Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 9/18/2009

Question
Hi I am 21 years old and I believe in a higher power or something but I don't think we know what it is yet. I am not religious at all. I am not an athiest but I am just curious why is their something rather then nothing? (the universe)It seems like athiesm states that their is no purpose to the universe then why does it exists in the first place? It seems like their would be absolute nothingness if nothing had any purpose. I just want to here a different point of view on this statement thanks

Answer
Note: ([x] is a reference to the links listed at the bottom)
EDIT: Lawrence Krauss gave a very good talk on the subject, and a video is found here [9].

The Tricky Question:
First of all, good question. The answer why there is anything at all is one of the oldest questions in all of philosophy and it is still a valid subject to grapple with. To do the question justice, I would have you be dissatisfied with my answer as well as dissatisfied with every other answer you hear to this question. The official atheist answer would be that the answer to your question is currently unknowable. We might be better able to answer this question below (see section below), but the best answer we can give right now is a non-answer. If someone claims to have the answer, it's not that they know something you don't, but rather they erroneously claim to have information that we can know they don't have. David Hume's work, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, is available online[1] and discusses what is knowable and what we can know about the unknowable, especially in the context of religion.

“I am wiser than this man: neither of us knows anything that is really worth knowing, but he thinks that he has knowledge when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think that I have. I seem, at any rate, to be a little wiser than he is on this point: I do not think that I know what I do not know” - Socrates (as a character in Plato's Apology)[2]


Religion does not answer the question:
This is a good youtube video that explains the skeptical response to the unknowable as compared to the faithful reaction[3]. To me, adding God to the mix just increases the questions that demand answers and does nothing to answer the question at hand. There doesn't seem to be any good religious answers to the question "Why did God create the universe?" Here are some samples of what am I talking about:
-The answer "So that humans can worship God." is met with "Is a perfect God so vain?", "Doesn't this contradict with omniscience?", "Why is the universe so empty of people to worship him?", and "Why does he seek to be mysterious if we are supposed to know him?".
-The answer "So that we can combat the evils of Satan." is met with "Why doesn't God care to battle Satan?", "If this is about the fight, isn't there a better, more epic, more character-building, more direct, more comprehensive way to fight?", "If some people go to hell, why does God create people to serve no other purpose than to fail at the fight and suffer eternally?", and "Why is it that we have eternal torture anyway?"
-The answer "God is mysterious" is met with "Why aren't you an atheist then if you believe we can't make any assumptions about God?", "Isn't the observable world being mysterious more reasonable that a mysterious universe plus an invisible mysterious being?"

And assuming we can cut through the gauntlet of entirely reasonable questions, we are still left with the question of "Why is there a God that exists to create such things?" which is little different from the question we started with "Why is there a universe that exists." Ockam's razor is the principle that the most parsimonious explanation, the explanation that involves the least assumptions, is the most likely to be correct. At the very least, it seems, atheists can say that the wild baseless guess that makes up the religious answer is worse than many other possible wild baseless guesses.

But usually the problem goes a great deal worse than that for the religious answers (although it sounds like you know this next one), because in addition to claiming that they know the reason for the universe, they add in a non-sequitar and attempt to buttress several more claims. Some of these claims are themselves unknowable (the existence of an afterlife, existence of guardian spirits, what occurred before the universe, what will occur after the universe) but they are even less parsimonious and even more likely to run into possible contradictions and questions ("God told us not to eat the fruit, that he knew we would eat, and has put the consequences on unrelated descendants?", "Why would we think the end of the world will occur like that?"). Some of these claims patently contradict things that are knowable - we know that there is no experimental or observational evidence for any prayer effect, we know that the universe is older than 6000 years, we know that there was no earthquake or world-darkness around 0 AD, we know there is no time in which the sun stopped in the sky, etc. If someone's answer to question "Why is their anything at all?" is the answer "there was some sort of superbeing outside of stuff that created it" than although I already argued that this would be an unlikely answer, but from an atheist's perspective this would be an acceptable answer because it stopped at the things we don't know and would be willing to change in light of evidence to the contrary.

“Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science


If we have to live with a non-answer:
I have to admit though, the answer "there is no answer" seems like a kind of dead-end. The idea is not to discourage people from probing deeper "because you'd never find it" but rather for the non-answer to serve as a placeholder until we get the answer or a representation of the complete set of possible answers. But lets suppose for the sake of argument that we could actually prove that the question, "Why is there anything at all?", is actually impossible to answer. Pragmatism is the principle that people deal with the consequences of truths rather than actual truths. If there is something that we can observe and interact with that would help us parse through different possible answers, than the answer to the question matters because it implies something about the universe. If we are truly unable to answer the question, than it is logically impossible for it to make any difference in our lives whatsoever. In that case the question is meaningless and any statement that attempts to answer has a vacuous truth value.

"You ask me what life is, That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know." - Anton Chekhov, deathbed letter to his wife [4]


Getting a better answer:
So I've spend the majority of this response trying to convince you that a complete non-answer is an acceptable answer and give you reasons why a non-answer questions. But what I alluded to before is that I think one day that we will have a better answer and today we can know that some answers are better than others. Understanding how the universe is gives us some indication as what the conditions on the fact of its being are. We know that animals are characterized by adaptive features which leads to the competing explanations that "something created these this way because it preferred to have them with adaptive feature" and "their existence is made more enduring by adaptive features and serves to generate more adaptive features". But we can rule out explanations like "all animals came from a perfect creation and have since degenerated as time has passed". Similarly "Why are mountains tall?" may have once been seen as a fundamentally unanswerable question, but observations that "landmasses move slowly" and "mountains grow taller at every year" clued us into the idea that landmasses collide push up the land and make a mountain.

Notice we can also evaluate religious answers this way. I dismissed religious explanations on the universe not only parsimony but because they don't comport with reality. But the better way to provide a religious explanation for the universe is to do it the other way - show that all the universe is unified some sort of plan and use that to infer that this plan has some fundamental nature to it that all other facts of the universe, including to the existence of the universe, are subservient to this plan. I know of no possible way to express God's supposed plan that fits the evidence that we can observe. When someone asserts that perhaps the plan is too mysterious or complex to be possibly understood it does not help the case for God. Because it is back to being an unknowable and if there is an unknowable God than he is nothing like the Judeo-Christian God that does things for us and cares about our lives. The only fundamental rules that seemed to be obeyed are those discovered in Physics.

Now Ockam's razor applies to physics as well - the fewer fundamental rules there are the less arbitrary they are and the more it makes sense that they would be the ones to generate a whole universe. This is why physicists work so hard on coming up with a complete unified theory for everything and breaking down the processes that they do understand into rules that are always followed. We have reason to believe physics will continue to be unified because it has become much more unified since the past, it makes more sense for the origin of the universe, and we have hints in what we do understand. Chaos theory[5] is the study of how very simple mathematical systems can result in very complicated or erratic things as seen in modeling turbulence, constructing bifurication diagrams, and exploring fractal sets[6]. Again, positing the existence of God may appear to be just one rule, but it's not really one rule if you need to qualify it with satisfactory explanations why things are the way they are. The elegance of mathematics, by contrast, comes from when a simple thing provides explanation for the complex rather than the other way around.

Before continuing here, I would like to say that physics is more unified and satisfactory in explanation than a lot of people realize and even more so than is typically represented in debates by God. For an amusing experience, if you ever get a chance to see a Christian argue that Fine Tuning parameters demonstrate God, ask him (or her) if he even knows what they mean and in what equations they appear. For example, the speed of light is the speed of two more constants called the "permittivity of free space" and the "permeability of free space". Every material has a permittivity rating, which is how easy it is for an electric field to propagate through the material, and every material has a permeability rating, which is how easy it is for a magnetic field to propagate through the material. Light is really an electromagnetic wave, so it's no surprise that it's speed of propagation is determined by the properties of the material. At first it seems like this implies some fundamental quality to a vacuum but actually these so-called constants don't actually correspond to real vacuums[7]. If you try to get a vacuum instead you get fluctuations in particles and antiparticles generated spontaneously out of the energy needed to create the vacuum (the opposite process of particle-antiparticle annihilation) and the opposite charges of these pairs make a dipole moment that reacts to the electromagnetic field and generates these constants. Quantum mechanics of course describes these particle wavefunctions and Einstein's relativity describes the consequences of the speed of light. How relativity works at a quantum mechanical level is very complicated and we are still working on them but there are some things we do know (like the particle-antiparticle thing) and there have been a number of ways proposed to reconcile the things we don't know. Much better known is how the simple rule "quantum mechanical systems equally prefer possible quantum states" and a little bit of statistics leads to all of thermodynamics including pressure, temperature, and entropy. There has even been some papers published that attempt to explain why the number of dominant dimensions we have is 3 space and 1 time.

But anyway let's assume we've got a collection of physics rules, constants, and parameters and we'll set aside the question of what exactly they are or how many we need. The rules still seem like an arbitrary choice and it is a perfectly valid question to ask at this point "But why these rules?". If the rules are no so fundamental that this question appears to solve itself, than instead we use the Anthropic Principle. The idea behind the anthropic principle is that in order for us to be sitting hear puzzling out the answer to this question, we have to be in a universe that exists, and has parameters so that it gives rise to sentient life. It doesn't have to be quick (the age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years), on a large scale (the earth is about 10^-40 of the size of the observable universe 46.5 billion light-years wide), or clean (of all species that ever lived, more than 99.9% are extinct) it just have to be some life somewhere for some period of time. So it could be that the fundamental rule of the universe is not for nothing to exist but instead for everything to exist. This can be every possible configuration of starting parameter or this could be every possible set of physics rules. By the nature of these rules, it makes sense that some (if not all) of these universes are bounded so that they cannot interact or observe each other. In one corner of this ever sprawling scope of multiverses (astronomers speculating about it refer to it as the Cosmos) is our observable universe with us in it. Think about the Anthropic principle like the lottery. While it is highly unlikely that any individual person will win the lottery, it is quite likely that somebody will win the lottery. To that person they would rightly judge that their individual chances of winning are negligibly small. But it would be incorrect for that person to infer that the lottery was rigged, that God selected them because they deserve it, or they have some sort of Luck that extends into other spheres of life.

Of course, the Anthropic principle is speculating the existence of an awful lot that we will (by definition) never have the evidence to prove exists, but the original question we are trying to answer is one based on parsimony anyway. This is similar to the debate between the Coperhagan interpretation of quantum mechanics (particles take only one action based on the arbitrary result of a probability function) versus the Many worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (there is an indefinitely large number of universe in which each possibility is represented by a different action of that particle) or Standard Model of particle physics versus String Theory of particle physics. If it makes sense to be in a limited universe with a specific sort of rules, go with that, if it more sense to be part of an endless landscape with a simple but general set of rules, go with that.

Right now there is still a lot to hammer out in the rules of physics and what we can observe in the universe. Knowing these things better will help us get a better picture of how few rules we can get away with and if there are any more fundamental rules that could generate them. It doesn't seem like a question a person can just answer on a serene mountaintop contemplating the mystery of the stars, but put a telescope between the person and the stars and we're getting somewhere.

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in." Richard Feynman, Character of Physical Law


Purpose:
There is probably a lot of people who would listen to me talk about physics and philosophy and when I was done they would respond that I had answered "how is their anything all?", rather than a "why is their anything at all?". The only difference in the two questions appears that if the "why" question has an answer that implies the mechanism is intelligent but if the "how" question has an answer that implies that the mechanism is not. So I would say that I have answered the question, just without the answer that some people would prefer. But earlier I gave common Judeo-Christian examples of moral reasons that God would create the universe and I asserted that the answer to the question might not even matter. I wouldn't want to give the wrong impression that I think my statements about the reasons there exists anything all implies that there is no such thing as morality, meaning or purpose.

While it is true that I believe the universe is indifferent and created without a predetermined purpose, but that is not incompatible with human morality. Rather, humans are able to identify good things that exist in the universe and able to create their own meaning. I will endeavor to explain what works for me, but I wouldn't leave myself as the last line of defense. There are many volumes of secular philosophy written on the subject of ethics that I would have someone rifle through before declaring the atheist worldview must be meaningless (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Noam Chomsky, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris).

Most secular philosophy at it's core values life for as many people as possible and human satisfaction (like happiness, except that it goes beyond simple pleasures to the set of things humans would want themselves to have) for all people. This is the moral proposition that all humans have in common (except when instructed otherwise by religion) and a very good case can be made that the reason why we have these preferences is that it is evolutionarily adaptive. Richard Dawkins has a pretty good talk about the subject called the "Purpose of Purpose" [8]. If the meaning of life was to gather up all pigs and paint them green, no one would do it even if you told them to so the only meaning really worth considering is that which humans are capable of recognizing.  However I think there are objective reasons for humans to prefer life and human satisfaction, that human intelligence is able to independently recognize as desirable properties of the universe.

The importance of life extends to all living creatures but is proportional to the complexity of the brain (mind or consciousness if you prefer). So we think it's great that dogs exist, but we have a greater responsibility in propagating the existence of humans. If there is ever the technology to expand our senses, memory, analysis-ability, or lifespan we ought to take advantage of it. You can define life in physics as processes that resist entropy (chaos) by preserving and propagating information. You can define life in biology as autonomous and self-directed and in computer science as something that transforms information or solves problems. Because these are objective distinctions from non-living things and unique in their complexity, it does not strike me as too anthrocentric to suppose an active, aware, complex universe is to be preferred to a dead one.

The importance of human satisfaction is rooted in the very definition of "purpose", "meaning", and "significance". These are social words that indicate communication to other beings. While it may be convenient for God to serve that purpose, people do the job of interacting with each other just fine. In this way we are not only deferring to the wisdom of people as a whole by valuing human satisfaction, but creating a system whereby the information and experiences have meaning and valuable ideas are propagated through the system. In some sense, sum of human minds acts itself as a mind, remembering valuable things, making important decisions, and reflecting on its experiences in the universe.

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful." - Albert Camus, "Three Interviews" in Lyrical and Critical Essays

But there are a lot of good answers to the original question and a lot of thought to put into answering it. In some sense, this is a question that you wouldn't want any one to solve for you and one that you will spend your lifetime cracking though. Good luck with that :P


Links:
[1]http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm
[2]http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-06-25
[3]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wV_REEdvxo
[4]http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962822,00.html
[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
[6]http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=fractals&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&ta...
[7]http://books.google.com/books?id=1F7xWULz0P0C&pg=RA1-PA205&dq=%22vacuum+state%22...
[8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT4EWCRfdUg
[9]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo