Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,30

fatuous.”

It didn’t take long for me to understand why he felt this way. Unlike Leibniz and Schopenhauer, unlike Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dawkins and Hawking and Proust, unlike any number of contemporary philosophers and scientists and theologians and just about any ordinary reflective person, Grünbaum finds the existence of the world utterly unastonishing. And he is utterly convinced that it is rational for him to be unastonished.

Consider again the basic mystery as originally stated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? Grünbaum dubs this, with appropriate grandeur (and perhaps a hint of irony), the Primordial Existential Question. But what makes it legitimate? Like any other why question, he observes, it rests on hidden presuppositions. Not only does it presuppose that there must be some explanation for the existence of the world. It also takes for granted that the world needs an explanation—that, in the absence of some overriding cause or reason, nothingness would be expected to prevail.

But why should nothingness prevail? Those who profess puzzlement at the existence of a world like ours—one teeming with life and stars and consciousness and dark matter and all kinds of stuff we haven’t even discovered yet—seem to have an intellectual prejudice, one that favors the Null World. Nothingness is the natural state of affairs, they implicitly believe, the ontological default option. It is only deviations from nothingness that are mysterious, that require an explanation.

And where did they get this belief in what Grünbaum derisively labels the Spontaneity of Nothingness—a belief which seems so obvious to them that they don’t even bother to defend it? Whether they realize it or not, he argues, they got it from religion. Even atheists like Dawkins unwittingly imbibed it “with their mother’s milk.” The Spontaneity of Nothingness is a distinctly Christian precept, Grünbaum claims. It was inspired by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which arose in the second century after Christ. According to Christian dogma, God, being all-powerful, had no need of any preexisting materials out of which to fashion the world. He brought it into being out of sheer nothingness. (Presumably the Genesis account of creation, in which God created the world by imposing order on a sort of watery chaos, can be dismissed as mythopoetic license.)

But God, according to Christian dogma, is not only the creator of the world. He is also its sustainer. Once created, the world is utterly dependent on him for its continuing existence. He works around the clock to keep it in a state of being. If God ceased existentially supporting the world, even for a moment, it would, to use a phrase from the twentieth-century British archbishop William Temple, “collapse into non-existence.” The world is not like a house, which, once the builder is finished with it, continues to stand. Rather, it is like a car balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff. Without divine power to maintain its balance, it would plunge into the precipice of nothingness.

The ancient Greeks did not share this Christian idea of creation ex nihilo. Nor did the ancient Indian philosophers. Thus it is hardly surprising, Grünbaum observes, that they failed to worry about why there is something rather than nothing. It was churchly philosophers like Augustine and Aquinas who insinuated the idea into Western thought. The doctrine of the world’s ontological dependence on God—Grünbaum calls it the Dependency Axiom—molded the intuitions of rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz, predisposing them to believe that, were it not for God’s continuous activity of sustaining the world in existence, nothingness would prevail. Being without a cause was thus unthinkable to them. Even today, when we ask why there is something rather than nothing at all, we are, wittingly or not, heirs to a way of thinking that is a vestige of early Judeo-Christianity.

So the Primordial Existential Question rests on the assumption of the Spontaneity of Nothingness. The Spontaneity of Nothingness rests on the Dependency Axiom. And the Dependency Axiom turns out to be a bit of primitive and groundless theological bluster.

And that was only the beginning of Grünbaum’s brief. He was not content to observe that what he called the Primordial Existential Question rested on dubious premises. He wanted to show that these premises were just plain false. There is no reason, in his view, to be astonished, puzzled, awed, or mystified by the existence of the world. None of the virtues claimed for Nothingness—its supposed simplicity, its naturalness, its lack of arbitrariness, and so on—made it the de jure favorite in the reality sweepstakes: