Read Online Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jim Holt
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have an intellectual prejudice, one that favors the Null World. Nothingness is the natural state of affairs, they implicitly believe, the ontological default option. It is only deviations from nothingness that are mysterious, that require an explanation.
And where did they get this belief in what Grünbaum derisively labels the Spontaneity of Nothingness—a belief which seems so obvious to them that they don’t even bother to defend it? Whether they realize it or not, he argues, they got it from religion. Even atheists like Dawkins unwittingly imbibed it “with their mother’s milk.” The Spontaneity of Nothingness is a distinctly Christian precept, Grünbaum claims. It was inspired by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo , which arose in the second century after Christ. According to Christian dogma, God, being all-powerful, had no need of any preexisting materials out of which to fashion the world. He brought it into being out of sheer nothingness. (Presumably the Genesis account of creation, in which God created the world by imposing order on a sort of watery chaos, can be dismissed as mythopoetic license.)
But God, according to Christian dogma, is not only the creator of the world. He is also its sustainer. Once created, the world is utterly dependent on him for its continuing existence. He works around the clock to keep it in a state of being. If God ceased existentially supporting the world, even for a moment, it would, to use a phrase from the twentieth-century British archbishop William Temple, “ collapse into non-existence .” The world is not like a house, which, once the builder is finished with it, continues to stand. Rather, it is like a car balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff. Without divine power to maintain its balance, it would plunge into the precipice of nothingness.
The ancient Greeks did not share this Christian idea of creation ex nihilo . Nor did the ancient Indian philosophers. Thus it is hardly surprising, Grünbaum observes, that they failed to worry about why there is something rather than nothing. It was churchly philosophers like Augustine and Aquinas who insinuated the idea into Western thought. The doctrine of the world’s ontological dependence on God—Grünbaum calls it the Dependency Axiom—molded the intuitions of rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz, predisposing them to believe that, were it not for God’s continuous activity of sustaining the world in existence, nothingness would prevail. Being without a cause was thus unthinkable to them. Even today, when we ask why there is something rather than nothing at all, we are, wittingly or not, heirs to a way of thinking that is a vestige of early Judeo-Christianity.
So the Primordial Existential Question rests on the assumption of the Spontaneity of Nothingness. The Spontaneity of Nothingness rests on the Dependency Axiom. And the Dependency Axiom turns out to be a bit of primitive and groundless theological bluster.
And that was only the beginning of Grünbaum’s brief. He was not content to observe that what he called the Primordial Existential Question rested on dubious premises. He wanted to show that these premises were just plain false . There is no reason, in his view, to be astonished, puzzled, awed, or mystified by the existence of the world. None of the virtues claimed for Nothingness—its supposed simplicity, its naturalness, its lack of arbitrariness, and so on—made it the de jure favorite in the reality sweepstakes: such was his conviction. In fact, if we look at the matter empirically—the way modern, scientifically minded people ought to—we’d find that the existence of a world is very much to be expected. As Grünbaum himself put it, “What could possibly be more commonplace empirically than that something or other does exist?”
Here was a man who thought Why is there something rather than nothing? was as much of a cheat as the question When did you stop beating your wife?
LATER THAT DAY, as
And where did they get this belief in what Grünbaum derisively labels the Spontaneity of Nothingness—a belief which seems so obvious to them that they don’t even bother to defend it? Whether they realize it or not, he argues, they got it from religion. Even atheists like Dawkins unwittingly imbibed it “with their mother’s milk.” The Spontaneity of Nothingness is a distinctly Christian precept, Grünbaum claims. It was inspired by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo , which arose in the second century after Christ. According to Christian dogma, God, being all-powerful, had no need of any preexisting materials out of which to fashion the world. He brought it into being out of sheer nothingness. (Presumably the Genesis account of creation, in which God created the world by imposing order on a sort of watery chaos, can be dismissed as mythopoetic license.)
But God, according to Christian dogma, is not only the creator of the world. He is also its sustainer. Once created, the world is utterly dependent on him for its continuing existence. He works around the clock to keep it in a state of being. If God ceased existentially supporting the world, even for a moment, it would, to use a phrase from the twentieth-century British archbishop William Temple, “ collapse into non-existence .” The world is not like a house, which, once the builder is finished with it, continues to stand. Rather, it is like a car balanced precariously at the edge of a cliff. Without divine power to maintain its balance, it would plunge into the precipice of nothingness.
The ancient Greeks did not share this Christian idea of creation ex nihilo . Nor did the ancient Indian philosophers. Thus it is hardly surprising, Grünbaum observes, that they failed to worry about why there is something rather than nothing. It was churchly philosophers like Augustine and Aquinas who insinuated the idea into Western thought. The doctrine of the world’s ontological dependence on God—Grünbaum calls it the Dependency Axiom—molded the intuitions of rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz, predisposing them to believe that, were it not for God’s continuous activity of sustaining the world in existence, nothingness would prevail. Being without a cause was thus unthinkable to them. Even today, when we ask why there is something rather than nothing at all, we are, wittingly or not, heirs to a way of thinking that is a vestige of early Judeo-Christianity.
So the Primordial Existential Question rests on the assumption of the Spontaneity of Nothingness. The Spontaneity of Nothingness rests on the Dependency Axiom. And the Dependency Axiom turns out to be a bit of primitive and groundless theological bluster.
And that was only the beginning of Grünbaum’s brief. He was not content to observe that what he called the Primordial Existential Question rested on dubious premises. He wanted to show that these premises were just plain false . There is no reason, in his view, to be astonished, puzzled, awed, or mystified by the existence of the world. None of the virtues claimed for Nothingness—its supposed simplicity, its naturalness, its lack of arbitrariness, and so on—made it the de jure favorite in the reality sweepstakes: such was his conviction. In fact, if we look at the matter empirically—the way modern, scientifically minded people ought to—we’d find that the existence of a world is very much to be expected. As Grünbaum himself put it, “What could possibly be more commonplace empirically than that something or other does exist?”
Here was a man who thought Why is there something rather than nothing? was as much of a cheat as the question When did you stop beating your wife?
LATER THAT DAY, as
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