“Why is there something rather than nothing?” In The Grand Design (2010), Stephen Hawking made headlines by denying the need for God to get matter to jump into being; the law of gravity was enough to do it. Then, Lawrence Krauss created a Youtube sensation and book called, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (2012), that made the same case, including an afterward by Richard Dawkins who heralded it as a death blow to the last proof for the existence of God. Jim Holt’s bestselling, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (2012), surveyed contemporary thinkers on this ultimate question as he sought some alternative to the theistic answer to the question. For these authors, the question is ultimate, but God isn’t.

Due to this explosion of interest in the question and the common aversion to God as the answer, it is worth asking a second-order question about the question: Why is there the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”?

A Copernican Shift

A peculiar thing about the question, “Why something rather than nothing?” is that we were given the answer before it occurred to us to formulate the question. Like Jeopardy, the answer came first, and only second did we ask the question.

Usually it is otherwise. We see a rainbow and ask what caused it, and then after extensive inquiry, we discover the properties of water and light that explain it. In this case, we naturally come upon the context of the world as what is ultimate. Against the mythologies of the poets, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus articulated what he took to be the ultimate necessity when he said, “The cosmos, the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and is and will be” (frag. 30, trans. Kahn). For the natural habit of mind, the world just is.

Then something happened. Human reason was given something that had never occurred to it before: the idea of God the Creator. Ancient philosophers already knew about the mythological tales of makers who fashioned chaos into order. Such makers would be co-eternal with matter, a part of the cosmos. They would not be the kind of thing that could exist independent of the cosmos. Now, thanks to biblical revelation, philosophy was given to think of a being that need not create, a being whose nature qualified it to be before and outside the cosmos. A new insight was nourished: compared to such a being, the cosmos need not be. Now the ultimate is not the cosmos, as Heraclitus assumed, for a new possibility emerged: a first cause that need not even cause.

Slowly did the powerful logic of the answer insinuate itself and fully work itself out into a corresponding question. God is. The cosmos and all the creatures in it need not be. Instead of the cosmos, there could be nothing other than God. Hence the question formed, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Nothing in this question means the negation of all that once was, now is, and will at some future time be. Hence, nothing is not something at all. It encompasses and negates the totality of finite being. Nothing harbors no possibility in itself; in it lurks no hidden potentialities and powers, no laws or propensities. Nothing excludes the watery chaos of mythology, the unformed matter of ancient cosmology, but also all the stuff of contemporary physics.

To ask the question is to be in the performance of the distinction between God and world, a distinction Robert Sokolowski argues in God of Faith and Reason is original to Christianity. Due to the genealogy of the question, attempts to answer the question with another answer necessarily fail as answers to the question. They may very well succeed in answering a different question, but they do not do what their authors would like them to do, namely provide an alternative answer to the ultimate question.

If there is no God, then the ultimate thing will be the cosmos, and there is no sense in pretending to ask the question why something rather than nothing. The nothing in the question will be a closet something otherwise there could never be something here, but we each know quite certainly that there is a something here. The nothing in the question only makes sense provided that we affirm the existence of the God who is not part of the cosmos, who is not a being among beings, but the generous granter of existence. Such a God is precisely the God affirmed by Christian philosophers and theologians in every century.

I am proposing, then, that the question only occurs as a result of a basically theological answer. Does that mean it is not a philosophical question?

The God of the Philosophers

Even though, as a matter of verifiable historical record, no ancient philosopher asked the question, now that it has occurred to us to ask the question it can be explored and appreciated by reason as a question. It would occur to few of us to ask most of the questions we now know the answer to, but that doesn’t mean the questions are not able to be understood once they occur to us (it doesn’t occur to a child, for instance, to ask how many suns there are, since the answer seems to be obviously one, even though this turns out to be illusory). Naturally, it seems obvious the cosmos just is, even though it turns out this is just an illusion in perspective.

Also, the question itself is a philosophical question which occurs to the philosophizing mind; it does not appear in the Bible and was not dictated by an angel. So, while the answer comes by way of revelation, the question comes by way of reason reflecting on the world in light of the answer.

But even this is not quite right. For the answer is only an answer in light of the question. Thus, strictly speaking, revelation does not give us the answer to the question; revelation shows us there is a God who defies worldly categories, a God who creates all things. The logic of such a God implies the question, why something, and suggests the answer: there is a necessary being who is not part of the system, responsible for sustaining the system. The philosophical question, then, actually enriches our understanding of the answer. Both revelation and the answer identify the same one being, but revelation does so theologically and the question does so philosophically. Strictly speaking, then, it is an act of faith that it is the same being in both cases.

Who Created God?

At first glance, it doesn’t make sense to ask about the origin of the cosmos. That seems like a non-starter. But having confronted the non-intuitive possibility that God need not have created and could have been all there is, we can appreciate the non-ultimacy of the cosmos. In light of the possibility of such a God, it makes sense to ask about the origin of all things.

But what about the origin of God? It would only make sense to ask this question if there was a conceivable origin to the origin of all things. But further consideration shows the silliness of the question. Either God is the origin of the cosmos, himself unoriginated, or the cosmos is somehow ultimate. There’s no sense in asking about the origin of something that is the origin of everything. It must simply be.

When we ask about things like rainbows and turtles and even the cosmos itself, it makes sense to ask after a cause. But when we are dealing with the necessary being, the one responsible for the fact that all of these caused causes are, it no longer makes sense to ask what causes it. If we ask, “Who created God?” we are not really targeting God the Creator but a creature, something with an origin.

Can we answer the question without invoking the God of theism? What else could transcend the whole cosmos? Something like a physical law doesn’t make sense apart from a cosmos to govern, but something like God the Creator does. Attempts to pose the question while dodging the theistic answer necessary fail to engage and thus answer the question.

Holt’s Existential Detective Story dismisses the theistic answer in one page as obviously incoherent. Hence, the pathos of his book, earnestly seeking a satisfying answer to the question other than the only possibly satisfying answer to the question.

If one wants to avoid the answer to the question, one can deny it is a legitimate question, as some philosophers have chosen to do. Bertrand Russell for example insisted, “The universe is just there—and that’s all.” The problem is that the question exercises a peculiar hold on our reason and won’t quite go away. Even philosophers, like Wittgenstein, who deny the question has sense, admit it is a question which grips us. He said he regularly has the following experience:

“I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist” or “how extraordinary that the world should exist.’”

Why from moment to moment should the universe exist? Like the Copernican revolution, the movement at work in this question is strange and disorienting. It questions what seems to be beyond question. The question, once asked, provokes us, and we must choose what is ultimate: God the Creator or almost nothing.

For the past several years, I’ve been posting short commentaries on YouTube, probably the most popular website in the world.  I’ve covered everything from movies and music to books and cultural trends, but I’ve given special attention to the New Atheism. Among other videos, I’ve posted three answers to Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great, a brief presentation of some classical arguments for God’s existence, and a response to Bill Maher’s movie Religulous.  As you might know, people are able to post comments in response to videos, and I’ve received a huge quantity of them—mostly negative—in regard to the aforementioned pieces.  Setting aside the venomous and emotionally-driven comments, I’ve been able to discern, in the more serious ones, a number of patterns.

The most glaring of these is what I would call scientism, the philosophical assumption that the real is reducible to what the empirical sciences can verify or describe.  In reaction to my attempts to demonstrate that God must exist as the necessary ground to the radically contingent universe, respondent after respondent says some version of this:  energy, or matter, or the Big Bang, is the ultimate cause of all things.  When I counter that the Big Bang itself demonstrates that the universe in its totality is contingent and hence in need of a cause extraneous to itself, they think I’m just talking nonsense.  The obvious success of the physical sciences—evident in the technology that surrounds us and facilitates our lives in so many ways—has convinced many of our young people (the vast majority of those who watch YouTube are young) that anything outside of the range of the empirical and measurable is simply a fantasy, the stuff of superstition and primitive belief.  That there might be a dimension of reality knowable in a non-scientific but still rational manner never occurs to them.  This prejudice, this blindness to literature, philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, and religion is the scientism that I’m complaining about.

Another feature of this scientism—and it’s evident everywhere on my YouTube forums—is  the extremely disturbing assumption that science and religion are, by their natures, implacable enemies.  Again and again, my interlocutors resurrect the story of Galileo to prove that the church has always sided with obscurantism and naïve biblical literalism over and against the sciences.  The Catholic philosopher Robert Sokolowski has argued that the founding myth of modernity is that enlightened thought was born out of, and in opposition to, pre-scientific religion.  And this is why, Sokolowski continues, the conflict between religion and science must be perpetually rehearsed and revived, as a kind of ritual acting out of the primal story.  (If you want to see a particularly dramatic presentation of this, watch the movie Inherit the Wind.)

But this myth is so much nonsense.  Leaving aside the complexities of the Galileo story (and there are complexities to it), we can see that the vast majority of the founding figures of modern science—Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Tycho Brahe—were devoutly religious.  More to it, two of the most important physicists of the 19th century—Faraday and Maxwell—were extremely pious, and the formulator of the Big Bang theory was a priest!  If you want a contemporary embodiment of the coming-together of science and religion, look to John Polkinghorne, Cambridge particle physicist and Anglican priest and one of the best commentators on the non-competitive interface between scientific and religious paths to truth.

Indeed, as Polkinghorne and many others have pointed out, the modern physical sciences were, in fact, made possible by the religious milieu out of which they emerged.  It is no accident that modern science first appeared precisely in Christian Europe, where a doctrine of creation held sway.  To hold that the world is created is to accept, simultaneously, the two assumptions required for science, namely, that the universe is not divine and that it is marked, through and through, by intelligibility.  If the world or nature is considered divine (as it is in many philosophies and mysticisms), then one would never allow oneself to analyze it, dissect it, or perform experiments upon it.  But a created world, by definition, is not divine.  It is other than God, and in that very otherness, scientists find their freedom to act.  At the same time, if the world is unintelligible, no science would get off the ground, since all science is based upon the presumption that nature can be known, that it has a form.  But the world, precisely as created by a divine intelligence, is thoroughly intelligible, and hence scientists have the confidence to seek, explore, and experiment.

This is why thoughtful people—Christians and atheists alike—must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion.  We must continually preach, as St. John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth.
 
 
(Image credit: Room4Debate)