The Trouble with Asking Why there’s Something Rather Than Nothing
How nothingness already informs all our conceptions of things
The question of why there’s something rather than nothing is supposed to be the ultimate mystery, a befuddling koan that reorients our perspective to appreciate the sacredness of everything.
The question seems unanswerable because it’s quintessentially philosophical, challenging as it does our basic concept of being. But the question is tricky also for a linguistic reason.
To see what that trick might be, we need to understand what the question is really asking.
The idea behind that big metaphysical question is that there could have been nothing at all, in which case there would never have been anything, including any of the things we take for granted, such as us, our planet, and so on. But since nothing comes from nothing, something astonishing must be responsible for the natural panoply of things. Thus, reflecting on the possibility of nothingness brings us, in short, to theism, to the positing of a supernatural source of natural things, a source we generally call “God.”
But if we analyze the question further, we find that it’s not so coherent since nothingness is unthinkable. For instance, if we wonder whether nothing preceded…
