Why Does Anything Exist?

Amid the daily ebb and flow of emails—personal, political, editorial, conversational—a title line occasionally stands out. I got one just the other day from EarthSky News:

Why does anything exist?

Now there’s an interesting question. The text of the article was also interesting, though it didn’t begin to answer the question. The question it addressed was a different one, namely, Why, in the micro-seconds after the Big Bang, didn’t the matter and anti-matter created by that cosmic event annihilate each other, leaving no residue behind? The answer, in brief, was the decoupled heavy neutrino.

We’re not going to proceed further down that path, because it “begs” the original question. The Big Band would never have taken place in a vacuum. Something must have existed prior to that explosion. We don’t need to ask ourselves what. Let’s return to the really big question: why?

It’s impossible for us to conjure a universe in which nothing exists, but even to try brings forth an eerie and vaguely unpleasant frisson. And foreign words come in handy when dealing with things we will never understand. (Then again, perhaps there’s something nonsensical about applying a concept from a foreign language to a cosmic event that could never have taken place and calling it “handy.” A hammer is handy. A Swiss Army knife can be very handy.)

The key element in this mind-boggling inquiry is Why. That word can have no meaning outside the context of a universe filled with intention. Many actions lack intention; they occur naturally and can often be predicted. They do not involve an agent. Then again, action and intention often dovetail so completely that why questions don’t arise. Why did you go to the grocery store? Because the cupboard was bare.

Some why questions are designed to expose a hitherto mysterious agent: Why did the basement flood? Because the rubber hose to the washer, which is sixty years old, sprung a leak. Some probe the origins of a seemingly incomprehensible action by a known and generally predictable agent. Why did you suddenly get rid of those New Yorker’s that you’ve been collecting and storing in the attic for decades? What was your motive? What was your intention?

I would argue that the concept of intention carries with it the notion of the ideal, especially if we tone it down a bit by acknowledging that it refers to the desire for a better universe, but not necessarily a perfect universe. Another way to put this would be simply to acknowledge that our notion of a perfect universe will always be far from perfect itself.

The universe is full of agents and intentions. Whether the universe itself has an intention is a different story.  I was intending to conclude this little blog with a few lines from the Vedas, those poetic/metaphysical utterances from the dim recesses of recorded history. It would have been suggestive, and apt. But just now I was reminded of a far more recent remark made by Sidney Lambrecht, a now-largely forgotten philosopher and professor at Columbia: “Nature is a lush welter of teleological profusion. Man faces the moral task of organizing as best he can what nature offers with total disregard of centrality.”

Why is there anything? So we can make it better.