How To Be An Agnostic
way – like a fantastic lego puzzle – then it takes on this very
special property we call life.
WHY IS FIDO? Before life? There was just stuff – matter. It
hung around for many billions of years on planet earth.
But why is FIDO? Before the earth, there were stars, and gal-
axies, subatomic particles and strange things like black holes.
[Stephen has the odd feeling that he knows all about black
holes, though he’s only fi ve.]
Yeah but, why is Fido? Scientists have thought it all started
with a big bang, Stephen, a kind of spontaneous eruption
out of which everything came. Or if not that, then a sudden
infl ation or spot springing from a brane.
Wow! Why is Fido? Well, whatever the scientists decide, it’ll
be according to the laws of physics.
BUT WHY IS FIDO?At this point Stephen’s father pauses. Being a philosopher, he
realises that Stephen is now asking a very different question to all
the ones he’s asked before. You see, before, his questions could be
answered with reference to some preceding state of affairs, out of
which Fido can be said to have come. Now, though, he is asking
about where everything came from, and being everything, there
is no antecedent reality to refer to. To start to talk of nothing, not
even abstract laws of nature, let alone wildly compressed energy,
is to try to put everything in the context of nothing. But nothing
is precisely that: not a quantum fi eld fl uctuating in the vacuum,
not one universe springing out of a multiverse. Nothing is more
radical than that. It is nothing. It’s impossible to conceive of, in
fact. No wonder Stephen’s father pauses.
I’m not sure we can ask that question, Stephen. It makes no
sense.
But I want to know: why is Fido?
Well, some say the universe just is. There’s a famous phil-
osopher from about 100 years ago, Bertrand Russell, and he
thought that.