a victim of its own inability to arrive at a workable distinction between sense and nonsense. In its wake, metaphysics—the project of characterizing reality as a whole—has seen a revival. Even in the Anglo-Saxon world, “analytical” philosophers are no longer embarrassed to grapple with metaphysical issues. The most audacious of the many professional philosophers who have confronted the mystery of existence in the last few decades was Robert Nozick of Harvard University, who died at the age of sixty-three in 2002. Although best known as the author of the libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick was obsessed with the question Why is there something rather than nothing?, devoting a fifty-page section of his later book Philosophical Explanations to the various possibilities for answering it—some of them quite wild. He invited the reader to imagine nothingness as a force “sucking things into non-existence.” He posited a “principle of fecundity” that sanctions the simultaneous existence of all possible worlds. He talked of having some kind of mystical insight into reality’s foundation. As for his colleagues who might have found his attempts to answer the ultimate question a little strange, Nozick was unapologetic: “Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn’t understand the question.”
TODAY, THINKERS REMAIN divided into three camps by the question Why is there something rather than nothing? The “optimists” hold that there has to be a reason for the world’s existence, and that we may well discover it. The “pessimists” believe that there might be a reason for the world’s existence, but that we’ll never know for sure—perhaps because we see too little of reality to be aware of the reason behind it, or because any such reason must lie beyond the intellectual limits of humans, which were tooled by nature for survival, not for penetrating the inner nature of the cosmos. Finally, the “rejectionists” persist in believing that there can’t be a reason for the world’s existence, and hence that the very question is meaningless.
You don’t have to be a philosopher or a scientist to join one of these camps. Everyone is entitled. Marcel Proust, for instance, seems to have placed himself among the pessimists. The narrator of his novel Remembrance of Things Past, musing on how the Dreyfus affair had split French society into warring factions, observes that political wisdom may be powerless to end the civil strife, just as “in philosophy, pure logic is powerless to tackle the problem of existence.”
But suppose you’re an optimist. What is the most promising approach to the mystery of existence? Is it the traditional theistic approach, which looks to a God-like entity as the necessary cause and sustainer of all being? Is it the scientific approach, which draws on ideas from quantum cosmology to explain why a universe was bound to leap into existence out of the void? Is it a purely philosophical approach, which seeks to deduce a reason for the world’s existence from abstract considerations of value, or from the sheer impossibility of nothingness? Is it some sort of mystical approach, which aims to satisfy the craving for a cosmic rationale through direct illumination?
All of these approaches have their contemporary proponents. All of them, at first blush, seem worth pursuing. Indeed, it is only by thinking of the mystery of existence from every available angle that we have any hope of resolving it. To those who consider the question Why is there something rather than nothing? hopelessly elusive or downright incoherent, it might be pointed out that intellectual progress often consists in the refinement of precisely such questions, in ways unforeseeable to those who first ask them. Take another question, posed twenty-five hundred years ago by Thales and his fellow pre-Socratics: What are things made of? Asking a question of such all-encompassing generality might sound naive, even childish. But, as the Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson observed, the pre-Socratic philosophers “were asking one of the best questions ever to have been asked, a question that has painfully led to much of modern science.” To have dismissed it from the outset as unanswerable would have been “a feeble and unnecessary surrender to despair, philistinism, cowardice or indolence.”
The mystery of existence, however, might seem uniquely futile among such questions. For, as William James put it, “from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.” But can this be known before any attempt is made to construct such a bridge? Other seemingly impossible bridges have been successfully built: from nonlife to life (thanks to molecular biology), from finite to infinite (thanks