Read Online Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt - Free Book Online Page A

Grünbaum became an intelligence officer. At the age of twenty-two he was back in Germany with the American army, interrogating captured Nazis in Berlin. Among those he was in charge of questioning, I was amazed to hear, was Ludwig Bieberbach—the man behind the “Bieberbach conjecture,” for decades one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, ranking just below Fermat’s last theorem. The idea that Bieberbach was an actual flesh-and-blood human—let alone one who customarily lectured to his students at the University of Berlin decked out in a Nazi SA uniform—was slightly staggering to me. Grünbaum’s contempt for this Nazi mathematician was more than moral. It was also intellectual. In supporting Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Bieberbach publicly argued that Nordic mathematicians took a wholesome geometrical approach to their subject, whereas the Jewish mind operated in a morbidly abstract way. The fact that Bieberbach had willfully overlooked the “glaring counterexample” to this generalization—namely, the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein, whose relativity theory showed that gravity was really geometry—enraged Grünbaum. It left him, he said, with a low threshold of indignation when it came to “sloppy, dishonest, and tendentious argument”—including arguments about why the universe exists.
    Despite his advanced age and diminutive size, Grünbaum ate with a hearty appetite. He made his way through an entrée of veal and then an enormous plate of angel-hair pasta, followed by another plate of portobello mushrooms. Forgoing wine, which he said made him sick, he continued to drink Cosmopolitans (“that’s my speed”) through the meal, as he regaled me, in his precise diction and vestigial German accent, with philosophical gossip. When it was over, he kindly drove me back to my hotel. On the way, we passed a rather imposing church, presumably one of Pittsburgh’s architectural jewels. “Do you worship there?” I asked him, trying not to sound too puckish.
    “Oh, every day ,” he replied.
    IN MY HOTEL room the next morning, foggily working through the formidable pile of reprinted papers from various philosophy journals the professor had given me—papers with intellectually belligerent titles like “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology” and “The Pseudo-Problem of Creation”—I tried to fathom why Grünbaum was so disdainful of the mystery of existence. His contempt for those who took it seriously leapt off the page. They were not just “obtuse,” but “exasperatingly obtuse.” Their reasoning was “gross,” “crude,” “bizarre,” and “inane,” amounting to “mere farce.” It was beyond “fatuous”: it was “ludicrously fatuous.”
    It didn’t take long for me to understand why he felt this way. Unlike Leibniz and Schopenhauer, unlike Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dawkins and Hawking and Proust, unlike any number of contemporary philosophers and scientists and theologians and just about any ordinary reflective person, Grünbaum finds the existence of the world utterly unastonishing . And he is utterly convinced that it is rational for him to be unastonished.
    Consider again the basic mystery as originally stated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? Grünbaum dubs this, with appropriate grandeur (and perhaps a hint of irony), the Primordial Existential Question. But what makes it legitimate? Like any other why question, he observes, it rests on hidden presuppositions. Not only does it presuppose that there must be some explanation for the existence of the world. It also takes for granted that the world needs an explanation—that, in the absence of some overriding cause or reason, nothingness would be expected to prevail.
    But why should nothingness prevail? Those who profess puzzlement at the existence of a world like ours—one teeming with life and stars and consciousness and dark matter and all kinds of stuff we haven’t even discovered yet—seem to