Free Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt Page A

let alone found evidence that its nonexistence would be ‘natural.’ So why should we be tempted to ask for an explanation of why it exists?”
    Here I thought I had him.
    “But we have observed its nonexistence,” I interjected. “The Big Bang theory tells us that the universe came into being only around 14 billion years ago. That’s a drop in the bucket when you consider eternity. What was the universe doing in that infinite stretch of time before the Big Bang singularity, if not failing to exist? And wouldn’t that make nonexistence its natural state?”
    Grünbaum made short work of this objection.
    “So what if the universe has a finite past?” he said. “Physics does not allow us to extrapolate back and say, ‘Before this singularity there was nothingness.’ That’s an elementary mistake so many of my opponents make. They mentally picture themselves at the initial singularity as observers endowed with memory, and this gives them the irresistible feeling that there must have been earlier moments of time. But the lesson of the Big Bang model is that before the initial state there was no time.”
    Hmmm, I thought, Grünbaum seems to be a closet Leibnizian on the matter of time. In the late seventeenth century, Leibniz and Newton staked out competing positions on time’s true nature. Newton took the “absolutist” position, holding that time transcended the physical world and all that went on within it. “ Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external,” Newton declared. Leibniz took the opposite, “relationist” position. He argued, against Newton, that time was merely a relation among events. In a static world—a world without change, without “happenings”—time would simply not exist. Grünbaum, in contending that there was no time before the Big Bang, seemed to be echoing Leibniz. He was assuming that it would be meaningless to talk of time in a clockless and eventless state of Nothing.
    But when I voiced this point, Grünbaum responded with a bit of jujitsu.
    “No, Jim, I’m being philosophically elastic,” he said. “I’m not necessarily siding with Leibniz. Maybe one can imagine time flowing in a Null World, as Newton did. But that’s not how the Big Bang model works! The model itself says that the initial singularity marks a temporal boundary. If you take the model to be physically true, then that’s where time begins.”
    So was he saying that the very idea of a world coming into existence out of nothingness was nonsensical?
    “Yes, because it implies a process taking place in time . To ask how the universe came into existence in the first place presupposes that there were earlier moments of time when nothing at all existed. If the theory allowed us to talk about such earlier moments—time before the Big Bang—then we could ask what was going on then. But it doesn’t. There is no ‘before.’ So there’s no gap for God to sneak into. You might just as well say that the universe came out of nirvana!”
    But it’s not just religious believers who dwell on the gap between Nothingness and Being, I objected. Plenty of atheist philosophers are also on record professing astonishment that there should be a cosmos. I mentioned one in particular, J. J. C. “Jack” Smart—a tough-minded Australian philosopher of science and, like Grünbaum, an uncompromising materialist and atheist. Smart said that Why does anything exist at all? struck him as the “profoundest” of all questions.
    “Well, I’ll tell you something about Jack,” Grünbaum replied. “He had a very religious upbringing. He may be an atheist now, but he once told me he’d be glad if someone could refute his arguments against religion, because he missed his old beliefs. People like him have a deep-seated tendency to be awed or amazed by the existence of the world. Like I say, they absorb it with their mother’s milk.”
    I could not