“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
                                                       – attributed to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz(1)

“The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect.”
                                                       – Charles Darwin(3)

The creature we have come to call Homo Sapiens evolved about 500,000 years ago with the development of a brain large enough to process complex ideas such as causality (necessary for tool making), language and religion. Creation myths are found in all cultures and almost certainly predate the earliest written accounts from the Sumerian Eridu Genesis of the 18th Century BCE. At some point in those intervening millennia, early man must have stood upright on the Serengeti and looked wonderingly at the world around him. He would have gazed in awe at the magnificent mountains soaring towards the sky and the frightening storms forming there to bring rain and cause the rushing rivers to flow. Beyond the mountains was the mystery of the warm, nurturing sun and the sparkling lights that tracked the night sky. Marveling at the Spring burst of flowers and green leaves, he must have questioned their apparent deaths in Winter. The roaming herds of deer and flocks of birds swarming the sky certainly captured his attention, as did the cycles of their mass movements and individual lives. Just as certainly, he delighted in his mate, in their children and in his ancestors – the cycles and history of his own kind.

And at some point in the breezy time of the day, his mind overwhelmed and heart bursting with the pure joy and wonder of it all, he must have shouted out a Paleolithic version of that most essential of all questions: WTF? Where did all these things come from? And why? Why the birds in the sky, why the trees? Why the earth under my feet and why the sun? Why the sky and all those stars?

Why me?

What am I? Who am I? Why am I?

Able to ask but profoundly unable to answer these questions, he must have shaken his head, shrugged and returned to his fire and family to eat, sleep (perchance to dream), and wonder again another day.

So why does this wonderful universe exist, with its gritty physical and ethereal metaphysical realities, its abstract notions, the mysterious phenomena that are consciousness and will, imagination, memory, reason and that most marvelous of all gifts – life? Why? Martin Heidegger called it “the first of all questions.”(4) Philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum called it the “Primordial Existential Question.”(5) Many others, like Darwin, called it simply “unanswerable.”

For an unanswerable question, however, it has been answered vociferously and often. That the answer has from the beginning been almost universally a religious one should not come as a surprise. The universe is extraordinarily complex and early man had neither the foundation of science nor the practice of intricate reasoning necessary to figure it out. It’s understandable that he would attribute the “creation” of such wondrous stuff to an intellect and power beyond his own. Creation myths are all about powerful, supernatural gods and goddesses fashioning the world and breathing life into its creatures – all via executive fiat. Such notions have persisted throughout human history and have in fact been refined by some of our greatest thinkers. In his essay On the Ultimate Origin of Things, Gottfried Leibniz insists that the very existence of the universe demands a creating metaphysical essence, or God:

Thus, therefore, we have the ultimate reason of the reality, as well of essences as of existences, in a Being who is necessarily much superior and anterior to the world itself, since it is from him that not only the existences which the world contains, but also the possibilities themselves derive their reality.(1) (italics mine)

He goes on to say, “...by supposing the eternity of the world, an ultimate extramundane reason of things, or God, cannot be escaped.”(1)*

Such beliefs persist even today. In the first decade of the 21st Century, a whopping 93% of Americans believed in God or a “higher power”(6) and about 66% believed in “Creationism,” that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.(7) This kind of supernatural Creator is the logical conclusion to a common strategy used to answer the Primordial Existential Question, “Why does the universe exist?” It’s the argument of creationists who (echoing Leibniz) aver that a “creation” implies a “creator.” If you see a building, they argue, you know there was an architect and a builder. If you see a painting, you know there was an artist. If you see a child, you know there were a mommy and daddy. We see around us a marvelous creation, so ipso facto, there was a Prime Creator. David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, confidently asserts, “Where reasonable men treat these subjects the question can never be concerning the being, but only the nature of the Deity. The former...is unquestionable and self-evident. Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God.”(8)

This embrace of causality is understandable – even to a scientist. Cause and effect is a fundamental principle of science and essential to our ability to make predictions based on science. We see cause and effect so much in our everyday lives we assume it has a universal application. But in the matter of creation ergo creator, this reasoning creates certain logical difficulties not the least of which is that supposing a supernatural cause simply because you can’t come up with a rational one is not intellectually satisfying. We know there’s a reason the sun comes up every morning, but it’s not because it’s been dragged up from its bed on the back of some god’s chariot.

But digging into this argument unearths additional logical fallacies. While our architect provided the creative vision for his building, he did not snap his fingers and make the structure simply appear from nowhere. He did not create the tree for the wood nor the ore for the steel. What he did was simply re-form some of the existing material of the universe into a new configuration approximating his architectural vision. And while mommy and daddy may be said to have “created” the baby (or the sperm and egg), the child did not pop into existence out of nothing. It grew from cells and nutrients that came together from sources and distances that would be impossible to imagine. And the genetic basis of any child meanders back through its parents, grandparents and so many ancestral iterations as to defy any attempt to identify an ultimate source (or point) of creation.**

At this point, the notion of Prime Creator as answer to the Primordial Existential Question seems suspect. But if we cannot explain why the universe exists by resorting to a supernatural deity, how can we explain it? Is the answer, as Darwin feared, beyond the scope of human intellect? While the religious answer doesn’t quite satisfy, I believe that science and human reason can now provide the answer to why the universe exists. 

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