“Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
Dr. Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine
Really, think about it. In grappling to understand what somethingness is we at least have the advantage of being something in it ourselves. We exist as something and when we look around all we see is something else.
Instead [for me] it’s always been part about groping to grasp why somethingness exists at all…and how it came to exist in the first place. After all, any number of astrophysicists will argue that first there was nothing at all. And then BOOM! the Big Bang. Everything there is somehow just “explodes” into existence.
Just don’t ask any of them to actually prove this.
At least with God we can attribute things to Him like omniscience and omniptence. End of story. As to how and why God came into existence…that is simply subsumed in His mysterious ways.
Or as Bryan Magee once superbly summed it all up:
[b]For a period of two to three years between the ages of nine and twelve I was in thrall to puzzlement about time. I would lie awake in bed at night in the dark thinking something along the following lines. I know there was a day before yesterday, and a day before that and a day before that and so on…Before everyday there must have been a day before. So it must be possible to go back like that for ever and ever and ever…Yet is it? The idea of going back for ever and ever was something I could not get hold of: it seemed impossible. So perhaps, after all, there must have been a beginning somewhere. But if there was a beginning, what had been going on before that? Well, obviously, nothing—nothing at all—otherwise it could not be the beginning. But if there was nothing, how could anything have got started? What could it have come from? Time wouldn’t just pop into existence—bingo!–out of nothing, and start going, all by itself. Nothing is nothing, not anything. So the idea of a beginning was unimaginable, which somehow made it seem impossible too. The upshot was that it seemed to be impossible for time to have had a beginning and impossible not for it to have had a beginning.
I must be missing something here, I came to think. There are only these two alternatives so one of them must be right. They can’t both be impossible. So I would switch my concentration from one to the other, and then when it had exhausted itself, back again, trying to figure out where I had gone wrong; but I never discovered.
space
I realized a similar problem existed with regard to space. I remember myself as a London evacuee in Market Harborough—I must have been ten or eleven at the time—lying on my back in the grass in a park and trying to penetrate a cloudless blue sky with my eyes and thinking something like this: "If I went straight up into the sky, and kept on going in a straight line, why wouldn’t I be able to just keep on going for ever and ever and ever? But that’s impossible. Why isn’t it possible? Surely, eventually, I’d have to come to some sort of end. But why? If I bumped up against something eventually, wouldn’t that have to be something in space? And if it was in space wouldn’t there have to be something on the other side of it if only more space? On the other hand, if there was no limit, endless space couldn’t just be, anymore than endless time could.[/b]
So, you tell me: What is he missing here?
How does one not go back and forth with so much crucial information still far, far out of reach.