“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is an unanswerable question, but the reason it’s an unanswerable question turns out to be interesting.
First, is it an unanswerable question?
Yes. For example, “God” cannot be the answer because God is “something” and therefore doesn’t answer the question. If there is (or was) a God, why? How did that come about?
One might notice a similarity to the following sequence of questions, “Why does the world exist?” Answer: “God.” Why does God exist? Answer: “You’re not supposed to ask that question.” Why not? “Because God always existed.” But why does God always exist? Why was there ever a God? Why was there ever something?
It’s an unanswerable question. And this is so whether “something” includes God or not.
But why is it an unanswerable question? Turns out, this is a question that can be analyzed and answered.
And here’s the answer: Existence (“something”) cannot have a cause.
The next interesting question is, why would we mistakenly think that it can have a cause?
We make this mistake because we (also mistakenly) think that individual things and instances within existence (somethings within something) can have causes.
Why do we make this mistake? Because we don’t realize that “causes” are really just “causal explanations.”
It is an important distinction. Causal explanations exist “within us”, within our thinking part. But we mistakenly believe that causes exist “out there” in the world. Right up until we look for the cause of all somethings, the cause of God, the cause of why there is something rather than nothing. Then we smack into our mistake.
There never were causes “out there.” All along there were only causal explanations “in here.” And here’s the rub: explanations are only human imaginings. There are no actual “explanations” out there, no actual causes.
Is this not solipsism? No, in fact the opposite. Our thoughts do not dictate or even “connect up” with the real world—at least not really. It is the daughter of solipsism to think that human causal explanations identify real causes in the real world, or even to think that there could be human mental elements such as “causes” in reality. Causes, like causal explanations, can only exist “in here.”
But wait—if this is so, then explain how science is even possible?
It’s easy, actually.
Even though Alvin Plantinga, Ronald Nash, and just about every Catholic theologian and Discovery Institute fellow can’t begin to imagine how science is possible if causes aren’t real and if the principle of sufficient reason isn’t true, the explanation has been well known at least since David Hume.
It’s called empiricism.
Empiricism is inherently pragmatic. When we say that the sciences are empirical, we mean that we can’t know whether our thoughts about the world are true unless we test those thoughts within the world around us. This does not mean that our thoughts about the world are verified by “checking in” with the world—that would be a misunderstanding. Since the world doesn’t actually contain causes or causal explanations or anything of the sort, we can’t check for these things in the world. We can’t verify truth against the world.
Say what?
We test the truth of our thoughts about the world—not against the world—but against other (possible) thoughts about the world. We test against the negative of what we are thinking or proposing. This is Popper’s falsification hypothesis, which replaced the logical empiricist* notion that the truth of our thoughts could be verified by checking the world using a verification principle.
“Truth” is a comparative between competing thoughts about the world. What is “true” can’t be tested by checking in with the world to see if it matches causes or causal explanations we can find in the world (since nothing of the like exists in reality—that is, outside of our minds). Instead, we test our competing thoughts against each other for their usefulness.
For example, you say “It is raining outside.” This is a practical claim which entails, for example that if we were outside we or our clothing would get wet. So we test it against a contradictory (likely though not necessarily opposite) claim, “It is not raining outside”, perhaps even “it is snowing outside” or “it is sunny and windy outside.” How do we test it? We go outside (or put instruments outside). If we get wet, as is entailed by the claim, then we think the claim true. But we must also be cognizant of other possible thoughts we may devise, such as the thought that we got wet when we stepped outside because Bob was on the roof and sprinkled us with water from the hose (a contradictory claim for why we got wet).
Science works by pragmatic empiricism. It does not require a principle of sufficient reason or the existence of actual causes in the physical world. The questions science asks and answers never have to be true of physical reality. They just have to be more useful to us than the answers we reject (rejected because they are less useful).
One other thing: scientists understand that “usefulness” must be pursued in a disinterested, objective sense. What is most useful to human beings is not usefulness that benefits me personally at the expense of everyone else, but usefulness that applies in a more universal, observer-independent sense. As Victor Stenger put it in his misnamed book, The Comprehensible Cosmos, what scientists strive for is models of reality that are “point-of-view invariant with respect to observations and the need to agree with those observations.” (p. 187)
In his book, which has the more applicable subtitle “Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?”, Stenger explains that it is this desire for point-of-view invariance which led necessarily to creation of the laws of physics. These laws exist to ensure point-of-view invariance. Stenger goes further, asking
“So, where does point-of-view invariance come from? It comes simply from the apparent existence of an objective reality—independent of its detailed structure. Indeed, the success of point-of-view invariance can be said to provide evidence for the existence of an objective reality. Our dreams are not point-of-view invariant. If the Universe were all in our heads, our models would not be point-of-view invariant.” (p 187)
He continues,
“Point-of-view invariance is thus the mechanism by which we enforce objectivity. If we did not have an underlying objective reality, then we would not expect to be able to describe observations in a way that is independent of reference frame.”
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*A.J. Ayer, who introduced the verification principle, called it “logical empiricism”. He was the most important member of a group known as the logical positivists.
