Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,10
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