Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,97

and you have something to make living beings out of; second, so that all quarks wouldn’t turn into leptons, meaning there never would have been any atoms; third, so that protons wouldn’t decay so quickly that there’d soon be no atoms remaining, let alone organisms to survive the radiation produced by the decay; fourth, for protons not to repel one another so strongly that there’d be no such thing as chemistry, and hence no chemically-based beings like us.”

He continued with a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth reason, each of greater technical complexity.

“Now,” Leslie said, having concluded the litany, “how is it that one and the same twiddling of the cosmic knob for the strength of the electromagnetic force should satisfy so many requirements? This doesn’t seem to be a problem that can be solved by the multiverse model. The multiverse model only says that the strength of the electromagnetic force varies by chance from universe to universe. But for even a single life-permitting strength to be possible, the fundamental laws of physics themselves have to be just so. In other words, those laws—which are, by the way, supposed to be the same all across the multiverse—must have the potential for intelligent life built into them. Which is precisely why they would be the sort of laws that an infinite mind might find it interesting to contemplate.”

It was an awfully tidy package, Leslie’s axiarchism. Whatever you thought of its mind-bending assumptions—the Platonic reality of goodness, the creative efficacy of value—you had to admire its completeness and coherence as a speculative construction. And I did admire it. But I wasn’t quite moved by it. It didn’t quite speak to my existential depths. It didn’t appease my hunger for ultimate explanation. In fact, I wondered how deeply Leslie himself was invested in it, emotionally speaking. Did he feel anything like a quasi-religious attachment to his theory?

“Um … uh … um … ,” he stammered, sounding almost pained. “I feel constantly embarrassed by the idea that I ought to be attracted to my system because, well, wouldn’t it be lovely if it were true. That is just pie in the sky, and I very much dislike it. I don’t have anything like faith in my Platonic creation story. I certainly haven’t proved its truth. Almost nothing of philosophical interest strikes me as being provable. I’d say my confidence in it is just a little over 50 percent. A lot of the time, I feel that the universe just happens to exist and that’s it.”

Was the possibility that the world might exist for no reason whatever disturbing to him?

“Yes,” he replied, “it is—on an intellectual level, at least.”

Still, I added, he must find it gratifying that a significant minority of other philosophers have come around to his view.

“Or to other views that are equally crazy,” he said.

WAS LESLIE’S AXIARCHISM the long-sought resolution to the mystery of existence? Had the answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing? been available virtually from the beginning of Western thought, in the form of Plato’s vision of the Good? If so, why did so many subsequent thinkers—Leibniz, William James, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Stephen Hawking, to name a few—fail to see it? Were they all prisoners in Plato’s cave?

To take axiarchism seriously, you have to believe three things.

First, you have to believe that goodness is an objective value—that there are facts about what is good and evil, and that these facts are timelessly and necessarily true, independently of human concerns, and that they would be true even in the absence of all existent things.

Second, you have to believe that the ethical needs that arise from such facts about goodness can be creatively effective—that they can bring things into existence and maintain those things in existence without the aid of any intermediary agent or force or mechanism.

Third, you have to believe that the actual world—the world that we ourselves are a part of, even if we can only see a very tiny region of it—is the sort of reality that abstract goodness would bring into being.

In other words, you have to believe that (1) value is objective, (2) value is creative, and (3) the world is good. If you buy into all three of these propositions, you’ve got your resolution to the mystery of existence.

The first of them is philosophically controversial, to say the least. The most radical of the value skeptics, who trace their lineage to David Hume, hold that there is no such