Why There is Something
Why is there Something rather than Nothing? Why, in other words, should anything exist at all?
This is a question that has torn great minds asunder, from Leibniz to Wittgenstein. Philosophers seem to have given up on it. When I asked Arthur Danto why there was something rather than nothing, he irritably responded, "Who says there's not nothing?" I then put the question to his colleague Sidney Morgenbesser, the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Columbia. "Even if there was nothing," Morgenbesser shot back, "you still wouldn't be satisfied!"
Now it is the physicists who are trying to resolve this ultimate "why" question. But in the scientific community, nobody understands Nothing. The laws of physics, they argue, dictate that Nothing is unstable, so it must give rise to Something–i.e., the universe. But where are these laws writ? In the mind of God? Aren't they part of the Something to be explained?
I have the real explanation for why there is Something rather than Nothing. It is a reductio. Suppose there were nothing. Then, pace the physicists, there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. But if everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Nothing, in other words, is self-forbidding. Therefore THERE MUST BE SOMETHING.
This epiphany came to me while I was shaving on June 14, 1994, the sixteen-billion-four-hundred-twenty-millionth anniversary of the Big Bang.
[Jim Holt, "Diary", Slate, 1 March 1996.]