bro. that’s not even a real question. fuckin’ german metaphysicists. all you gotta do is look at the way the word ‘nothing’ is used ordinarily and without abstraction, and you’ll see that the question ‘why something rather than nothing’ isn’t the kind of question you can ask about the nature of all that exists (the universe or whatever).
in the strictest sense, and ontologically speaking, ‘nothing’ never means ‘absence’; we open a cupboard and when noticing it’s empty, we say ‘there’s nothing in the cupboard’. but there most certainly is something in the cupboard… just not the box of triscuits you were looking for.
your friend calls and asks what’s up. you say ‘i’m doing nothing’. impossible. you’re always doing something.
freddie mercury says ‘nothing reeeely maaaters, anyone can see…’, but here he’s referring to values, not the nature of the things valued or not.
‘there’s nothing we can do about it’. we’ve all heard that before. but that’s impossible too. abstaining from action is an action itself.
seriously, give me any example of a statement in which that word is used and i’ll show you how through creating an improper analogy with it, a philosopher will come along and ask something stupid like ‘why something rather than nothing.’
what’s happening here is we take the meaning of the word ‘nothing’ out of an otherwise ordinary context - ‘nothing is there’ , when we expect something to be in place x - and then imagine that it would be possible for the entire universe to be missing.
the reason why there is something rather than nothing is not a matter of there being the logical possibility of there being nothing, and instead there just happened to be something. there can’t be nothing, but that’s not ‘why’, not the reason, there is something. there is no reason for there being something, so to ask ‘why’ there is, is idiotic.
jesus did martin write a whole book about this pseudo-problem? thanks for the heads-up. i’ll be sure not to read it.