Why Does the World Exist?

Why Does the World Exist? - by Jim Holt

"But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?"

- William Shakespeare. “Hamlet.” Act 3, Scene 1, Page 3

What would it take to explain the universe’s existence? When it comes to every day events, finding a prior cause or at least where to look for one is almost trivial. Just imagine that your PC fails to turn on. Without giving it any thought, you would check if it was plugged in correctly and then see if everything was connected. The cause would be in the neighborhood of the PC itself, existing in time and nonrandom. The same cannot be said to apply to theories about the existence of our world.


Precious little is left untouched by way of the explanations put forward by the philosophers, scientists and religious personalities in this book. At first, their ideas seem deranged, the mad ramblings of minds at work on an impossible question. They meander from logic, displaced of all reality, to quantum physics, morality and back again in pursuit of the universe’s causal singularity. This is to be made distinct in the reader’s mind from the singularity, an infinite mass tucked neatly upon a nano-needle, present at the big bang (known to us through its cosmic microwave background radiation) which expanded (and keeps doing so) into the universe around us. Why the singularity? Why not nothing at all? These are questions worthy of a mad man or two.

One particular problem troubles many of our expositors: infinite regress. If an explanation leads to another question we find ourselves chasing our tail like an inquisitive little boy who asks “but who made God?” Two of the more ingenious solutions have been around for ages. The first is the Cosmological Argument, which states: the universe is here by chance, all contingent events have an explanation therefore the universe must have an explanation. From there, either we infinitely regress - meaning a self-explained cause outside the loop caused it - or finitely regress to the self-explained root cause.

The other, arguably more formidable, is the Ontological Argument arrived at by Saint Anselm. It holds that if God is by definition the most perfect thing conceivable and if it is far more perfect to exist than to only be thought, God must actually exist or else it would be possible to conceive of a more perfect being who does actually exist. Read it again if your eyes gloss over, it is known for its sleight of hand.

Jim’s real contribution is in decoding these and other theories for the existence of the world. In doing so, he makes a formidable topic, which is already stretched thin across wide-reaching disciplines and levels of rigor, accessible to the lay man.

And the theories only get more wooly as we go. From the world existing because it is good (morally) to Plato’s realm of forms to every kind of world existing simultaneously. Jim is quick to answer the skeptics by using Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Much like those allegorical prisoners stuck watching mere shadows, how could we possibly know when someone is accurately describing reality to us?