Why is there something rather than nothing?
Being, nothingness, the reason for the world
Why is there something rather than nothing? Philosophers give 5 main answers: there is a reason, a brute fact, nothingness does not exist, physics answers and the first mystery. AskPhilosophy presents 14 arguments, from Parménide to Lawrence M. Krauss, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 5 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Nothing is without a reason: the world exists because a necessary being accounts for it.
Leibniz, Plotin, Samuel Clarke, Alexander Pruss
The world is just there, that's all: there is no reason to look for beyond it.
Russell, Hume
'Nothing' is an empty idea: the question is ill-posed.
Parménide, Henri Bergson
The laws of physics can explain how a universe comes out of 'nothing'.
Lawrence M. Krauss, Alexander Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking
It is the deepest question, and it stays open: we should wonder at it, not dissolve it.
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derek Parfit
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
There is a reason
Nothing is without a reason: the world exists because a necessary being accounts for it.
4 argumentsNothing would be simpler: there must be a reason
Nothing would be simpler, and the chain of contingent things never explains its own existence: the reason lies outside it.
The world overflows from the One, because the One is too perfect to stay alone
The One is perfect and lacks nothing: so it overflows and produces all the rest, as the sun shines without losing anything.
An endless series of dependent beings has no reason to exist: there must be a necessary being
If no being in the series exists by necessity, the whole series has neither cause nor reason: it would be determined by nothing.
If every contingent fact has an explanation, the totality of contingent facts is explained by a necessary being
No contingent fact can explain all contingent facts without going in circles: a necessary being is needed.
A brute fact
The world is just there, that's all: there is no reason to look for beyond it.
2 argumentsThe universe is just there, and that's all
What is true of each member is not true of the whole, and nothing shows that the universe as a whole has a cause.
There is no necessary being: the world can just be there
Whatever we conceive as existing we can conceive as not existing: no existence can be demonstrated, and the world may simply be there.
Nothingness does not exist
'Nothing' is an empty idea: the question is ill-posed.
2 argumentsWhat is not, is not: nothing comes from nothing
What is not can be neither thought nor said: so nothing is not a possibility that needs explaining.
Absolute nothing is a pseudo-idea
Absolute nothing can be neither imagined nor conceived without contradiction: to think an absence is to think something else present.
Physics answers
The laws of physics can explain how a universe comes out of 'nothing'.
3 argumentsA universe can arise from nothing: the quantum vacuum is not stable
The quantum vacuum is unstable and a flat universe can have zero total energy: the laws of physics suffice to produce a universe.
A universe can arise by quantum tunnelling from a state with no space and no time
In quantum physics, a small universe can arise by tunnelling from a state with no space or time, then grow by inflation.
Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can create itself from nothing
Gravity's negative energy balances that of matter: a whole universe can arise from nothing, with no God needed to start it.
The first mystery
It is the deepest question, and it stays open: we should wonder at it, not dissolve it.
3 argumentsIt is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is
The world's existence is not one more fact inside the world, so no scientific explanation can answer it.
The first of all questions: why beings rather than nothing?
It is the widest, deepest and most original of questions; answering it in advance with a doctrine means ceasing to ask it.
Why anything? Why this? A question with no causal answer, but not without sense
Nothing would be the simplest and least arbitrary possibility, and yet it is not what exists: that calls for an explanation.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.