Topics Existence

Question You can't create something out of nothing can you! And yet, here we exist. Is this not the most relevant question we can't answer?

Accepted:
September 10, 2019

Comments

What question are you

What question are you referring to? I'll hazard a guess that you are talking about why there is something rather than nothing. Then your idea seems to be that, because something can't come from nothing, there is no explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. But does this really follow from the claim that something can't come nothing?

Perhaps there was always something and this allows us to explain why something exists in the following way. There is something now because at an earlier time there was something and it is a physical law that the earlier something developed into what exists now. You might ask, Why was there something at that earlier time? But we could then employ that same style of explanation at this earlier time. You might also ask, Why was there something rather than nothing at the first moment? But suppose there is no first moment to the universe. Would this explanation then have provided an answer to why there is something rather than nothing? After all, for any arbitrary moment you pick, we can explain why there is something rather than nothing at that time.

This style of explanation is inspired by Quentin Smith's article "The Reason the Universe Exists Is That It Caused Itself to Exist."

@ Jonathan: If I may, I think

@ Jonathan: If I may, I think Leibniz's analogy is faulty. The constraints on what counts as a good explanation of why there have been any books at all (or any books bearing a particular title) need not be constraints on what counts as a good explanation of why there have been any states of the universe at all. I try to explain why in this brief article.

Leibniz considered the

Leibniz considered the question, and perhaps was the first to ask it, in "On the Radical Origination of Things" of September 23, 1697. He gave a comparison for the sequence of things demanding explanations.

For a sufficient reason for existence cannot be found merely in one individual thing or even the whole aggregate and series of things. Let us imagine a book on the Elements of Geometry to have been eternal, one copy always being made from another; then it is clear that though we can give a reason for the present book based on the preceding book from which it was copied, we can never arrive at a complete reason, no matter how many books we may assume in the past, for one can always wonder why such books should have existed at all times; why there should be books at all, and why they should be written int his way. What is true of books is also true of the different states of the world . . .

This puts the skids under the type of explanation Quentin Smith gives. He commits what informal logicians call an ignoratio elenchii, the fallacy of the irrelevant conclusion. For the question is not how each individual state is to be explained, but how the totality of the sequence of states is to be explained. Answering the former does not provide an answer to the latter. It may also be a case of the fallacy of composition, in which some characteristic of the parts (in this case having been explained is attributed to the whole. Leibniz's own answer has to do with the metaphysical or absolute rather than conditional nature of the necessity and exigency ("urgency") of things to exist, and this for him can only be found in the region of eternal ideas, which is the mind of God, and without whom the necessity for things to exist would remain imaginary.

Question You can't create something out of nothing can you! And yet, here we exist. Is this not the most relevant question we can't answer? Accepted:September 10, 2019

Question You can't create something out of nothing can you! And yet, here we exist. Is this not the most relevant question we can't answer?

Accepted:
September 10, 2019