An A–Znature of this thought by denying it is a real question. Victor
Stenger argues that something is the natural state of things, and
the nothing out of which it supposedly came, is a distraction.
‘There is something rather than nothing because something is
more stable.’ But Stenger needs to take nothing more seriously,
for nothing would exclude both stability and instability against
which something might be.
Not dissimilarly, it’s suggested that the vacuum of space actu-
ally consists of a quantum foam, out of which universes may
emerge spontaneously, unpredictably. Or that the universe is
the self-creation of M-theory. Something like that may or may
not happen – it’s way off being shown empirically – but even if
the evidence mounted, you’d then need to ask why quantum
foam or M-theory, not nothing? The same would apply to the
various candidates for our universe being part of a multiverse
too: the question applies equally to whatever exists.
A different class of solutions attempt to fi nesse the issue by
pointing out that time may be infi nite, with no beginning or
end. Our universe would then be just one of an infi nite many,
just one bubble before the next collapse and bubble. But ever-
lasting time doesn’t resolve the question either, as the universe
still requires something called time to be everlasting in.
Incidentally, God is not a scientifi c answer to this natural
mystery, as an intelligent design advocate might tell you. It
means something else to invoke God having pondered the
why something: as Wittgenstein pointed out, ‘not how the
world, but that it is, is the mystery.’ God is a way of keeping the
question open, and not simply trying to close it down out of
atheistic discomfort.
O – is Oedipal
Freud thought religion infantile. In The Future of an Illusion, he
argued that it would become clearer and clearer to humanity that
religion was an obsessional neurosis which, like children negotiat-
ing the reality of their fathers, arises out of the Oedipus complex.