Truth Reconciled

The ultimate question

One of the deepest questions that has been considered by the human mind is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It has also been phrased as “Why is there anything at all?” It is related but not identical to the more specific and physical question: “Why does the universe exist?” It is considered by some to be the ultimate question, or the fundamental question, because everything in existence depends on it.

I first considered the question of existence when I was a child in a Sunday school class. I can’t recall if the lesson was about the Creation, but I remember that the teacher told us that God created everything. One of us then posed the question, “If God created everything, then who created God?” The teacher responded, “His God created him.” I know now that this is an unusual answer, but any other answer would have led me down the same path. The next question was, “But how did it all start?” 

That was it. This was the first time that I saw the dark possibility of nothingness in my mind’s eye, as I tried to consider the beginning of everything. It was unnerving for me at that age, as was the teacher’s response that “there was no beginning.” I couldn’t comprehend a beginning, nor an infinite past. The beginning didn’t make sense to me, because how could something just spontaneously appear from nothing? An infinite past did not solve the problem either, because there was no explanation for why that infinite timeline existed instead of nothing.

From that moment on, the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing” was pinned in the back of my mind like a monster hiding in the closet. I remembered it from time to time, and the idea of it bothered me. It felt as if the nothingness was near, threatening to erase me from existence unless I could figure out why I existed. But there was nothing I could do about it because apparently no one knew the answer. 

No one knows

As I grew older and learned the answers to many mysteries, this one great mystery never seemed to resolve itself. I came to realize that, although many people like my teacher thought they had solved it, they really had not. Nobody knew the answer. Everyone was just avoiding the issue. Even the greatest thinkers who considered the question and wrote about it seemed to give up hope of finding a real explanation for existence.

Those who did claim to have an answer all used the same approach. Instead of assuming the existence of the universe, they assumed some universe-creating mechanism that would then create the universe. They were not really answering the question, they were simply pushing the assumption back one step. Every explanation I ever heard begged the question: “Why did that universe-creating mechanism exist in the first place?”

For anyone who is interested, a summary of attempted answers to the question can be found in a couple of fairly recent books: “The Mystery of Existence” by Leslie and Kuhn and “Why Does the World Exist?” by Holt. Both include thoughts from many different thinkers, and both admit that nobody has actually provided a satisfactory answer to the fundamental question. Read them if you wish, but don’t get your hopes up.

Inadequate explanations

The most common explanation that any of us will hear is that God created everything. Although I believe in God, this answer is just as inadequate now as it was when I was a small child. We always have to ask the follow-up question: Why did God exist in the first place? Some defenders of traditional creationism will say that God exists eternally and never needed to be created—the famous uncaused cause. But this is just the infinite timeline problem again. Why does this eternal being exist instead of nothing? It is a very big assumption to make, and it demands an explanation.

Another answer is that everything was created in the Big Bang. But this explanation also begs the question of why the Big Bang happened in the first place. One might say that it was a random fluctuation at the quantum level that generated enough mass/energy to create the whole universe. Although it is an extremely unlikely event, it could happen, and we could be created from it. The anthropological principle comes in here to say that we live in an extremely improbable situation because in any other situation, we simply wouldn’t exist, and therefore, we wouldn’t have to wonder about it. The problem with this explanation is the same as the problem with the divine explanation: Why did this realm of quantum possibilities with its well-formed laws of physics exist in the first place? 

The most popular explanation for the laws of physics involves the assumption of infinite possibilities combined with the anthropological principle. Everything that can possibly happen happens, every possible set of laws is tried, every possible universe is generated, but almost all of them fail to generate humans. We exist in this universe with these laws of physics because this is one of the only settings where our existence is possible. Although this explanation is brilliant and represents the culmination of thousands of years of human thought and inspiration, it doesn’t actually finish answering the question of why anything exists because it still starts with an assumption. Why did this multiverse of infinite possibilities exist in the first place? 

A complete explanation

I made it one of my goals in life to provide a complete explanation for existence. A complete explanation is one that needs no additional explanations. The only way to provide a complete explanation is to start from absolute truth and derive existence through pure logic. We cannot make any assumptions, because any assumption would beg for an explanation, which would make our explanation of existence incomplete. We want the final answer, an answer that answers the question so thoroughly that no more questions need to be asked on this topic.

Some have questioned whether it is even possible to give a complete explanation for existence. I have always thought that it is possible, as long as it has not been proven to be impossible. I can tell you now that it is possible, and not only is it possible, all the laws of physics follow from the answer. I will describe the solution in future posts.