Why does anything exist?
Simply put, because there never could be nothing
Why does anything exist? You, me, the universe — everything that we know and don’t know has a common state, that of existence. But why? Would it not be simpler for nothing to exist? And yet existence is a reality.
Or is it?
Solipsism is the idea that a person’s mind is the only thing that exists. After all, we only experience our consciousness: it may seem like others, too, have a consciousness, but it could simply appear so without actually being the case. One would never know.
Solipsism aside, the very question of why anything exists is a seemingly unanswerable one, as the Rig Veda, which is an ancient sacred text, explains:
“Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being? Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not.” — The Hymn of Creation in the Rig Veda
Perhaps the answer is God. The Creator. Perhaps that is why things exist. But this answer is not a fully satisfactory one. Who created God? What existed before Him? What caused God to exist — did he emerge out of nothing? Why is there a God rather than nothing at all?
What is nothing? How do you define it? How do you grasp it? Is it the number zero, is it a vacuum, where no matter exists. Surely even nothing in itself is something? If nothing exists, then isn’t that same nothing also everything?
For the sake of argument, if we were to define nothing as the absence of matter, then surely when all matter is absent (i.e in a vacuum): then the vacuum itself would be everything that had ever existed.
The problem with the question that faces us is the infinite nature of time. If x denotes now (i.e the present moment) and x-1 denotes, for example, the dinosaur era, x-2 denotes when only bacteria lived on Earth and so on, the problem is that there will always be a before — as we reach x — ∞ and then x minus a larger infinity, and so on. Infinity is, well, infinite, so we will never truly reach a beginning.
So the only logical conclusion is that existence always was, and not as if everything appeared out of nothing.
Our conclusion, however, brings us no nearer to answering the question we first set out to answer. Sure, perhaps there was never nothing: perhaps existence always was, is and will be permanent. But why? Why is there not nothing instead?
To me, the answer is that there is no nothing.
The very concept of “nothingness” is a false perception, for there will always be something: and that is why there is not nothing. Because there cannot and never will be nothing: it’s not possible.
