Why Does the Universe Exist?
By Derek Parfit
That’s the distinction I make as well. Okay, you come up with an explanation as to why and how something must exist rather than nothing. But how does that resolution explain why it’s this existence and not another one altogether? And, even here, assuming that this is applicable to our universe in a way that is applicable to all of the other ones in the much conjectured multiverse.
Really, how can you exist as a self-conscious entity able to ask yourself things like this, and think the questions are idle?..make no sense? What makes no sense to me are those who just shrug off questions of this sort as just “philosophical stuff”. “Metaphysical foolery” as my ex-wife once put it. Something, she insisted, that has no relevance at all to the lives that we live.
Unless of course I find myself, from time to time, more or less thinking my own rendition of the same thing. Why waste your time dwelling on something that you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever figuring out. On the other hand, grappling myself with questions like this takes my mind to places that are so unimaginably ineffable, that it allows me a sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe something beyond the grave is included in it.
What would make no sense [to me] are extant self-conscious entities who did not ask themselves questions like this. Ever and always assuming that the evolution of self-conscious matter that we become acquainted with as “I” includes some measure of actual autonomy.
Which take some to God and religion. After all, the universe that does exist includes us. And since we are able to think up God and concoct all sorts of arguments as to why He must exist, that in and of itself seems to suggest that God and this particular somethingness are inextricably bound. If, so far, only in the minds of those among us who believe it.
God here too. The Goldilocks Universe. So many things have to be precisely as they are – newhumanist.org.uk/articles/415 … aul-davies – that a Creator is clearly one possibility.
But that then begs the question as to whether God Himself created the laws of nature or the laws of nature themselves are such that God really didn’t have a choice. The existence of existence simply was, is and always will be in accordance with its only possibly explanation. God, like all the rest of us, just being along for the ride.