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—are 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.
Nothingness was alien to the Abrahamic tradition too. The book of Genesis has God creating the world not out of nothing, but out of a chaos of earth and water “without form and void”—tohu bohu, in the original Hebrew. Early in the Christian era, however, a new way of thinking began to take hold. The notion that God needed some sort of stuff to fashion a world seemed to put a limit on his presumably infinite creative powers. So, around the second or third century CE, the church fathers adduced a radical new cosmogony. The world, they proclaimed, was summoned into existence by God’s creative word alone, without any preexisting material to make it out of. This doctrine of creation ex nihilo later became part of Islamic theology, figuring in the kalām argument for the existence of God. It also entered medieval Jewish thought. In his reading of the opening passage of Genesis, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides affirmed that God created the world out of nothing.
To say God created the world “out of nothing” is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of anything. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than nothing at all.
And a few centuries later, someone finally