Why anything? Why this?

Derek Parfit

Why does the Universe exist? There are two questions here. First, why is there a Universe at all? It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Second, why does this Universe exist? Things might have been, in countless ways, different. So why is the Universe as it is?

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[*] I am here merely summarising, and oversimplifying, what others have claimed. See, for example, John Leslie, Universes (1989).

Vol. 20 No. 2 · 22 January 1998 » Derek Parfit » Why anything? Why this? (print version)
pages 24-27 | 5731 words

Letters

From Leonard Pepper

Why does a literary magazine exist at all? It might have been the case that no magazine existed: no cover, no list of contributors, no contents. We have to go on and ask why we have the magazine we do have. Consider the Null Possibility. There could have been a journal with nothing in it. Consider next the All Worlds Hypothesis, in which our periodical would contain every possible kind of article. Somewhere in between is the publication we buy. Perhaps the Brute Fact View applies and we have to put up with what we get between the covers and not ask questions. On the other hand, there may be a Selector or a set of partial Selectors which determines what kind of magazine we experience. I am trying to get round, of course, to asking the ‘Selectors’ what was going on when they decided to publish Derek Parfit’s two-part article on the meaning of the universe (LRB, 22 January and 5 February)? The world we live in is unfair enough, with the LRB appearing only fortnightly, and that terrible gap after Christmas, the deepest abyss in the year. To surrender two and a half pages in each of two issues to this meticulous but rather pontifical philosophical analysis is enough to make us cry out ‘Why?’ to the heavens.

Leonard Pepper
Oxford

From William Flesch

Following contemporary cosmology, Derek Parfit writes of the sheer statistical unlikeliness of our existence: ‘Of the range of initial conditions, fewer than one in a billion billion would have produced a Universe with the complexity that allows for life. If this claim is true, as I shall here assume, there is something that cries out to be explained. Why was one of this tiny set also the one that actually obtained?’ Parfit seems to think that the probability that God exists is greater than one in a billion billion, so that the existence of God is more likely to be true than the accidental existence of a life-supporting universe. But his stipulation that he’s assuming that the claims of current cosmology are true gives the game away. For even if you think that the odds that God exists are greater than one in a billion billion, it’s dizzyingly more probable that cosmology has it wrong. (After all, similar sorts of error are not unprecedented in the history of physics.) In fact, Parfit’s argument ought to embarrass cosmologists, not atheists. To paraphrase Parfit: cosmologists may reject this answer, thinking it improbable that their theory is wrong. But this probability cannot be as low as one in a billion billion. So even cosmologists should admit that, of these two answers to our question, the one that invokes scientific error is more likely to be true.

William Flesch
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts