Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,94

nature—which is a very elegant and interesting way for a world to be—you can’t have bowls of rice suddenly appearing miraculously. Moreover, the fact that the child doesn’t have a bowl of rice may very well be the result of a misuse of human freedom, and you can’t have the goodness of a world where agents are free to make decisions unless you also have the possibility that those agents will make bad decisions.”

I understood that the requirements of goodness could conflict, that some could be overruled by others. But why should goodness have any tendency to fulfill itself at all? Why should it be different from, say, redness? Redness clearly doesn’t have a tendency to fulfill itself. If it did, everything would be red.

“Richard Dawkins once made the same point. He asked me, ‘How could so piffling a concept as goodness explain the world’s existence? You might as well appeal to Chanel Number Fiveness.’ Well, I don’t think of goodness as just another quality that is slapped on things like perfume or a coat of paint. Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense. Anyone who doesn’t grasp that hasn’t reached square one in understanding what ethics is all about.”

Imagine some good possibility—like that of a beautiful and harmonious cosmos just spilling over with happiness. If that possibility were made real, it would have an existence that was ethically needful. This was essentially Plato’s idea: that a thing could exist because its existence was required by goodness. The connection between goodness and required existence isn’t a logical one. Yet it is a necessary connection—that, at least, is what Platonically inclined thinkers like Leslie believe. We may simply lack the conceptual resources to appreciate why this is so. We tend to think that value can bring something into existence only with the aid of some mechanism—as Leslie put it, “some combination, perhaps, of pistons pushing, electromagnetic fields tugging, or persons exerting willpower.” But such a mechanism could never explain the existence of a world. It could never explain why there is Something rather than Nothing, because it would be part of the Something to be explained. Given the limitations of our understanding, we have to content ourselves with the bare insight that an ethical need and a creative force both point in the same direction: toward Being. The Platonic idea that there is a necessary connection between the two is not an inescapable truth of logic. But neither is it a conceptual absurdity. So, at any rate, Leslie was maintaining.

Perhaps, I suggested to him, it might help to think of the matter the other way around. Even if an abstract need for goodness did not in itself provide a very compelling reason for a cosmos to exist, it at least provided some reason. And in the absence of a countervailing reason—a reason that would oppose the existence of the world—goodness alone might be enough to secure the victory of Being over Nothingness. From a physical point of view, after all, the universe doesn’t seem to cost anything: its total energy, when the negative gravitational energy is balanced against the positive energy locked up in matter, is zero.

Leslie welcomed this reasoning. “In the absence of a nihilistic force fighting the existence of things,” he said, “any valid reason for their existence would tend to bring about their realization. You might dream up a sort of demon that was opposing the existence of things. But then, I ask, where did that demon come from?”

What about Heidegger, though? Didn’t he believe in an abstract annihilating force? The Nothing that “noths”?

“Maybe he did, but I don’t,” Leslie replied. “If you actually read Heidegger, he’s very obscure on the question of explaining existence. But he’s been interpreted by the theologian Hans Küng as holding that the word ‘God’ is just a label for a creative ethical principle that’s producing the world. So Heidegger may well be in the Plato-Leslie camp!”

Leslie himself, for all his theologically flavored talk of “divine minds,” had little sympathy for the traditional concept of God. “If my view is true,” he said, “what you are stuck with is an infinite number of infinite minds, each of which knows absolutely everything worth knowing. You can call each one of them ‘God’ if you want, or you could say that God was the entire infinite collection. Or you could even say that God was simply the abstract principle behind them all.”

I recalled an observation that the orthodox Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne had made