Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,42

hear the echo of your footfall, which is unthinkable in New York—made my thoughts seem clear and compelling and true.

The next morning, however, a metaphysical fog had descended on me again. I wondered whether there wasn’t something unwholesome about the Café de Flore. Sartre’s paradoxes seemed too easy to me, his ontological despair slightly off key. After all, Leibniz and Descartes were far greater philosophers than he ever was. And both of them were convinced that the world of contingent being—the one Sartre found so gooey and absurd, so permeated with nothingness—must rest on a secure and necessary ontological foundation.

There must be serious thinkers who still believed this. But I wasn’t going to find them easily on the Left Bank, not, at least, in this century. Better to look for enlightenment in a more cloistral, medieval setting. So, after grabbing a tartine et café crème at the bar of Le Select, I hauled my bags onto the Métro and headed to the Gare du Nord, there to catch the Eurostar train to London. Arriving at Waterloo Station a few hours later, I caught the tube to Paddington, where I hopped on a local train to Oxford, debouching from the station into that city of dreaming spires well in advance of cocktail hour.

“I HAVE BEEN here before,” I thought to myself (rather derivatively) as I made my way down Oxford’s High Street. And I had—for the wedding of a friend just a few months earlier. Now it was midwinter, Hilary Term, and the clear light of the late afternoon leant an apricot glow to the Cotswold sandstone of Oxford’s colleges. Bells rang out over the gables, cupolas, and finials. Students hurried to and fro through the Gothic labyrinth of passageways, cloisters, alleys, and quadrangles. All around me I felt the soft breath of a thousand years of learning.

So much for the bogus poetry. Where was the next clue to the mystery of the world’s existence?

I had a pretty good idea. Years ago, in a stack of galleys I had been sent to review, one slim volume stood out. Its title, Is There a God?, was not in itself remarkable. Books with titles like that are a dime a dozen. What struck me were the credentials of the author, whose name was Richard Swinburne. He was a philosopher of religion, a practitioner of what is called “natural theology.” But he was also a philosopher of science, the author of rigorous treatises on space, time, and causality. And he was clearly a thinker alert to the mystery of existence. “It is extraordinary that there should exist anything at all,” I read on the back cover of the volume. “Surely the most natural state of affairs is simply nothing: no universe, no God, nothing. But there is something. And so many things. Maybe chance could have thrown up the odd electron. But so many particles!” What could account for the existence of such a rich and plenitudinous universe? And what could account for its many surprising features—notably its spatial and temporal order, its fine-tuned fostering of life and consciousness, its suitability as a theater for human action? “There is a complexity, particularity, and finitude about the universe that cries out for explanation,” he wrote.

The simplest hypothesis that explains the existence of such a world is the hypothesis that God is behind it—that was Swinburne’s conclusion. Admittedly, it was not a very original one. What was original was Swinburne’s methodology. He did not pretend to prove God’s existence by means of an abstract logical deduction, in the manner of Anselm, Aquinas, or Descartes. Instead, he used modern scientific reasoning. He endeavored to show that the God hypothesis was at least probable, more probable than its negation, and hence that belief in God was rational. “The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence,” Swinburne wrote. Each step in his case was painstakingly justified by appeal to the canons of inductive logic. He was especially expert in the use of “Bayes’s theorem,” a mathematical formula that describes how new evidence raises or lowers the probability of a hypothesis. Using Bayesian confirmation theory, Swinburne sought to show that on the total evidence—which includes not just the existence of the universe, but also its lawfulness, the patterns of its history, and even the presence of evil within it—it was more likely than not that there is a God. Intellectually,