Never one to shirk a challenge, the Unthinkable column today endeavours to answer what many describe as the ultimate question: why is there something rather than nothing?
It will take us on a journey through centuries of philosophising and present you, dear reader, with a choice of two paths: that mapped out by a mathematician who died in Hanover more than 300 years ago (and is today best known for lending his name to a brand of German biscuit) and a British TV celebrity with millions of Twitter followers.
Our guide is Dr Kenny Pearce, philosopher of religion at Trinity College Dublin and joint author of Is There a God? A Debate, a riveting new book which includes some of the cleverest arguments for religious belief that this atheist has ever read. Pearce opens the book asking why is there something rather than nothing.
Three forms of answer tend to be given. The first is to dismiss the problem as pseudo-scientific and to walk away from the conversation.
The second is to shrug and say “just because”. This response usually comes in one of two forms: either “everything is random; get over it” or “this is just how the world is meant to be” – a position known in philosophy as necessitarianism.
Pearce tells me “we can’t assume from the outset that all good questions have good answers”. So it’s possible something like necessitarianism is the best answer we can give. “Even some theists end up in that place.”
You may think, however, that “just because” is not so much an explanation as the very lack of one. Can we do better?
Pearce believes so and this brings us to the third category of response, which is to speculate on a possible reason for the world’s existence and then construct arguments to defend your hunch. The most common hunch is, of course, God.
Classical theism
About 80 per cent of the world’s population identifies with a religious group, and Pearce makes the case that it’s not so crazy to think that a certain type of ultimate being has the answer to the ultimate question.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
“Because of the free and rational choice of a necessary being.”
Pearce’s reply is known as classical theism.
Are you convinced?
“I would say in general to those who think there are other answers I want to hear about them,” he says. “For the most part,” other answers “haven’t been that well developed”.
One of the advantages of classical theism is that it’s “a middle path” between the two “just because” replies. “We want an explanation of why the world is as it is but we don’t want [the world] to be arbitrary or random, happening for no reason. At the same time, we want to say the world could have been different from how it is . . . That’s what this ‘free and rational choice’ is supposed to do.”
He quickly adds: “The reason I get uncertain at these sorts of points about how the details of the explanation works – and whether it eliminates all the ‘why?’ questions – is because, of course, free will is one of the hardest problems of philosophy. And the existence of God is another, and they are linked in this really crucial way . . . To me this is really the heart of the philosophical puzzle.”
In essence, if you join Pearce on this middle ground you’re encouraged to ask just what kind of God would choose to create the world?
This is where Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Stephen Fry come in. Leibniz is associated with the view that since God is an all-perfect being we must live in the most perfect world imaginable. Fry famously went on RTÉ's The Meaning of Life and asked what God would be evil enough to create bone cancer in children.
“I really like Leibniz. I find a lot of his arguments convincing and then you arrive at this end point of ‘This is the best of all possible worlds; everything is as it should be’ – and I just can’t swallow it. I just find that literally incredible,” Pearce says.
“Again, this is where the puzzle is. How does freedom play a role, and how do we understand God’s choice of worlds to create?
“So I want to say: ‘This is the world that exists, and is as it is, because of the reasons that God saw in favour of it. But there are obviously quite compelling reasons against this particular world. It has a lot of bad things in it that a perfectly good God would want to avoid.
"One strategy is to say: 'There is no 'best of all possible worlds' – for every world there is a better one'. And many people think that Thomas Aquinas had a view like this . . . If God was going to create anything God would just have to pick one [world] and there would always be infinity of better ones.
'Widespread incommensurability'
“Another view attributed to Alexander Pruss is that there is widespread incommensurability – meaning that there are different competing values that can’t be weighed on the same scale. There is a pleasure and pain scale, and beauty and ugliness scale; an order and chaos scale; a simplicity and complexity scale. So God likes pleasure, and moral goodness, and simplicity, and beauty, and there is no one answer to how all these thing get balanced off with each other.
“That means there are all these different worlds such that we can’t put them on one ranking, and God decides between them based on the goods that God sees, but not based on there being one objectively best world.”
But why bring God into it at all? Could a different type of force fill the gap?
One alternative, Pearce notes, is axiarchism, “which is that it’s an ultimate, necessary physical law that everything is for the best”. This gets around the theistic problem of needing a God that cares for humans “but once again I think we’re leading to necessitarianism”. Moreover, proponents of axiarchism “need to spell out a conception of the good that makes sense in these impersonal terms”.
Something not yet mentioned is religious experience. For many people who believe in God, fancy arguments do not matter compared to the feeling that an all-powerful being is responsible for everything. Such experience is typically written off as a “delusion” but Pearce points out that we don’t dismiss other forms human consciousness so readily.
“There is I think a kind of elitism. These highly educated, urban upper-class people [think] this isn’t how they think about the world, and they are really writing off reports of experience of very large segments of the human race.
“Not all scientifically-minded, atheist, naturalist types do that,” he stresses, citing ongoing research on the psychology of religious experience.
There is now a large body of research to show that humans tend to think things "happen for a reason". This preference for teleological explanations "is something that we as humans seem to be unable to silence", Pearce notes.
“I guess the question for the theist and the naturalist is whether that is an irrationality or mistake? Is it a heuristic that is useful for survival but doesn’t get at the truth of the world? Or is it actually something we should take a bit more seriously?”
Either way, Pearce wants to make clear that there is no shame in continuing to ask “Why?” questions.
How to answer them is another matter. Teleology was never taught at school. So where can I turn for help?
“When people are looking for the whys of human life I would tend to look to ethics, to the theory of value . . . I tend to look to the very foundational questions: what is the nature of goodness and what could give us a reason to pursue the good?
“That whole thing of understanding the nature of reasons, or what it is to have a reason, is where I look for those questions about the purposes of human life; about what reason do I have for going on and what gives value to the life that I live.”
Is There a God? A Debate by Graham Oppy and Kenneth L Pearce is published by Routledge (£18.89)
