Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

Why is there something rather than nothing? It is the oldest question in philosophy, the one Leibniz called the first, and the one a child asks. This appendix gives the book's answer in plain order: there could not have been nothing. Something is necessary. The argument runs twice, from two different starting points, so that a reader who resists one route still has the other. The first route looks at the word. Every way things could be falls into one of two kinds. Either there is at least one difference in it — one boundary, one contrast, one this-rather-than-that — or there is none at all. Our world is the first kind, and so is anything with even a single distinction in it. The second kind is being with nothing to tell apart: no parts, no places, no moments, no features. The book calls the first kind diversity and the second equality, because in it everything is the same. Logic allows no third kind. A state that is neither with nor without differences is like a number that is both even and odd: a description that fits nothing. So where does "nothing" go? Nothing has no differences in it either, so it lands in the same place as undivided being. Ask what tells the two apart. Not any feature, since neither has any. Only one thing separates them: undivided being is the case, and nothing is not. Kant made the point with a hundred coins: a hundred real coins and a hundred imagined ones have exactly the same list of features, and being real is not one more item on the list. So "nothing" turns out to be undivided being described as not being the case. Had it been the case, it would have been undivided being. Nothing was never a way things could have been; the word names an impossibility. The second route needs no argument about words. Trace the chain of reasons down, or the past back. Either they go on without end, in which case there is something at every level and every moment and no first moment at which nothing could have been, or they stop, in which case where they stop is still a state that is — at bottom, being without differences. On neither path was there ever a nothing for the world to come out of. Something has always existed. What is necessary is being as such; no particular being, divine or otherwise, has to carry that necessity, so the argument gives the traditions what they were looking for without the necessary Being they asked for. The traditions came close. Theology described the origin as timeless, without parts, beyond every predicate; cosmology as without space, time or variation; the mystics as the One, Brahman, Ein Sof, the Nothing; mathematics named it zero, one and infinity. Read strictly, these are one description of the same undivided state. Each then added what the description rules out: a mind, which runs on differences; a physical state, which is structure; a creation out of a nothing that was never there. Why did the answer take so long? Because of four confusions built into the words. "Without limits" was one phrase for two states, endless diversity and undivided equality. "Nothing" was one word for undivided being and for non-existence, so nobody granting that nothing was possible could say which he had granted. "Nothing detected" was taken to mean nothing there, though a state with no differences is exactly what a detector cannot report. And when the mind is asked to picture nothing it supplies a dark, empty space — which is something. The right image is the region behind your head: not dark, not empty, simply not there to be seen. One question survives, and it is the child's real question: why are there many things rather than one? To that there is no answer, and the reason there is none is the answer: a reason would have to be some feature of undivided being, and it has none. What is left unexplained is a single fact without parts, that the world of differences is the case — the smallest remainder any account of the question has to carry. What we ta