Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. "I believe in Spinoza's God," he answered, "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything. . . . To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable. —QUEEN

Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

(It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.”)

Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both.

As Grünbaum is fond of saying, even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by “always” you mean at all instants of time.

Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.

I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it's all better. - John Leslie

If by 'God' you have something definite in mind - a being that is loving, or jealous, or whatever - then you're faced with the question of why God's that way and not another way. And if you don't have anything very definite in mind when you talk about 'God' being behind the existence of the universe, then why even use the word? So I think religion doesn't help. It's part of the human tragedy: we're faced with a mystery we can't understand - Steven Weinberg

messages from the unseen” that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

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 that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find.

It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time. . . . 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.

To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness.

Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding. Therefore, there must be something. QED.

From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation.

is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.

Façamos um pequeno cálculo. Como integrante da espécie humana, tenho uma identidade genética específica. Existem cerca de trina mil genes ativos no genoma humano. Cada um tem pelo menos duas variantes, ou "alelos", de modo que o número de identidades geneticamente distintas que o genoma pode codificar é de pelo menos dois elevado à trigésima milésima potência - o que equivale mais ou menos ao número um seguido de dez mil zeros. É o número de pessoas possíveis permitido pela estrutura do nosso DNA. E quantas dessas pessoas possíveis chegaram realmente a existir? Estima-se que cerca de quarenta bilhões de seres humanos nasceram desde o surgimento de nossa espécie. Vamos arredondar para cem bilhões, só para ficar numa estimativa moderada. Isso significa que a fração de seres humanos geneticamente possíveis que nasceram é menor que 0,00000... 000001 (acrescente cerca de 9.979 zeros a mais no intervalo). A esmagador a maioria desses seres humanos geneticamente possíveis é de fantasmas que não nasceram. Foi essa a fantástica loteria que eu - e você - tivemos de ganhar para aparecer no cenário". Jim Holt - Por Que o Mundo Existe?

VICTORIA, in a letter to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse, 22 August 1883