Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,1
had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing.” Christopher Hitchens, another tireless proselytizer for atheism, is often confronted by his opponents with the same question. “If you don’t accept that there’s a God, how can you explain why the world exists at all?” one slightly thuggish right-wing TV host asked Hitchens, with a note of triumph in his voice. Another such host, this one of the leggy blonde variety, echoed the same religious talking point. “Where did the universe come from?” she demanded of Hitchens. “The idea that this all came out of nothing—that seems to defy logic and reason. What came before the Big Bang?” To which Hitchens replied, “I’d love to know what came before the Big Bang.”
What options do you have for resolving the mystery of existence once you let go of the God hypothesis? Well, you might expect that science will someday explain not only how the world is, but why is it. This, at least, is the hope of Dawkins, who looks to theoretical physics for an answer. “Maybe the ‘inflation’ that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe’s existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwin’s biological one,” Dawkins has written.
Stephen Hawking, who is actually a practicing cosmologist, takes a different approach. Hawking came up with a theoretical model in which the universe, though finite in time, is completely self-contained, without beginning or end. In this “no-boundary” model, he argued, there is no need for a creator, divine or otherwise. Yet even Hawking doubts that his set of equations can yield a complete resolution to the mystery of existence. “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” he plaintively asks. “Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?”
The problem with the science option would seem to be this. The universe comprises everything that physically exists. A scientific explanation must involve some sort of physical cause. But any physical cause is by definition part of the universe to be explained. Thus any purely scientific explanation of the existence of the universe is doomed to be circular. Even if it starts from something very minimal—a cosmic egg, a tiny bit of quantum vacuum, a singularity—it still starts with something, not nothing. Science may be able to trace how the current universe evolved from an earlier state of physical reality, even following the process back as far as the Big Bang. But ultimately science hits a wall. It can’t account for the origin of the primal physical state out of nothing. That, at least, is what diehard defenders of the God hypothesis insist.
Historically, when science has seemed incapable of explaining some natural phenomenon, religious believers have been quick to invoke a Divine Artificer to fill the gap—only to be embarrassed when science finally succeeds in filling it after all. Newton, for example, thought that God was needed to make little adjustments from time to time in the orbits of the planets to keep them from colliding. But a century later, Laplace proved that physics was quite capable of accounting for the stability of the solar system. (When Napoléon asked Laplace where God was in his celestial scheme, Laplace famously replied, “Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.”) More recently, religious believers have maintained that blind natural selection alone cannot explain the emergence of complex organisms, so God must be “guiding” the evolutionary process—a contention decisively (and gleefully) refuted by Dawkins and other Darwinians.
Such “God of the gaps” arguments, when they concern the minutiae of biology or astrophysics, tend to blow up in the faces of the religious believers who deploy them. But those believers feel themselves to be on safer ground with the question Why is there something rather than nothing? “No scientific theory, it seems, can bridge the gulf between absolute nothingness and a full-fledged universe,” the scientifically inclined religious apologist Roy Abraham Varghese has written. “This ultimate origin question is a metascientific question—one which science can ask but not answer.” The distinguished Harvard University astronomer (and devout Mennonite) Owen Gingerich agrees. In a lecture titled “God’s Universe,” delivered at Harvard’s Memorial Church in 2005, Gingerich pronounced the ultimate why question to be a “teleological” one—“not for science to grapple with.”
Faced with this line of argument, the atheist typically shrugs his shoulders and says the world “just is.” Perhaps it exists because it’s always