Why is there something rather than nothing?
Nothing at all would have been simpler. No universe, no laws, no questions. Yet here everything is.
- Reading time
- 5 min
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Branch
- Reality
- First posed
- Implicit in Parmenides, 5th century BCE; posed explicitly by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714
The question
You can ask why almost anything exists by pointing to something else. The oak exists because of an acorn; the acorn because of an earlier oak; the Earth because of a collapsing cloud of gas; the gas because of the early universe. Each answer points backward.
But now ask the question about everything at once. Why is there a universe at all, with laws of physics, rather than nothing whatsoever: no space, no time, no matter, no laws, no possibilities? Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz called this 'the first question we have the right to ask', and added that nothing would be simpler and easier than something.
The question is unusual because every ordinary answer is ruled out in advance. Any 'something' you appeal to as the explanation is itself part of what needed explaining. If you say a physical process produced the universe, the process and its laws were already something.
“Why is there something rather than nothing? For nothing is simpler and easier than something.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace (1714)
Why it matters
It is perhaps the deepest question there is, and it has shaped both religion and physics. Arguments for the existence of God often start here, as do debates about whether science can, even in principle, explain everything.
It also tests the principle of sufficient reason: the idea that everything has an explanation. If even existence itself has no reason, then reality, at bottom, is a brute fact.
Key terms
- Principle of sufficient reasonThe principle, championed by Leibniz, that everything that is the case has a reason or explanation why it is so and not otherwise.
- Brute factA fact that has no explanation; it is simply so. Whether the existence of the universe is a brute fact is a central question in cosmological arguments.
- Necessary beingA being that could not have failed to exist. Some arguments claim that only such a being can explain why anything contingent exists.
- ContingentTrue or existing, but able to have been otherwise. Opposed to necessary.
- NothingnessThe absence of anything at all. Some philosophers doubt the idea is even coherent; Sartre used it for consciousness's power to negate and step back from what is given.
The positions
A necessary being
There is something because something exists necessarily, something that could not have failed to exist and so needs no further explanation.
A brute fact
There is no reason. The existence of the universe is simply a fact, and the demand for an explanation of everything is misplaced.
Nothing is unstable, or impossible
Nothing is not a real option. Either 'nothing' is incoherent, or the laws of physics make a universe inevitable.
The question is meaningless
The question looks deep but misuses words. 'Why' asks for causes within the world, and cannot be applied to the world as a whole.
Arguments and objections
A necessary being
- Best argument
- Contingent things, which could have failed to exist, need explanations beyond themselves. The whole collection of contingent things is itself contingent. So the ultimate explanation must lie in a being whose existence is necessary. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) developed a version of this argument from the 'necessary existent', and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Thomas Aquinas gave others. Many identify this being with God.
- Strongest objection
- David Hume and Immanuel Kant questioned whether 'necessary existence' makes sense: anything we can conceive existing, we can conceive not existing. And even granting a necessary being, it is a further step to show it has the attributes of a personal God.
- The reply
- Defenders reply that necessity need not be conceptual; it could be metaphysical, like the necessity of mathematical truths, which also exist in every possible world.
A brute fact
- Best argument
- Explanation must stop somewhere, and the principle of sufficient reason may simply be false. Bertrand Russell, debating Frederick Copleston on the radio in 1948, replied, in effect, that the universe is simply there, and that is all that can be said. Every chain of explanation ends in something unexplained; the universe is a natural place for it to end.
- Strongest objection
- Accepting a brute fact at the foundation of everything seems to give up on understanding just where it matters most. And if things can exist for no reason, why not expect bizarre unexplained events all the time?
- The reply
- Brute-fact theorists answer that the regularity of the world can itself be part of the brute fact; accepting one unexplained starting point does not license expecting chaos.
Nothing is unstable, or impossible
- Best argument
- Some physicists argue that the quantum vacuum is unstable and naturally produces universes. Some philosophers argue that a state of absolute nothingness is impossible because, for example, it would still be true in that state that there is nothing, and truths are something. Others note that of all the ways things could be, only one is 'nothing', so something is overwhelmingly likely.
- Strongest objection
- A quantum vacuum governed by laws is not nothing; it is a very particular something. Physical explanations of the universe's origin move the question back to why those laws exist. As for probability, it is unclear that 'ways things could be' can be counted at all.
The question is meaningless
- Best argument
- Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that 'not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is'. Logical positivists went further and called the question meaningless, since no possible observation could answer it. Asking for the cause of everything is like asking what is north of the North Pole.
- Strongest objection
- That a question cannot be settled by observation does not make it meaningless; the verification principle that says so cannot itself be verified by observation. Many people find the question perfectly clear, if unanswerable.
Who argued what
- A necessary being Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Thomas Aquinas
- A brute fact Bertrand Russell, David Hume
- Nothing is unstable, or impossible Lawrence Krauss, Peter van Inwagen
- The question is meaningless Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap
Variations
The sequence with no first link
Suppose every event was caused by an earlier one, infinitely far back. Each event has an explanation. Does the whole infinite series still need one? Leibniz compared it to a geometry book copied from an earlier copy, forever: you can explain each copy, but not why the book exists at all.
Subtracting things one by one
Thomas Baldwin proposed a subtraction argument: if there could be a world with only finitely many things, and each of them could be absent without anything else being added, then you could subtract them one by one and reach a world with nothing. If that works, nothingness is possible, and the question is real.
Go deeper
The physics of beginnings
The Big Bang theory describes how the observable universe evolved from an extremely hot, dense state about 13.8 billion years ago. It does not by itself say that this state came from nothing, or that time began there. Some cosmological models have no beginning at all; others treat the early universe as emerging from a prior state. None of them, as physics, addresses why there are laws or a universe in the first place.
Related ideas
Further reading and sources
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Nothingness
- WikipediaWhy is there anything at all?
- BookWhy Does the World Exist?, Jim Holt
- EssayPrinciples of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, G. W. Leibniz
Open questions
- Could anything ever count as a final answer to this question?
- If there were nothing, would it be true that there was nothing?
- Is it more surprising that the universe exists, or that it can be understood?