Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Part 3 of The Argument. We've established that neither belief nor skepticism is neutral ground — both make extraordinary claims about reality. Now: the first of five places where that becomes impossible to avoid.

Question One: Something Rather Than Nothing

Let's start with the most fundamental question a person can ask.

Not "how did the universe begin" in a scientific sense, that's a different question. This one goes deeper. Before the Big Bang, before matter, before energy, before space and time themselves. Why is there anything at all? Why didn't nothing simply remain nothing?

This question has no easy exit. You cannot science your way past it, because science describes how things within existence behave. It doesn't explain why existence exists.

And there are really only two possible answers.

The first: existence is self-explanatory. The universe simply exists, uncaused, without reason, without source. There is no "why." It just is.

The second: existence has a cause. Something brought everything into being. The universe is not self-explanatory. It points beyond itself to something that is.

Each of these answers requires a significant amount of faith. And all of us are committed to one answer or the other. And all of us used nothing but faith to choose our answer, whether we realized it or not.

Now, notice: every single thing we have ever observed in existence has a cause. Not some things. All things. The idea that existence as a whole is the one exception to this universal pattern is not the obvious conclusion. It is a very specific, very demanding act of faith.

So, now that means that the first answer requires just faith in the answer itself, while the second answer not only requires faith in itself, but also that it is incoherent and goes against everything single thing we have ever known or observed.

Again, the question was never whether we would believe something extraordinary. It was always which extraordinary thing we would believe. And again, we're not saying that one is right and the other is wrong. We are simply honestly examining the options.

Next: if everything in existence depends on something else for its existence, where does that chain of dependency end — and what does it mean if it can't end anywhere ordinary?