Nothing Ventured

A bold leap into the ontological void

Jim Holt

Harper's Magazine, November 1994

The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured....It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think they are not than to understand that they are and are as are. The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not...

It can even be argued that we are impotent to answer any question of why there is something rather than nothing. For, as the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick has written, "how can we know why something is (or should be) a certain way if we don't know why there is anything at all?" But why should one bother with a question of such generality that it appears impossible to answer? Although it is certainly reasonable to inquire why each particular thing in the world exists--our solar system, life on earth, the clock in the Grand Central station--it makes no sense to demand the same of the tout ensemble. Any factor introduced to explain why there is something rather than nothing--a cosmic egg, a fluctuation in a vacuum, a transcendent purpose, an omnipotent deity will itself be part of the something to be explained. Besides, if the world is by definition all that exists, it would seem foolish to inquire why the world itself exists. That is like asking why a triangle has three sides. Existing is just what the world does. To ask, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is, to this way of thinking, not to pose a real question. It is to rhapsodize--to express awe, astonishment, bewilderment before the cosmos. Wittgenstein himself suggested as much when he remarked: "If I say, 'I wonder at the existence of the world,' I am misusing language."

Whether the existence of the world is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans or a mere tautology, it continues to exercise the imagination of philosophers and theologians, not to mention stoned undergraduates and insomniac yuppies having a Dark Night of the Soul. And it is becoming the special province of a small group of physicists known as the "nothing theorists." With some metaphysical chutzpah, these physicists are seeking to resolve the "how" question that corresponds to "Why is there something rather than nothing?": to wit, how could something have spontaneously arisen from nothing? For we now know that, contrary to what Aristotle believed, the cosmos is not eternal. Rather, it sprang into being some 15 billion years ago with the explosion of an infinitesimal speck of infinitely concentrated energy.

This truth, broached early in the century and recently put beyond doubt by the data from the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, has not been unanimously welcomed by physicists. Einstein, for one, found the idea that the universe had a beginning in time nutty and downright repugnant, although the evidence finally compelled him to accept it shortly before his death. The great cosmologist Fred Hoyle thought that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to commence, rather like a party girl jumping out of a cake; once, during a BBC broadcast, he derisively referred to the hypothesized origin as the "Big Bang," and the term stuck. Churchmen, by contrast, had finally seen a scientific discovery that was cause for cheer rather than gloom. Pope Pius XII, opening a scientific conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that the Big Bang theory bore witness "to that primordial fiat lux uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation....Hence, creation took place in time; therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!

Whether or not the Big Bang truly implies that the universe was created out of nothing by an omnipotent deity in a wholly gratuitous act of love, it does demonstrate that the universe is, as philosophers say, contingent--that is, it need not have existed. Anything that exists by its own nature, that is the cause and ground of its own being, must be eternal and imperishable. The universe is neither of these things. Just as space, time, and matter winked into existence with the Big Bang, expanding to form the present universe, so too will they likely begin contracting one day when gravity arrests the expansion, eventually winking out of existence altogether in a great cosmic implosion--The Big Crunch. The cosmos is thus a mere interlude between two nothings. It cannot contain the reason for its own existence, the ground of its own being.

But, then, what could? Only God, say the theologians. Remember the words that the Supreme Being called out to Moses from the burning bush? "I am what I am." What He was trying to put across was that His existence was contained in His very essence. (Indeed, the Israelite name for God, Yahweh, is a form of the Hebrew verb "to be.") Being the cause of his own existence , He doesn't have the occasion to ask Himself, "Whence, then, am I?" In the eleventh century, Saint Anselm of Canterbury elaborated this idea into an ingenious argument for the existence of God. Anselm's "ontological proof," which the monk cast in the form of prayer, began with the premise that God is the greatest and most perfect thing that can be conceived. It is clearly greater and more perfect to exist than not to exist, Anselm reasoned, for a real being is greater than a merely fictitious one. "So truly, therefore, dost thou exist, O Lord, My God, that thou canst not be conceived not to exist," concluded Inseam's invocation.

Leibniz, too, counted Necessary Being among the Godhead's perfections. God exists as a matter of logical necessity; it is because He harbors the reason for His existence in His nature, that He, and He alone, can furnish the last link in the great explanatory chain, the ultimate answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" There is a world because God created it out of nothing, through His own free choice. This not only explains why a world exists, Leibniz contended, but also accounts for the selection of this particular world: since God's creative act was motivated by His infinite goodness, the world He brought into being must be the best of all possible worlds--and, adds the cynic, everything in it is a necessary evil. (A physicist I know claims that things make much more sense if you assume the world was created not by an all-good and all-powerful being but by one that is 100 percent malevolent but only 90 percent effective.)

Was this putatively self-existent deity the cause of the Big Bang? Theologians and believing physicists alike tend to find this conception of God as a sort of pyrotechnical engineer a vulgar one. the Christina doctrine of Creation is, in the main, about the dependence of a contingent world upon a necessary being. God is not to be thought of as an entity who gets the cosmic ball rolling--the Unmoved Mover; this participation in the causal order would rob Him of His transcendence. Rather, He is to be seen as the only sustainer unsustained, without whose timeless purposing the world would altogether cease to be. Whether the universe happened to have a beginning in time is, in this view, irrelevant. The point was nicely put by the British physicist Russell Stannard a few years ago in an article he wrote for the London Times: "Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then leaves the others to write themselves, so God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather, his creativity has to be seen as permeating equally in all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge." This was presumably what the Church of England prelate William Temple was trying to capture in the famous pair of equations he propounded earlier in the century: God minus the world equal God; the world minus God equals nothing. (But the archbishop's arithmetic was more treacherous than he knew, for a little manipulation of these equations yields "God minus God equals God"--which is, of course, equivalent to "God equals nothing.")

The problem with this theistic resolution of the mystery of existence is that it hangs rather precariously close to the ontological argument. It was by that bit of scholastic jugglery, you will recall, that a self-existent divinity was conjured into being in the first place. Theologians were chary of Anselm's reasoning from the moment it was articulated. Could a being whose existence is grounded in pure logic really be the God of faith, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The argument fared better with philosophers. Leibniz plumped for it; so did Descartes, so did Spinoza. It was not until the eighteenth century, after hundreds of years of muddled controversy, that Immanuel Kant nosed out the fallacy. Simply put, it is this: Existence is not a property of things, like size or color. It adds nothing to a concept. If it did, all kinds of entities could be defined into existence. Suppose, for instance, a unicorn were to be defined as the most perfect horse there could be; would it not follow then, by the very reasoning Anselm employed, that unicorns exist? No logical bridge can be built between a mere abstraction and concrete existence. True, there are some philosophers around today who defend the ontological argument on various eccentric grounds. I have even met one rabbi who swore that he based his belief in God on a version of Anselm's reasoning. Most, though, would agree with Schopenhauer's assessment of it as a "charming joke."

So reason, unaided by faith in revelation, is left staring at nothing. And that is all to the better. For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, "he who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing." Let us, then, dip briefly into the abyss to see what nothing looks like, fully confident that we will not come up empty-handed. For as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, Nothing find.

What is nothing? Macbeth answered this question with admirable concinnity: Nothing is but what is not. (Or as my dictionary puts it, somewhat less felicitously--if more paradoxically--"nothing: something that does not exist.") Although the ancient Eleatic sage Parmenides declared that it is impossible to speak of what is not--violating his own rule in the process--the plain man knows better. Nothing is, for example, popularly held to be better than a dry martini but worse than sand in the bedsheets. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. Nothing is impossible for God yet a breeze for the rankest incompetent. In fact, no matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would simply mean that everything is obvious--including, presumably, nothing. That, perhaps, is why the world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing. But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also many bumptious types about--call them nullophiles--who are fond of declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.

The philosophers of antiquity were inclined to agree. Ex nihilo nihil, they unanimously declared: "Nothing comes from nothing." Not only does this maxim attribute to nothing the divine quality of being self-generating; it also impiously denies God the power to prevail against nothingness, to bring about a world ex nihilo. The best any deity could do, they held, was to organize a cosmos out of a primordial mess they called Chaos; but this is an exercise in cosmetics rather than fullblooded creation. Centuries later Leibniz paid nothing a similar compliment, declaring that it was "simpler and easier than something." (Hard experience teaches the same lesson: Nothing is simple, Nothing is easy.) This conviction, indeed, is what prompted the great Rationalist to ask why there is something rather than nothing in the first place; if there were nothing, after all, there would be nothing to be explained.

It was left to Hegel, though, to take nothing up and really make something of it--or perhaps the other way around. At the beginning of Hegel's famous dialectic is the assumption that the Absolute is Pure Being. But Pre Being is totally indefinite; it has no qualities; it is utterly empty. It is the same as Pure Nothing. You can't have one without the other; they are dialectical twins. And yet, inasmuch as they are also contraries, they can't coexist very happily. Something new must be found that reconciles and supersedes them. And that turns out to be: Becoming! Becoming is what happens when Being is on the verge of passing into Nothing--or vice versa. Thus does the Hegelian dialectic get merrily underway, eventually yielding up human history and culture in all their variegated splendor. As a feat of ontological boot-strapping, this is breathtaking. It leaves Saint Anselm simply nowhere.

So nothing is nice, simple, self-begetting, and not really all that different than something. Why, one wonders, was it regarded with such apprehension by the existentialists? Heidegger was filled with angst at the very thought of nothing (though this did not keep him from writing copiously about it). For him the encounter with nothingness was suffused with the dread of one's own impending nonbeing--the dread of death. Sartre, too, was possessed with a sort of horror vacui. "Nothingness haunts being," he wrote in the treatise aptly entitled Being and Nothingness. Not even the cafes of Saint Germain offered certain relief from nullity. He goes to Deux Magots--on a good day, a "fullness of being"-- to meet Pierre. Pierre is not there. Et voila: a little pool of nothingness, a frisson of anguish. To be fair, it must be said that neither Sartre nor Heidegger was very favorably disposed toward the category of existence either. Roquentin, the autobiographical hero of Sartre's novel Nausea, finds himself "choked with rage" at the "monstrous lumps" of "gross, absurd being" that environ him as he sits under a chestnut tree in Bouville. The universe, in all its gooey contingency, is de trop. For the more phlegmatic Heidegger, the feeling elicited by "what is" was not so much nausea as boredom. Ontologically speaking, the existentialists were fussy customers: neither something nor nothing afforded them much jollity.

Across the Channel, British philosophers dismissed these vaporings as much ado about nothing. The late A.J. Ayer submitted that Sartre, Heidegger, and their epigones had been fooled by the grammar of "nothing"; since it behaves like a noun, they assumed that it must relate to an entity--a something. (The White King in Through the Looking Glass made a similar blunder when he reasoned that if Nobody had passed the messenger on the road, Nobody should have arrived first.) Ayer's brethren among the logical positivists singled out for derision Heidegger's famous pronouncement "Das Nichts nichtet": "Nothing noths." Nothingness is more than a mere entity, Heidegger seemed to be implying; it is the great annihilating force. "Nothing" turns out to be a noun after all, but the present participle of the transitive verb "to noth"! Nonsense with knobs on, chuckled the positivists. Nonsense on stilts.

But what if nothing really is a kind of force? What if it does "noth"? Perhaps it might just noth itself. The idea that nothing could usher the world into being by committing suicide, as it were, may seem a pretty barmy way to answer the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" But it has been semi-seriously raised by no less a thinker than Robert Nozick. In his book Philosophical Investigations, he invites us to imagine nothing as "a vacuum force, sucking things into non-existence or keeping them there. If this force acts on itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness, producing something or, perhaps, everything, every possibility." Nozick recalls the vacuum-cleaner-like beast in The Yellow Submarine that goes around sucking up everything that it encounters. After hoovering away the surrounding background, it ultimately turns on itself and sucks itself into nonexistence; with a pop, the world reappears, along with the Beatles. (Come to think of it, the cosmic background hiss left over from the Big Bang does rather resemble a giant sucking sound.)

One of Nozick's more acute observations on the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is that it is biased; it presupposes that nothing is a privileged, natural state that requires no explanation, and that something is a mysterious deviation from it. Now, it is true that if nothing did exist, no one would be around to ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It is also true that while there are many possible worlds for there to be something -- worlds in which Henry Kissinger is a steeplejack, worlds in which everything is made of cream cheese -- there is only one way for there to be nothing; and that uniqueness would seem to elevate nullity from the crowd. But this is a two-edged sword. For if all of these possibilities -- the myriad worlds where there is something and the single one where there is nothing -- are assigned equal chances of occurring (and why shouldn't they be?), then it is overwhelmingly probable that there will be something rather than nothing.

Tennessee Williams once said that "a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with." That sentiment has not stopped certain contemporary philosophers of a Platonic kidney from asserting that the world exists because it is so much better than nothing. The leading exponent of this Axiarchic School is the Canadian philosopher John Leslie. With considerable sophistication, Leslie argues that the cosmos exploded into being in answer to a need for goodness. "Suppose there is no nihilistic force fighting the existence of things," says Leslie. "Then absolutely any valid ground or reason for things will tend to bring about their materialization. And ethical realities supply such grounds or reasons." What about the problem of evil? Plotinus said that the murdered were themselves murderers in a previous life. Christian apologists invoke the inscrutability of God's designs. Hegel claimed that the conflict and wickedness were mere appearances. The Axiarchists, to their credit, do not try to make evil disappear. Rather, pointing to the majestic complexity of living things, they submit that the world is on balance good enough -- that is, at least marginally better than nothing. So its existence is ethically required. Given a sufficiently developed sense of irony, one can almost accept this.

The alternative, after all, is to believe that the triumph of Full Being over the Absence of All Things was just a matter of reasonless luck. Or that, as the Hunter College physicist Ed Tyron is fond of putting it, "the universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time." Tryon holds the distinction of being the first of the "nothing theorists," a cabal of theoretical cosmologists (clustered mostly upon the banks of the Cam and the Charles Rivers and on Manhattan's Upper West Side) who are trying to fathom what happened before the Big Bang. It was in 1969 that Tryon, doing a bit of woolgathering during a talk by a visiting celebrity physicist at Columbia University, suddenly blurted out, "Suppose the universe is just a quantum fluctuation?" This was greeted with a good deal of harrumphing by the several Nobel laureates present. What the callow Tryon was suggesting was that the entire cosmos might have bounded into existence out of nowhere -- in complete accordance with the laws of physics.

The key to it all is the notorious Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which says that, provided the scale is tiny enough and the duration is sufficiently brief, anything can happen. Little space-time bubbles can froth up from nowhere, elementary particles can appear and disappear. Add to this the "inflationary theory" developed by Harvard physicist Alan Guth in the early 1980's, which allows minuscule things to blow up to colossal proportions in the blink of an eye -- miraculously boosting their own energy in the process -- and the cosmogenic possibilities are endless. A random blip in the void can easily cascade into a Big Bang. "It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch," Guth observes. "The universe, however, is a free lunch." The nothing theorists have fleshed out a variety of rococo scenarios for creatio ex nihilo in recent years, all relying on the idea that nothing is in some sense unstable. When these fellows are speaking English rather than equations, they tend to sound like the blowhard physicist Myron Kriegman ("Name's Myron. Not Ron, mind you") in John Updike's novel Roger's Version. Listen to Kriegman explaining the spontaneous emergence of the universe to a nonplused young man at a cocktail party:

As you know, inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this space-time foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling into a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe. How about a drink? You look pretty dry . . .

The giveaway here is "next to nothing." That may not sound like much, but it is still something. The nothing theorists always seem to need some sort of orphic seed, some little bit of mathematics-saturated fuzz, to get their cosmologies going. Ed Tryon's universe pops out of a "false vacuum" -- an infinitesimal patch of empty space-time that, thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, is a mad ferment of particles and fields. Stephen Hawkins calculates the probability that the cosmos might have arisen from a three dimensional geometry of zero-volume: close to naught, but no cigar. Others invoke a preexisting dust of timeless structureless points and inchoate geometries: a quantum tohu-bohu not unlike the Chaos of the ancients. But these are all pale and paltry nothings, no the real item. You could hold them in the palm of your hand. They scarcely inspire much angst.

Of all the nothing theorists, the one who appears to have got closest to real creatio ex nihilo is Alex Vilenkin, a Ukranian emigre cosmologist now at Tufts University. When Vilenkin says the universe arose from nothing, he means it. "Nothing is nothing," he told me over the phone. "Not just no matter. No space, no time." (Vilenkin suggested that I think of nascent universes as little bubbles forming in a glass of champagne.) By a quantum process called "tunneling," which permits the breaching of otherwise impassable barriers, space-time emerged from nothing into a manifold of potential universes, and thence into reality. Of course, since time itself is created in the process, these transitions cannot be thought of as taking place in time. They are a logical, not a temporal, sequence -- one dictated by the laws of physics.

But where do the laws come from? And why these laws? We appear to have traded one orig9n mystery for another. "They exist prior to the universe," Vilenkin assured me. "If you like, you can say they're in the mind of God," he added in a bit of theistic hand-waving that is fashionable among physicist these days. But suppose the laws of quantum physics did somehow precede the cosmos, hovering transcendently like Plato's eternal Forms. That does not change the fact that they are only a set of equations, a mathematical pattern. They have no ontic clout. They need a demiurge to get behind them and shove. As Stephen Hawking asked in A Brief History of Time, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? . . . Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"

If the laws of physics come into being along with the universe, then they can't explain it. If they exist prior to the universe, then there is nothing to account for their existence -- not to mention their extraordinary power to exact obedience from the void. That is the dilemma of the nothing theorists. And there is no need to get impaled on its horns when a much more economical way of showing why there is something rather than nothing is available. It goes like this. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that nothing existed. Then, in particular, there would be no laws. (Laws are something, after all, despite what the nothing theorists seem to think.) If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. Therefore, if nothing existed, nothing would be forbidden. Therefore, nothing, if it existed, would forbid itself. Therefore there must be something.

That is my own argument. I thought of it the other day while shaving. The logic seems to be sound; at least, no one I have run it by so far has detected a flaw. yet admittedly there is something sterile about it. So I decided to enlist one more round of experts to pass judgment on my musings.

First I phoned a theoretical physicist I know at Cal Tech. I got his voice mail and said that I had a question for him. He called back and left a message on my answering machine. "Leave your question on my voice mail and I'll leave the answer on your machine," went his instructions. This was alluring. I complied. When I returned to my apartment late that evening, the little light was blinking on my answering machine. I played the message back with some trepidation. It was from the physicist.

"Okay," it began, "what you are really talking about is a violation of matter-anti-matter parity . . ."

So I called a professor of philosophical theology at the University of Virginia. I asked him if the fact that there was something rather than nothing could be explained by invoking a deity whose essence entailed his existence. "Are you kidding?" he said "God is so perfect He doesn't have to exist."

Then on the street in Greenwich Village, I ran into a Zen Buddhist scholar who had been introduced to me once at a cocktail party as an authority on mystical matters. After a little chitchat, I asked him -- perhaps, in retrospect, a bit precipitately -- why there is something rather than nothing. He tried to bop me on the head. He must have thought it was a Zen koan.

Finally, I rung up a philosopher at Columbia, about the deepest intellect I know. I said I was at the end of an essay about a metaphysical question and the waters were fast rising up around me. When I told him the question, his response was vehement and almost churlish: "Who says there is not nothing?"

On reflection, I think I see his point. And as I've always said, nothing is good enough for me.