, you end up in an infinite regress. The second atheist response is to say that even if there were an ultimate creative force, there is no reason to think of it as God-like. Why should the First Cause be an infinitely wise and good being, let alone one that is minutely concerned with our inner thoughts and sex lives? Why should it even have a mind?

  The idea that our cosmos was somehow “made” by an intelligent being might seem to be a primitive one, if not downright nutty. But before dismissing it entirely, I thought it would be interesting to consult Andrei Linde, who has done more than any other scientist to explain how our cosmos got going. Linde is a Russian physicist who immigrated to the United States in 1990 and who now teaches at Stanford University. While still a young man in Moscow, he came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde’s theory, called “chaotic inflation,” explained the overall shape of space and the formation of galaxies. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation left over from the Big Bang that the COBE satellite observed in the 1990s.

  Among the curious implications of Linde’s theory, one of the most striking is that it doesn’t take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required, nor are supernatural powers. It might even be possible for someone in a civilization not much more advanced than ours to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

  Linde is a handsome, heavy-set man with a full head of silver hair. Among his colleagues he is legendary for his ability to perform acroba
tics and baffling sleights of hand, even while a little squiffy.

  “When I invented the theory of chaotic inflation, I found that the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter,” Linde told me in his Russian-accented English. “That’s enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us. It looks like cheating, but that’s how the inflation theory works—all the matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the gravitational field. So what’s to stop us from creating a universe in a lab? We would be like gods!”

  Linde, it should be said, is known for his puckishly gloomy manner, and the preceding words were laced with irony. But he assured me that this cosmogenesis-on-a-lab-bench scenario was feasible, at least in principle.

  “There are some gaps in my proof,” he conceded. “But what I have shown—and Alan Guth [a codeveloper of inflation theory] and others who have looked at this matter have come to the same conclusion—is that we can’t rule out the possibility that our own universe was created by someone in another universe who just felt like doing it.”

  It struck me that there was a hitch in this scheme. If you started a Big Bang in a lab, wouldn’t the baby universe you created expand into your own world, killing people and crushing buildings and so forth?

  Linde assured me that there was no such danger. “The new universe would expand into itself,” he said. “Its space would be so curved that it would look as tiny as an elementary particle to its creator. In fact, it might end up disappearing from his own world altogether.”

  But why bother making a universe if it’s going to slip away from you, the way Eurydice slipped from the grasp of Orpheus? Wouldn’t you want to have some quasi-divine power over how your creation unfolded, some way of monitoring it and making sure the creatures that evolved therein turned out well? Linde’s creator seemed very much like the deist concept of God favored by Voltaire and America’s founding fathers—a being who set our universe in motion but then took no further interest in it or its creatures.

  “You’ve got a point,” Linde said, emitting a slight snuffle of amusement. “At first I imagined that the creator might be able to send information into the new universe—to teach its creatures how to behave, to help them discover what the laws of nature are, and so forth. Then I started thinking. The inflation theory says that a baby universe blows up like a balloon in the tiniest fraction of a second. Suppose the creator tried to write something on the surface of the balloon, like “PLEASE REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU.” The inflationary expansion would make this message exponentially huge. The creatures in the new universe, living in a tiny corner of one letter, would never be able to read the whole message.”

  But then Linde thought of another channel of communication between creator and creation—the only one possible, as far as he could tell. The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, would have the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. He could determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron’s mass to the proton’s will be. Such numbers, called the constants of nature, look utterly arbitrary to us: there is no apparent reason why they should take the value they do rather than some other value. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits “6673”?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde pointed out with evident relish, such a message would be legible only to physicists.

  Was he joking?

  “You might take this as a joke,” he said. “But perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may furnish the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird, so far from perfect. On the evidence, our universe wasn’t created by a divine being. It was created by a physicist hacker!”

  From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. Of course, orthodox believers can always respond to a scenario like Linde’s by saying, “Okay, but who created the physicist hacker?” Let’s hope it’s not hackers all the way up.

  2

  PHILOSOPHICAL TOUR D’HORIZON

  The riddle does not exist.

  —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

  proposition 6.5

  The crux of the mystery of existence, as I have said, is summed up in the question Why is there something rather than nothing? William James called this question “the darkest in all philosophy.” The British astrophysicist Sir Bernard Lovell observed that pondering it could “tear the individual’s mind asunder.” (Indeed, psychiatric patients have been known to be obsessed by it.) Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the academic field known as the History of Ideas, observed that the attempt to answer it “constitutes one of the most grandiose enterprises of the human intellect.” Like all deep incomprehensibilities, it lends an opening to jocularity. Some decades ago, when I put the question to the American philosopher Arthur Danto, he replied, with mock irritability, “Who says there’s not nothing?” (As will soon become apparent, this response is not entirely a joke.) A still better answer was supplied by Sidney Morgenbesser, late Columbia University philosopher and legendary wag. “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied!”

  But the question cannot be laughed away. Each of us, as Martin Heidegger observed, is “grazed by its hidden power”:

  The question looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time. . . . The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.

  Ignoring this question is a symptom of mental deficiency—so, at least, claimed the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “The lower a man is in an intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence itself is to him,” Schopenhauer wrote. What raises man above other creatures is that he is conscious of his finitude; the prospect of death brings with it the conceivability of nothingness, the shock of nonbeing. If my own self, the microcosm, is ontologically precarious, so perhaps is the macrocosm, the universe as a whole. Conceptually, the question Why does the world exist? rhymes with the question Why do I exist? These are, as John Updike observed, the two great existential mysteries. And if you happen to be a solipsist—that is, if you believe, as did the early Wittgenstein, “I am my world”—the two mysteries fuse into one.

  FOR A QUESTION that is supposed to be timeless and universal, it is strange that nobody explicitly asked, Why is there something rather than nothing? until the modern era. Perhaps it’s the “nothing” part of the question that makes it truly modern. Premodern cultures have their creation myths to explain the origin of the universe, but such myths never start from sheer nothingness. They always presuppose some primordial beings or stuff out of which reality arose. In a Norse myth current around 1200 CE, for instance, the world began when a primeval region of fire melted a primeval region of frost, giving rise to liquid drops that quickened into life and took the form of a wise giant called Ymer and a cow called Audhumla—whence eventually sprang the rest of existence as the Vikings knew it. According to a somewhat more economical creation myth, that of the African Bantus, the entire contents of the universe—sun, stars, land, sea, animals, fish, mankind—ar
e literally vomited out of the mouth of a nauseated being called Bumba. Cultures that have no creation myth to explain how the world came into being are rare, but not unknown. One such is the Pirahã, an amusingly perverse Amazon tribe. When anthropologists ask Pirahã tribespeople what preceded the world, they invariably reply, “It has always been this way.”

  A theory about the birth of the universe is called a cosmogony, from the Greek kosmos, meaning “universe,” and gonos, meaning “produce” (the same as the root for “gonad”). The ancient Greeks were the pioneers of rational cosmogony, as opposed to the mythopoetic variety exemplified by creation myths. Yet the Greeks never raised the question of why there is a world rather than nothing at all. Their cosmogonies always involved some sort of starting material, usually rather messy. The natural world, they held, came into existence when order was imposed on this primal mess: when Chaos became Cosmos. (It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.”) As to what this original Chaos might have been, the Greek philosophers had various guesses. For Thales, it was watery, a kind of ur-Ocean. For Heraclitus, it was fire. For Anaximander, it was something more abstract, an indeterminate material called “the Boundless.” For Plato and Aristotle, it was a formless substrate that might be taken as a prescientific notion of space. The Greeks did not worry too much about where this ur-matter came from. It was simply assumed to be eternal. Whatever it was, it was certainly not nothing—the very idea of which was inconceivable to the Greeks.