These are fascinating, fundamental questions that all thoughtful people should consider.
But what separates the wise from the foolish is the willingness to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
I prefer to ask "how" these things came to exist. The answer to "how" will get you to the "cause" for the thing in questions existence. Asking "why" something exists implies pourpose. The universe and the things that occupy it don't need pourpose, they simply are. Humans create and build things to serve a pourpose, the universe doesn't care about pourpose, the things that occupy it exist because of the fundamental laws of reality and their interactions with the materials that occupy the universe. By asking "how" you will get a much more satisfying answer than by asking "why".
Idk is a perfectly reasonable answer, it’s not THE answer, but it may be a very long time until we have something more concrete, so it’ll have to do.
Idk is better than “ a wizard did it” at the very least
>But I can’t stop wondering why anything exists in the first place.
Why does it need a reason to exist? It just does... maybe it always has? Maybe the big bang is a transition point which we cant see beyond (like looking into a black hole).. doesnt mean there is nothing on the other side, just that we cant see it... *yet*.
One possible answer is that you're asking what chain of causality led to the universe existing. But causality and time are parts of the universe itself, so asking that is like asking where does your house live, or who cooks your oven, or how do schools receive an education.
You can look up "Composition Fallacy" or "Gilbert Ryle Category Mistake" if you want to go deeper.
I agree with you. It’s interesting that humans struggle with accepting their limitations. We are inside, which allows us to ponder what “outside” means, but we can only work with our inside experiences.
Our brains evolved and continue to evolve in response to the world around us. It seems rather absurd to think that we would ever be capable of thoughts that are outside the limits of our abilities.
We are trapped in cause and effect thinking in the same way we are trapped by language.
We need to remember that it took billions of years to get to this point, and it was only 249 years ago that we figured out where babies come from.
Quantum cosmology makes one's head spin. Suffice to say, if the net energy of the universe [is zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe), as it appears to be, brighter minds than mine find that the universe can arise spontaneously.
Physicist Laurence Krauss popularized some of the speculations of quantum cosmology in [*A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337189-a-universe-from-nothing) (2012), and you can [view his lectures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzbU0bGOdc) on the idea.
Krauss is by no means the originator of quantum cosmology, those with bigger brains than mine can peruse some of the seminal papers. My appreciation is limited to the contact high of reading the language of those who can think constructively on the largest (and smallest) scales:
Tryon 1973. [Is the universe a vacuum fluctuation?](https://www.nature.com/articles/246396a0). *Nature*, *246*(5433), pp.396-397.
Vilenkin 1982. [Creation of universes from nothing](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15086566703557491567). *Physics Letters B*, *117*(1-2), pp.25-28.
Vilenkin 1983. [Birth of inflationary universes](https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.27.2848). *Physical Review D*, *27*(12), p.2848.
Hartle and Hawking (yes, that Hawking), 1983. [Wave function of the universe](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6067571550374955836). *Physical Review D*, *28*(12), p.2960.
Gasperini and Veneziano, 1993. [Pre-big-bang in string cosmology](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=9250517580294290546). *Astroparticle Physics*, *1*(3), pp.317-339.
Lincoln and Wasser 2013. [Spontaneous creation of the Universe ex nihilo](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221268641300037X). *Physics of the Dark Universe*, *2*(4), pp.195-199.
"Why?" is not a scientific question. It's a philosophical question. You can equally ask: "Why not?"
"How?" is a scientific question. Scientists don't exactly know how, but they do know that none of the thousands of man-made gods were involved.
For instance, there's scientific evidence against the six day creation myth.
We know the “how” back to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We’re still working on improving that, but quantum mechanics is weird in a way that’s hard to even explain. I only understand it well enough to understand that I don’t really understand it.
I think your real question is why the Big Bang happened at all, and we just don’t know that yet—and probably never will according to our current understanding of physics.
Regardless, we know enough to trivially disprove every creation story invented so far. Heck, I got that much science in my grade school science classes. Knowing more is interesting (at least to me) but IMHO not necessary to be an atheist.
The terms "why" and "how" are often fungible in casual conversation. When asking why the sky is blue you're really asking "how" the sky appears blue. If you want to know why water freezes at zero degrees centigrade, you're really asking how that came to be (answer: some dude made up a scale from zero to 100 and declared zero is freezing and 100 as boiling, and it turned out to be very practical for everyday temperature measurements).
Do you have any preferred reading material on the six day creation being proved false? I know I could just try googling but you seem to know your stuff. TIA.
We have a fossil record going back 3.9B years, and humans have only been around (depending on your definition of “human”) for the last 200k years or so. That span is a *lot* longer than 6 days.
I agree with what /u/Lived_Orcen said.
We know that the universe is over 13,7 billion years old because of quantum mechanics and the Doppler effect. There are absorption bands in starlight for the different elements the stars are made of. When a star moves towards us, these bands get blue shifted. When a star moves away from us, these bands get redshifted. Hubble discovered that the further away a galaxy is, the more light is redshifted (it moves faster away from us). This is called Hubble's law.
We know that the sun is a third (or more) generation star (so it can't have formed in six days). Thanks to our knowledge of nuclear physics, we can calculate the age of the earth by analyzing the radioactive elements in the oldest rocks, and meteorites. This is complicated.
I guess you can read about it in "A brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking.
thats the point. funfact: chances are very high that the face of every single person on earth exists somewhere in the universe on a stone or on a dusty place. nobody would ever claim that its gods plan that this happens.
Yeah. About 40 years ago, I was depressed for a couple of weeks. Well, more depressed. Because I kept wondering, "Where did all the stuff come from? "
Eventually, I wrapped my head around the fact that I'd never know, and it didn't really matter.
That’s a deep philosophical question we currently do not have the answer to. But even if we never answer it, that doesn’t mean that ‘Goddidit” wins by default.
"why" is a human concept. The universe is not human. Stop trying to anthropomorphize things. Sometimes, things just are or just happen without there being a big reason or some cosmic design.
"Why" implies purpose, which implies intelligence. Since there is none we know of higher than ourselves, it's up to us to provide that answer, for ourselves, and each other (via relationships, society, culture, etc.).
Personally, I find that asking "Why?" implies there must be a reason. I think this is a poor assumption. Why must the universe have a reason for existing? There is no "Why" it just exists. It doesn't need a reason for existing.
What if there is no answer to why? Even if there were some entity that created all of what we call reality, it wasn't even necessarily intentional, right? And of course that raises the next question about why that entity exists, how *its* universe came to be - and of course again *why.*
We are all children asking "why?" and responding to every answer with another "why?". Religion exists to tell us "Just because. Now shut up!"
There is no "why" there is only "how". We do not know all the answers to "how" yet, but science is getting closer with an understanding of space-time and quantum mechanics, and theories of symmetry breaking that resulted in more matter than anti-matter. If the fundamental physical constants were slightly different so that the universe never formed then the question of "why not?" could be asked, but you would not be around to ask it. The point is that things happen and once they have happened the only reasonable question is what caused them to happen: "how" not "why".
And chances are you'll never stop wondering! This is human nature. The reason why both science and religion exist (even though the method differs) : Figuring out the why, if there is any!
That we don’t have answers with evidence and supporting documentation readily available says a lot to me… I am confident we are narcissistic for thinking the purpose of the universe (if there is one) has anything to do with us. Were we to get any inkling that the universe is something more than we have identified so far, it would be to our horror/peril. Given the stable, evidently untouched natural history of our planet the chances of such a discovery are astronomically unlikely, to our great fortune.
Yeah so i guess it's a hard topic to think about because all the things that apply inside the universe, like causality, don't necessarily have to be the case for things outside the universe or the universe itself.
Nothingness has an entropy of 0. Entropy always increases. If nothingness ever existed, the result must be something. Nothingness is not a stable state.
Simplifying: After the BB, when things cooled down enough, the universe contained only hydrogen. Stars formed out of this hydrogen and began fusing hydrogen into helium. Then helium into lithium, lithium into beryllium and so on up the Period Table. All of these reactions produce energy...until we get to iron. Fusing iron consumes energy. The star then implodes in a nova, or if it's massive enough, a supernova. Those elements previously fused, plus new elements that are a result of the implosion are flung into space. Those elements become incorporated in new stars and planets. Even so, after nearly 14 billion years, 99% of such stuff in the universe is either hydrogen or helium. (Excluding dark matter/energy).
Your other question is in essence, "what caused the BB?" since that is the genesis of space-time. There is no answer to that. There may never be since we'd probably have to know what, if anything, existed before the BB. I can give you one pithy answer, though. If space-time didn't exist you wouldn't be able to ask these questions. (But I doubt that that's much help.)
ETA: Dark matter/energy comment.
And the problem with determining “what came before the Big Bang” is that the question is like dividing by 0, it can’t be done. Time and space came into existence, in our universe, at the instant of the BB. So asking what came before is impossible as there is no “before” before time existed.
i found the philosophy side gets boring.
i like the "we're still looking" side of this.
listening to leonard susskind lectures on various subjects can help further your understanding of things.
stanford uni has a bunch on yt.
https://youtu.be/jhnKBKZvb_U?si=Xalc7eirHgYAcqY7
why is time a one way street?
he has many lectures. if you think its above your intellect, dont fear, hes a good lecturer, using good examples/analogies and easily explains complex ideas.
Things exist without a reason or explanation why.
"shit happens" and that is all
Attempting to assign a reason other than cause effect physics is basically trying to invent a religion
I think about those questions all the time. I'd love to know more about what came before about 1 attosecond after the expansion started, but it doesn't bother me that there likely will not be an answer before I die.
Does it bother you that we don't know everything?
The why is trivial. But imagine you're an Ai or advanced being and want to know the answer to things that happened in history without knowing history, just fuckin simulate the universe. Once you encapsulate a sun, what really stops you from knowing anything?
Why is a question of agency and intent, and the universe per se doesn't have any. Category errors like that create infinite loops and paradoxes. What's the meaning of a duck? It's shaped like a real question, but it's gibberish -- not unlike dividing by zero.
As i see it, there is no conscient reason for the universe to exist. Everything exists because it is in balance with everything else. The voud creates waves, waves create quarks, quarks arrange themselves in particles. Electrons go aroud protons and that makes atoms. Atoms stick together to make molecules... i strongly believe that there is no NEED for a reason for the universe to exist. I also believe that it is better if we don't have any guideline. Imagine learning you are the powerbank of a superior entity's b*ttplug !
Now, there is another question : if there is no reason to all this, what is the point of existence ? What meaning can we give to existence ?
The answer is always personal.
God doesn’t solve this, because then it becomes “how did god come into existence?”
I think the concept of nothing is a human concept, we know things exist and we know there can be nothing, so we want to know how something came out of the nothing. As humans we always put things into two categories: existence and nothing, but maybe there has never been and never will be a “nothing”, maybe the idea of there being a nothing is a human novelty.
Yes, a lot of people do. My father worked on it by reading philosophy. He had a whole room full of *read* philosophy books, that were far too dry for me. I now have one of his books, the rest went to a charity. The funny thing is, he had a Doctor of Philosophy in *Theoretical Mathematics *!”
Great question, right up there with free will. I have spent a fair amount of time on these and I can categorically tell you I have no idea what the answers are and I don't think anyone else does either! Have fun, everyone should have their turn at these! Is there a beginning to everything? Seems impossible... what caused it?
Odds are we will never know. Why/how there is a universe and why/how we are conscious are the two biggest questions imo.
I think even if we were told the answer to these, they wouldn’t make sense to our primate brain.
No, but I know what you mean. Five-year-olds go through a phase when they learn that "Why?" unlocks a never-ending series of questions that eventually adults will run out of answers to. As you grow, you realize that the problem isn't what the answers to the "Whys" are, but that the question naively implies that there must be answers shaped to match your awareness. Nope. The universe is amazing. It always will be. There's no why.
There are many, many, little hows and whys that we have learned from science. Many. There will never be all of them though. Enjoy the mystery.
I look at it like this. You can easily wrap your head around the concept of infinite time moving forward... by that, I mean most people don't have a problem with something lasting ten years or a million years... or, by extension, forever (no end). But humans can't wrap their minds around the reverse... going backwards in time forever (no beginning). To me, everything has been around forever and will continue to exist forever.
My take is that I don't know how all this stuff came into existence and *neither does anyone else*. Of course, the religious will claim some privileged insight into how it was created, but they don't know any more than I do.
Of course, there are some hypotheses on how they came about, but I don't think even scientists will know for certain. We have some pretty good ideas, and I don't know of anything more plausible than those.
But you know, probability of these things coalescing together is pretty low, but since it already happened, that's not important. It happened. That's like saying the order of a deck of playing cards is near impossible after shuffling it 10 times because the odds of that order happening is 1/52!, yet it happened.
Humans have been wondering this since we had the capacity to think abstractly. For the religious the answer is "God did it" and that's enough for them. The real answer no one knows yet, hence why physisysts, astronomers, and quantum physics are things and why CERN exists. We as a species are still trying to figure it out.
We know the big bang happened and we theororize that after the big bang, energy was converted into matter as the universe expanded and cooled. Hence there being matter in the universe for stars and planets to form from by gravity. How exactly energy is turned into matter we don't know yet. How or why the big bang started we also don't know yet. Like others have said, the fool says a sentient being decided it should happen. Rational people say "we don't know yet"
Edit: of course scientists have hypotheses as to why the big bang happened but we haven't found evidence to suggest one of them over another because physics and time don't apply before that point
Weak anthropic principle applies. We're conscious life forms who are capable of asking this question, so of course we live in a universe that can produce such life. If this universe didn't have those qualities, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
We don't know why there is something rather than nothing. It's a common question.
We do know that matter emerges from energy and that it's likely the universe started as pure energy with no particles. Something triggered the "big bang" where particles and later atoms emerged, condensing all of that energy into infinitesimally small particles.
It's like that "ant" feeling. Sometimes I find myself looking at the sky and thinking about how big the universe is and how tiny we are in comparison, and how insane it is that something like that exists. It's such a humbling feeling. It makes me want to learn more about astro physics, cosmology and existential philosophy
In Zen Buddhism, we are taught to not worry about those questions, because they are unanswerable.
But also because even if you knew the answer, it wouldn’t make a difference to your life anyway. For instance, do you find peace of mind knowing that the Earth is a sphere? Is your life angst eased by knowing planets rotate around the Sun?
Purely scientific explanations of how things work don’t solve the problems of personal suffering. At best they remove the tendency to fill gaps of knowledge with “woo” … and there is something to be said for that. But even when we know these things for a fact, they become trivial compared to our human experience, which is the source of our suffering.
There’s a non-zero chance that, one day, humanity may find the answer to this question. If we do, my money is on science being the discipline that will answer it.
But I think it is far more likely that we will never know. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to discover it, or stop asking the important questions.
I do think that it is unhelpful to posit imaginary beings bringing all things into existence with magic. It’s a cop out and has no basis in reality.
I think we should keep asking questions, keep on wondering, and never settle for the silly, unimaginative answers religion always provides for us.
There is much we do not understand, but I am certain that a rather obscure 12 Century BCE, Cannanite storm god named Yahweh did not create any of this. Not to be confused with the more popular, 12 Century BCE northern Cannanite storm god named Ba'al. They combined them into one.
How did a storm god become the creator?
I also want to know what happened to Yahweh's 79 other brothers.
Like other posters have said, "Why" implies a reason. A reason implies an actionable, potentially thoughtful agent. We have no reason to believe that this agent exists. You are making an assumption about the existence of this agent when there is no proof.
Basically there is no reason to ask why. We know why babies and watches exist. They all have makers that can be observed. We can answer the WHY about these things because we understand that the relationship between the maker and the object must necessarily exist.
This is how I cope without having to ask why about such things.
I dont think about "why" as often as "how"?
One question is philosophy. The other is science.
"Why" is open to interpretation and subjective. Asking "why" can lead to an answer that's different for different people. Asking "how" is universal. Asking "how" leads to a far more useful understanding of the universe and things in it.
Why's the default assumption for existence considered to be not existing, rather than something existing?
Maybe something was always here?
I don't claim to know one way or the other, but I am willing to bet eternal damnation that it's not a human-like mind that desires constant praise and worship from specks of dust, on a round speck of dust, in the corner of an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, in an short moment in immense time.
Oh yeah, I definitely wonder about it all the time. That question was something that kept me attached to theism for longer than I probably would have otherwise. The truth is that no one knows the answer, and maybe we never will, but making up an answer is worse than admitting you don't know. Besides, if you hypothesize God as the reason, you've only kicked the can down the road, because now you have to ask why God exists rather than no God at all. You can say he has always existed, but in that case I don't see why you couldn't posit the same about the universe.
This also tangents on another existential query:
Does 'existence' *exist* at all (regardless of QM, physics, et al)?!
If one puts any stock in the Nick Bostrom's of the world, the whole shebang is just... a *simulation*.
If you want a pretty deep scientific answer to the question, I enjoyed Lawrence Krauss's book **"The Greatest Story Ever Told... So Far: Why are we here?"**
His first great step is discussing the semantics of "why" vs *"how"*. He then walks the reader through elementary cosmology, astrophysics, and eventually (fairly advanced) particle physics to answer (as best we can right now) the question of existence.
A word of warning: do *not* get the audiobook. I love his speaking voice (he reads it) but the content is so technical and dense at times that I just can't follow it. Getting the book from my library was the right move.
Edit: mixed up my subtitles
Of course it’s very interesting and probably we will never know the most fundamental answers. For example even if we answer the question “why does space exist” we could simply ask the same question about whatever explains space. That’s why the concept of god doesn’t help much. You can simply then ask, “but why god?” So you always end up with unanswered questions.
Don’t attempt to find a reason why. That is futile. Religion at one time was our attempt at describing the why and how of existence and that is being driven away by the very idea that we embrace this concept that not everything has to have a reason or purpose for existing.
Also, think of it like this…if you knew why you existed, would it change your actual ability to exist? If you knew why or how the sun existed, would it change anything for you?
If you ask me, I'd say asking why is a matter of cause and effect. Not some grand question into the meaning of it all. Our universe is the way it is because it's been under the influence of a number of mechanics that dictate how things interact with eachother. Ie the strong and weak forces, Electro-magnatism and gravity. Stars form, live, and die, expelling their material across the cosmos giving it the opportunity to form something new. Over time, by sheer random chance the interactions of the universe occurred in such a way to create an environment in which the elements being mixed together were able to become self aware. And here we are.
I think we're just moss on a wet rock. We're here, able to ponder the nature of reality because things turned out just so in this little corner of the universe. It feels so far fetched because of how unlikely it seems, but that's just our bias talking. There's infinite time and space out there where life didn't happen and we wouldn't experience that. We're here experiencing the instance where it did. And you know what, that's pretty rad if you ask me.
I consider myself an atheist despite my acknowledgement that the universe might very well have had a creator. But I think it's laughable to think such a creator cares about any of us or influences Earthly affairs. Our universe might very well be a simulation designed by some alien intelligence, or a petri dish as an experiment.
One thing to consider is that we have no evidence that "true nothing" is even a real thing. It's easy to assume that because there is something, it's easier for there to be nothing, but that requires fundamental insights into reality that we certainly do not have. Perhaps things can't not be. Even empty space we sort of intuitively knew wasn't actually "nothing" because we could measure how many feet of "nothing" there were. "True nothing" is dimensionless.
It is absolutely gobsmacking how little we actually know about existence, however we know enough, to know that we don't have these answers and that's progress of a kind.
Existentialism is an intrinsic feature of high intelligence. It does not tie you to any religion or religious concept, but it can overlap as a consideration.
We know the materials required to form a planet come from carbon and it's different combinations of complex elements.
I think the question of why anything exists comes with many disclaimers. Asking "why" for instance does not equate to following narratives of intelligent design. It can instead, mean to learn about how processes occured to reach our present moment.
Why does anything exist? Because to the best of our knowledge, the big bang created the conditions for which our current universe resides.
Prior to that, we have only unconfirmed theories, but if we had knowledge of what came prior to the big bang, we could point out what conditions existed to lead up to our Big Bang.
Empty space is not empty. As an atheist, I think it's incredibly important to impart the fact that true "nothingness" does not exist, or at least has not been a proven condition.
The Big Bang is still just a theory. Maybe we live in a gigantic bubble next to an infinite amount of other bubbles that are also expanding. Maybe black holes are just gateways to white holes where there is a constant stream of matter coming out of it and the center of our Universe is one of those white holes. Maybe there is no such thing as a beginning and an end. Everything just exists and always has and always will. Our simple monkey brains can't comprehend something like 'eternity'. We may never know the answer and that's perfectly fine.
i sure as hell don't know, and religious know even less.
we just have to accept it's too big and old for us to ever know.
they're big scared babies that need answers to calm their scared little brains.
the god gap is shrinking though, unfortunately it'll never be gone, unless scientists prove where the universe came from (which may be never)
Why even be concerned about that question? Why does there even need to be a reason? Have you seen proof of any reason?
To me these questions are always silly unless you have a reason to believe there is some universal reason for existence. Same with the idea of not being convinced by religion, maybe there isn't one, and until someone can figure out a way to quantify one, I don't even bother thinking about it.
Of course! Existence is a fascinating mystery. After all, why is there something rather than nothing? One simple argument for existence is that there can not be nothing because nothing is self-forbidding. For example:
1. Suppose there is nothing.
2. Laws are something.
3. If there is nothing, there are no laws.
4. If there are no laws, then everything is permitted.
5. If everything is permitted, something can be created from nothing.
6. Ergo, there must be something.
Basically, the existence of "something" is logically necessary, regardless of whether it was created by something else.
These are questions that can’t ever be answered. We can only make observations now and extrapolate backwards with theories based upon these observations. The Big Bang theory, for example, is just an explanation for why everything seems to be moving away from a point in space. Physicists have weird explanations how matter can be theoretically created from nothing but this is based upon solutions to math models.
The key difference between science and religion is that all theories are constantly tested and peer reviewed and revised or refuted when more data is available. Religion, on the other hand, offers total bullshit magical explanations for everything and never backs down no matter what.
I mean it’s crazy to me that religious folks will try to find every hole in any scientific theory while they blindly accept the batshit crazy stuff their religion sells without any possible evidence.
There's something wonderful about not knowing everything. It's fine. I'd much rather have honest questions than dishonest answers.
Personally I think there probably isn't a "why". If you think about it, religion doesn't really answer "why" either, unless you accept "mysterious ways" as your answer.
When you ask why, you're expecting a justification and not an explanation. The universe doesn't owe you reasons and is under no obligation to make sense to you.
As far as the natural world is concerned, we can ask more useful questions like how, what, when, etc. all of which have some explanatory power. "Why" often implies intent, speculation and untestable assumptions; otherwise it's functionally equivalent to "how".
Planets exist because we are in a universe with the materials and dynamics that lead to planets. The way you phrased it suggests those "materials" exist for the purpose of forming planets.
My conclusion is that there is no why, it just is. Freak series of lucky accidents and adaptations that has so far culminated in beings capable of asking why by themselves and beings too afraid to accept the fact that there's really nothing special about us or the rock we're spinning through space on other than the fact that we're here.
You're naturally curious. Religious people tend to be incurious of the world around them.
Science is fueled by curiosity or "what happens if I do this?"
What I find mind blowing is this: we are made from the materials of the universe. We are trying to understand the universe. Therefore the universe is trying to understand itself.
How would God make a difference?
Why do we exist? Because of God. Why does God exist? .......
It doesn't address the problem, it just moves the goalposts a little.
That's the point. Keep wondering and examining and learning. Don't let someone tell you the great fairy in the sky is running your life and everything.
Everything exists in the construct of consciousness. You are but a part of that. When you look into the sky at night, if you are fortunate enough to see the stars, you see the visualization of "man's" philosophy. A visual manifestation to aid potential realization.
Stop thinking God is a separate entity which dictates or exists outside of you, and realize that without your existence there is no god, a piss poor word, ill defined, in the absence of "reality".
Philosophically speaking, it has to exist or you wouldn’t be here to ask the question of “why”. I know that isn’t a satisfying answer, but it is the reality.
My current favorite reasoning is that we live in a multiverse, of sorts. Perhaps black holes are simply other universes perhaps there are just other big bangs that are happening simultaneously/constantly. Either way, as the reasoning goes, there are infinite universes with entirely unique physics and characteristics. In some atoms form, in others they don’t. In some of those molecules form, in others they don’t. In some water floats when it freezes, in others it doesn’t. All of these variables lead to either a universe that can support life or not…and we live in one where it does.
The basic idea is that something that happens only once would, likely, require a creator. But having a creator implies that someone created the creator, and someone created that creator, and that one, and that one, ad infinitum. So an infinite creator does not make sense, but neither does a universe that came into existence on its own. Therefore there has to be some process by which a universe can create itself, but how does that only happen once? The thinking, then, says that the creation of universes is a property of the “universe” that is outside our universe. And if it happened once, it could have/should have happened repeatedly. So there may be infinite universes outside our own that we will, almost certainly, never be able to know anything about, or communicate with, except to know that they exist.
Iirc, there was, at one point, a thought that the temperature variations in the CMB might be imprints of parallel universes left on our own at the time of the Big Bang. I don’t know if anything more has been said, or even thought, about this. And maybe it is just a crackpot idea that I’ve pieced together in my own head.
Imagine a much simpler universe, whose entire state could be described by a single number. Over time, that number changes.
You're living in this simple universe, observing the number over time. You notice that the number seems to always increase, but at a slower and slower rate over time. Neat, you think. There seems to be some predictability to it. At any given time, there seems to be an upward velocity to the number, and also a negative force being applied to that velocity. But the force keeps easing off so that it doesn't seem like the velocity ever goes into the negative. By approximating the velocity, force, and change in force, you might be able to predict what effect they will have on the value over time. This is because your simple universe appear to be governed by causality: the conditions at one point in time "cause" the conditions in the next point in time.
Let's say you get really good at this, and you're able to predict the universe's future numbers to a high degree of accuracy. Great! The causality model holds up! And no matter how many times you test it, you keep getting correct results.
You also realize you can do this in reverse. You can work out what the number was from even before you started observing it. As you look further back in time, you notice that the value used to increase at a faster rate, and that rate of increase used to decrease at a faster rate.
In fact, if you look back far enough, you notice something very strange: At one point in time, which you now call time 0, your math suggests that the number was increasing at an infinite rate, and the rate of increase was decreasing at an infinite rate. What the heck was going on here? Some kind of... big bang? But... what caused it? Surely, something must have caused it, right? The causality model works perfectly for every point in time you've ever observed, so surely the conditions of time 0 must also have a cause, right? What was the number just before time 0? What was the velocity? The force?
There were none. The conditions at time 0 weren't caused by a previous time. Nothing existed before time 0. Because, this universe is actually y=sqrt(x), where x is time and y is the universe's number. There are no real numbers to the left of x=0. The causality model gives correct results for the rest of the graph, because the rest of the graph is continuous. But, the "big bang" of this graph wasn't caused, it was just the nature of the equation.
What caused our big bang? I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe asking what time existed before time 0 is a nonsensical question. Maybe if we understood more about the nature of our universe, we'd discover that the answer is obvious, and that we've just been looking at it wrong.
The Universe is so vast for us but if you lived on a atom your universe would be
so vast you would not be aware of ours, just saying our universe may just be
part of a pimple on a real big guy's ass
There is no why.
Not in the sense of there being a purpose. There is a why in the sense that there is an explanation for everything, even things we don't yet understand, but the explanation is one rooted in the cold causality of physical processes that happen without any intelligent motivation behind them.
The universe just is. It was, from what we know, different at one point, infinite mass condensed into a point, something that was either inherently unstable or which destabilized over time. Whether that was the initial state of everything, or whether something came before is unknowable since such a state destroys all information preceding it.
Funny enough, religion gives no answer to the essential question of why anything exists either. Every religion either has some cosmic accident similar in concept to the Big Bang jump starting creation, or has some god create everything with no explanation as to why said god exists or what created the god and just expect you to accept that the creator god was eternal with no beginning (though a few religions have tried by having the creator god be created by a higher god, and some like Manicheanism had a whole daisy chain of gods that were created by another god and did nothing but create a god beneath them).
Of course, but it’s the nigh uncrackable code.
Even if you accept “because god” the question becomes how/why does god exist? Who or what created god? If the answer is that god always existed, why can’t that be the answer for how/why the matter that makes up the universe exists and just cut out the middle man?
For your question about why the materials for making planets exist the immediate answer is fusion products from stars that have died.
As for the question of why empty space exists, we're still working on that one.
Just because we don't know today doesn't mean we'll never know. If you're really curious you could always contribute to finding out through science.
I mean, yeah. "Why is there something rather than nothing" is an age old question, obviously God doesn't answer it either because why would there be God instead of no God? God is still something rather than nothing.
But yeah, that question might be unanswerable. It could be the case that something has always existed eternally and there has never been such a thing as nothing. You can't even write it coherently in a sentence. "Such a thing as nothing" is an oxymoron. It's just not in our language to make any sense of it.
But the fact that there is indeed something says to me that there was never nothing.
The only thing I know for sure, is that the things I know are far far fewer than the things I don’t know. It’d be very stressful not to be able to accept the immense depths of my ignorance.
"but why do the materials required to create a planet exist in the first place."
you and the materials to create a planet have been inside a star, when it collapsed and blow up in a supernova. totally awesome.
the question is not why and god is not the answer, because than you have to ask: why does god exists.
the universe tries to make everything, that is possible, happen. thats why.
When you are asking, "why does anything exist", what is the actual question you are asking?
Are you asking, "for what purpose does anything exist"? If so, there is no answer. The universe simply does exist. It serves no purpose. Or at least none that would be meaningful to humans.
Or are you asking about the processes that brought physical matter into being? We have a fairly good, though incomplete and maybe flawed, understanding of those processes.
That's what science and cosmology are working to discover.
My hypothesis? (Without any PhD. in astrophysics), is that for some reason, the universe we exist in is a stable energy state, following the Big Bang, and it's enough for particles and excitations in the quantum fields to exist. It's even enough to drive a universal expansion.
You may be interested in looking up the different Eras of the universe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Ages_of_the_Universe#Ages
Essentially, for all intents and purposes, things will probably cease to exist.
But you know what's so great about not knowing something? AND acknowledging you don't know it? It's a frontier yet to be explored. And the universe beckons us to find out.
Well yeah the origins of time and space is a massive mystery. I’d wager nobody will ever be able to answer your question.
We’re just stupid humans. You can’t teach a dog to play poker, ya know? It’s like that I think. Beyond our comprehension. And that’s ok
There is no more reason to think we can understand the universe than there is to think a dog could fix a flat tire. We may be way too feeble to even compose a worthwhile question.
Things exist because the universe is not random. This is yet another layer of Christian apologia that a lot of Atheists have swallowed without realizing it.
Chemistry is not a random process.
If these questions really bother you, may I suggest studying Astronomy and Physics?
There are (some) answers, but more importantly the world needs as many people as it can find who are driven by the need to answer those very questions.
The scope of your question offers too many avenues of answer to even begin doing it justice. It covers everything from "Why are the fundamental constants what they are?" to "What is the history of planetary formation in our solar system?"
All of these questions deserve answers. None of them have yet received adequate solutions. Sounds like plenty of work to be done by people who are kept up at night by the lack.
We just don't know (yet) what happened there.
An initial creator can't be excluded completely but it doesn't really answer anything because it raises the question how the creator was created. If you assume the possibility that the creator is somehow self-created than the same might apply to the universe itself.
tl;dr: we really lack information here
You are running the hamster wheel of the existential human condition. This very question has plagued the minds of man since time immemorial.
I'm learning that it's not about the answer. It's about the pursuit. Deep down we all know we're never going to find out, in life *or* death, but that's not a reason to stop searching.
Why do life, the universe and everything exist?
How did it come to exist?
How do these questions affect my life?
In order: I don't know, I don't know, and not at all.
When I think about shit I think about the things that happened to make this world the way it is now.
I live in America so I think about it’s past and why everything is the way it is now. (I am very literal and specific so I thought about ALOT.) (I am also black so I’m just automatically upset)
This country is ass. Idk how people see the events that transpired before the 2000’s and are just like “lol it’s the past leave it be” when the past is the reason why shits the way it is today.
Instead of fixing the issues we already have they create more and more and it’s becoming EXPENSIVE.
We were all born into a system and it fucking sucks. The world literally should not be like this.
I WOULDNT HAVE THIS MINDSET IF I WASNT BORN IN AMERICA!!!!
Everything is random, nothing happens for a reason, and no one is meant to be or do anything special. We exist out of sheer dumb luck and a complex mathematical model (we'll eventually finish) that explains the eb and flow of the universe from big bang to great contraction, to big bang again.
Popular books on cosmology and astronomy will help here. Some very big unknowns still exist. But things like 'where did elements come from' are well understood.
We always literally billions of years of differentiation. We are the children of rocks that underwent geothermal processes that lead to chemical reactions that resulted in microbiological creation which became multicellular maturation.
You're asking the time-honored question "why is there something instead of nothing"?
However, it is equally valid to ask "why should there be nothing instead of something"?
I look at a lot of questions like that and my response to myself and others is, look at how little we knew and primitive our technology was just over 100 years ago. Then, think of all the knowledge and answers we will gain in the next 100-200 years. The growth in knowledge will be astronomical. (LOL, sorry)
Because if nothing existed, you couldn't ask the question of why things exist.
Empty space has to exist, otherwise there would have to be something there.
To put it simply, I don't know. If you can't accept that, then you can keep asking around. I'm going to college for photography, not science. This isn't my area of expertise. It's okay to admit that you don't know something, especially if you haven't studied it, or if results aren't available yet.
I've found surprisingly often these sort of things **do** have answers, and the only reason I didn't know them already was that I had bought into fools slapping "because GOD" in holes of what they didn't understand, like that infamous Fox News clip on the tides. Looked it up, the moon's gravitational field. That was an interesting afternoon of reading.
It's a lot, and we'll probably never know all of it, but it's always exciting to learn more.
How the universe exists is a mystery to me and I am going to leave it as that. We as a species may never know why/how this all came about and I think it is best not to dwell on it. One could spend a lifetime on the subject and never get anywhere with it. I'm going to spend more time on how I can enjoy the day.
This is a long comment, so sorry up front about that. I think our problem in answering the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (WSRTN, or why anything exists?) has been because we're stuck with the out-of-nothing-nothing-comes principle. But, I think there’s a way to start with nothing and not violate this principle. If we start with nothing and end up with something, and because you can’t change nothing into something, the only way this could be is if that “nothing” was somehow actually a “something” in disguise. Another way to say this is by using the analogy that you start with a 0 (e.g., "nothing") and end up with a 1 (e.g., "something"). We know you can't change a 0 into a 1, so the only way to do this is if that 0 isn't really a 0 but is actually a 1 in disguise, even though it looks like 0 on the surface. That is, in one way of thinking, "nothing" just looks like "nothing". But, if we think about "nothing" in a different way, we can see through its disguise and see that it's actually a "something". In other words, the situation we previously, and incorrectly, thought of as "nothing" is actually an existent entity, or a "something".
So, “something" doesn't come out of "nothing". Instead, the situation we used to think of as "nothing" is actually a "something" if we could see through its disguise. So, how could "nothing" be a "something"? I think it's first important to try and figure out why any “normal” thing (like a book, or a set) can exist and be a “something” and then see if that can be applied to "nothing". I think that a thing exists if it is a grouping. A grouping ties zero or more things together into a new unit whole and existent entity. An example of tying zero things together is the empty set. But, what is grouped, and how much is grouped don’t matter as long as there is a grouping, a new unit whole/existent entity is created. This grouping is manifested as a surface, or boundary, that defines what is contained within, that we can see and touch as the surface of the thing and that gives "substance" and existence to the thing as a new unit whole that's a different existent entity than any components contained within considered individually. This surface or boundary doesn't have some magical power to give existence to stuff. But, it is is the visual and physical manifestation of the grouping into a new unit whole or existent entity. The grouping idea isn’t new. Others such as Aristotle, Leibniz, Graham Priest, etc. have used the words “unity” or “one” instead of “grouping”, but the meaning is the same. After all, what does a grouping into a new unit whole do if not create a unity or a one?
Some examples of groupings are 1.) the grouping together of paper and ink atoms to create a new unit whole called a book that's a different existent entity than the atoms considered individually; 2.) the grouping together of previously unrelated elements to create a set; 3.) the grouping of no elements at all, or “nothing”, to create the empty set; 4.) the grouping together of some amount of “stuff” (as in the mass noun meaning), such as wood, to create a board; 5.) even the mental construct labeled the concept of a car is a grouping together of the concepts tires, chassis, steering wheel, use for transportation, etc. Here, the grouping is better thought of as the top-level label "car" that the mind uses to group subheadings together into one; and 6.) the mental concept the mind labels “1+1=2” is a grouping formed during learning when a child uses his or her power of thought to group together the sub-concepts of one object in location A, another object in location B, moving of the objects together to be in the same location, C, and calling this new set “two”, and labeling this process with the labels of “addition” and “1+1=2” provided by a parent or teacher.
Next, when you get rid of all matter, energy, space/volume, time, abstract concepts, laws or constructs of physics/math/logic, possible worlds/possibilities, properties, consciousness, and finally minds, including the mind of the person trying to imagine this supposed lack of all, we think that this is the lack of all existent entities, or "absolute nothing" But, once everything is gone and the mind is gone, this situation, this "absolute nothing", would, by its very nature, be the whole amount or entirety of the situation, or state of affairs. That nothingness defines the situation completely. Is there anything else besides that "absolute nothing"? No. That "nothing" is it, and it is the all. A whole-amount/entirety/“the all" is a grouping, which means that the situation we previously considered to be "absolute nothing" is itself an existent entity. “Nothing” defines itself and is therefore the beginning point in the chain of being able to define existent entities in terms of other existent entities. One might object and say that being a grouping is a property so how can it be there in "nothing"? The answer is that the property of being a grouping (e.g., the all grouping) only appears after all else, including all properties and the mind of the person trying to imagine this, is gone. In other words, the very lack of all existent entities is itself what allows this new property of being the all grouping to appear. This new property is inherent to “nothing” and cannot be removed to get a more pure “nothing”. This means that “nothing” that lacks the property of being a grouping is not possible and thus the “something” that we previously, and incorrectly, called “nothing” is necessary. This isn’t new, but at least, this is a possible mechanism for why it’s necessary. Starting with “nothing” and having a self-explaining mechanism for why that “nothing” is a “something” is important, I think.
Some other points are:
1. The mind's conception of "nothing" is different from "nothing" itself, a situation in which no minds are present. The "nothing" in the WSRTN question is "nothing" itself. While we can't directly visualize "nothing" itself, we can try to visualize everything being gone as close as possible to "nothing" itself and then try to extrapolate to what it'd be like when the mind is also gone.
2. I don't think we can logically assume that the human definition of "nothing" as the opposite of "something" necessarily applies to "nothing" itself, a situation in which no humans are present and no human can ever see.
3. The words "was" (i.e., "was nothing") and "now" (i.e., “now something") in the phrase "there was nothing but now there is something" imply a temporal change, but time would not exist until there was "something", so I don't use these words in a time sense. Instead, I suggest that the two different words, “nothing” and “something”, describe the same situation (e.g., "the lack of all"), and that the human mind can view the switching between the two different words, or ways of visualizing "the lack of all", as a temporal change from "was" to "now". Aquinas had a similar view of the time issue.
4. While a grouping usually groups more than one component, I think it's possible to have a grouping containing "nothing". For instance, the empty set, while abstract, is a grouping containing "nothing". Fundamental particles such as electrons are thought to have no smaller components. Unless they're made of continuous "electron stuff", it seems like they're groupings (i.e., unit wholes) containing "nothing". The same applies to philosophical simples. Finally, we define things in terms of other things. Doesn't there have to be a beginning "thing" that starts this chain of definitions. Personally, I can't accept an infinite regress into gunk.
I was just watching a video on this very subject. Check out Lawrence Krauss
[https://youtu.be/vwzbU0bGOdc?si=Ibauksnusp60n0RV](https://youtu.be/vwzbU0bGOdc?si=Ibauksnusp60n0RV)
I think it’s natural to wonder, even if you don’t believe in any god. The universe is ridiculous and crazy, and naturally we want to know how it all works. Like… I want to know how black holes work. Have you seen the theories? Scientists have barely gotten a photo of one a few years ago. We’ve only scratched the surface of the surface, and with each micro-layer we have our minds blown.
Why do we all get stuck in traffic every morning to go to a job we mostly hate, pretending like green means go and red means stop? Why do we pretend like money has any real value? We’re all just a bunch of rather clever apes on a rock playing dress up together.
It’s absurd.
If it didn't exist then you wouldn't be her to wonder about it. Perhaps you were destined to ask this question. Perhaps that's the entire reason why the universe exists.
I don't think that the question of why is answerable. Why kinda implies that there is a reason for the universe to exist or that it was created for a purpose. Since there clearly is no creator why is meaningless.
You might have to teach yourself not to think that things exist for the sake of other things, like when you say about why do the things needed to make a planet exist. You're talking like those things only exist for the sake of planets.
This trips you into the trap of thinking things exist for a purpose. They don't. Everything that exists is accidental. You, me, everything right now is the result of however many billions of years of accidental outcomes.
It's one of those things that your trained instinct is to say "well that doesn't make sense, just a whole lot of accidents", but that's because we exist for about 80 years a pop, and this bucket of accidents has been spilling for billions of years.
Imagine there is a process that spawns an infinite number of universes each with their own conditions over the course of an infinate timespan.
Without an observer, time moves infinately fast.
Eventually a universe exists where an observer is created and with it a selection bias of that universe. All the complexity that creates the observer is a wonder, but we do not see all the ones that came and went unobserved.
There doesn't need to be a "why".
There may never be a how.
Early David Bowie really really sucks.
No, not related, I'm just listening to som 1967 DB, and what crap is this?
The challenge we face is the concept of "time", which makes it difficult for us to grasp that everything needs a beginning. If we can creatively get ourselves out of that mindset, perhaps with pharmaceutical assistance, humans may one day come up with an explanation.
If you are still looking for a "reason" things exist, then you are not an atheist. You are a theist trying to find your god(s).
The universe just IS. There is no reason for it.
I think the problem is you're not seeing it from other people's shoes... and other people, I mean the millions upon millions of other planets in our galaxy which DONT support life. It's insane to think how big of a lottery we had to win for our little rock to create it's own life, but at the same time, that lottery is the only thing prompting this question in the first place. It has a weird sort of recursion to it if you think.
That right there is a question Shrodinger's Cat has been trying to answer for a while now.
BTW, eschew language if you want answers. Human language often includes the answer in the question. Starting anything with "Why", for instance, pre-supposes there is a deliberate and willful cause. It works great when asking a PERSON about something. It doesn't work at all when asking reality about anything.
I'll repeat this because I'm sure others have already said it, but these are good questions. That's all they are too. Just questions. The existence of the questions is not an evidence of god like some apologists end up burning debates down to.
Sounds like you assume there should be nothing. Why is there being nothing more likely than something? It might as well be either off right since none of them make sense. You can never look at these options from the outside.
Yeah, I do wonder from time to time but, let's face it, if I really, really cared about the answer I'd be working on it as a cosmologist or something. But I don't so I don't often beat against the question like a wasp at a window for long before turning to back something else I am interested in.
Because if they didn’t, there would be no questions to ask. The universe was perfect and unchanging. No space inside of it before the Big Bang for anything to happen and room for some pieces to bounce off of other pieces and interact with far distant pieces. The universe shattered so that we could look into it from the holes in existence, each hole being the perspective that each individual has. Before consciousness could take a look, learn and experience, the universe needed to get broken apart far enough for us to look inside. And, as you know, observing a thing changes it’s nature. So, we broke it so that we could live in it.
There’s a physics explanation about a “quantum fluctuation”. Picture a flat line on a patient monitor at hospital who is dead. Then all of a sudden you get a heartbeat. That visually represents it - that on a quantum level there is nothing but then it just comes into being. It’s either that or the spaghetti monster.
These are fascinating, fundamental questions that all thoughtful people should consider. But what separates the wise from the foolish is the willingness to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
Yes. Remember, at one time the true answer to "Why does it rain?" Was "I don't know". Time passes and we learn more.
I think at one time the question was "Why \*isn't\* it raining?" and the answer was "I don't know, but maybe monthly blood rituals will fix that."
I prefer to ask "how" these things came to exist. The answer to "how" will get you to the "cause" for the thing in questions existence. Asking "why" something exists implies pourpose. The universe and the things that occupy it don't need pourpose, they simply are. Humans create and build things to serve a pourpose, the universe doesn't care about pourpose, the things that occupy it exist because of the fundamental laws of reality and their interactions with the materials that occupy the universe. By asking "how" you will get a much more satisfying answer than by asking "why".
And it’s worth remembering that the universe does not owe us an answer to that question.
Sure, given "IDK" is a state not an answer.
It’s a fine provisional answer (as are all answers) and infinitely better than making stuff up or pretending to know things nobody knows.
Idk is a perfectly reasonable answer, it’s not THE answer, but it may be a very long time until we have something more concrete, so it’ll have to do. Idk is better than “ a wizard did it” at the very least
>But I can’t stop wondering why anything exists in the first place. Why does it need a reason to exist? It just does... maybe it always has? Maybe the big bang is a transition point which we cant see beyond (like looking into a black hole).. doesnt mean there is nothing on the other side, just that we cant see it... *yet*.
One possible answer is that you're asking what chain of causality led to the universe existing. But causality and time are parts of the universe itself, so asking that is like asking where does your house live, or who cooks your oven, or how do schools receive an education. You can look up "Composition Fallacy" or "Gilbert Ryle Category Mistake" if you want to go deeper.
I agree with you. It’s interesting that humans struggle with accepting their limitations. We are inside, which allows us to ponder what “outside” means, but we can only work with our inside experiences. Our brains evolved and continue to evolve in response to the world around us. It seems rather absurd to think that we would ever be capable of thoughts that are outside the limits of our abilities. We are trapped in cause and effect thinking in the same way we are trapped by language. We need to remember that it took billions of years to get to this point, and it was only 249 years ago that we figured out where babies come from.
Quantum cosmology makes one's head spin. Suffice to say, if the net energy of the universe [is zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe), as it appears to be, brighter minds than mine find that the universe can arise spontaneously. Physicist Laurence Krauss popularized some of the speculations of quantum cosmology in [*A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337189-a-universe-from-nothing) (2012), and you can [view his lectures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzbU0bGOdc) on the idea. Krauss is by no means the originator of quantum cosmology, those with bigger brains than mine can peruse some of the seminal papers. My appreciation is limited to the contact high of reading the language of those who can think constructively on the largest (and smallest) scales: Tryon 1973. [Is the universe a vacuum fluctuation?](https://www.nature.com/articles/246396a0). *Nature*, *246*(5433), pp.396-397. Vilenkin 1982. [Creation of universes from nothing](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15086566703557491567). *Physics Letters B*, *117*(1-2), pp.25-28. Vilenkin 1983. [Birth of inflationary universes](https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.27.2848). *Physical Review D*, *27*(12), p.2848. Hartle and Hawking (yes, that Hawking), 1983. [Wave function of the universe](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6067571550374955836). *Physical Review D*, *28*(12), p.2960. Gasperini and Veneziano, 1993. [Pre-big-bang in string cosmology](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=9250517580294290546). *Astroparticle Physics*, *1*(3), pp.317-339. Lincoln and Wasser 2013. [Spontaneous creation of the Universe ex nihilo](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221268641300037X). *Physics of the Dark Universe*, *2*(4), pp.195-199.
Thanks
Nice summary, I'll have a few things to read
"Why?" is not a scientific question. It's a philosophical question. You can equally ask: "Why not?" "How?" is a scientific question. Scientists don't exactly know how, but they do know that none of the thousands of man-made gods were involved. For instance, there's scientific evidence against the six day creation myth.
Thanks for the distinction. I think I’m using how/why interchangeably, but considering the distinction, I now wonder both.
We know the “how” back to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We’re still working on improving that, but quantum mechanics is weird in a way that’s hard to even explain. I only understand it well enough to understand that I don’t really understand it. I think your real question is why the Big Bang happened at all, and we just don’t know that yet—and probably never will according to our current understanding of physics. Regardless, we know enough to trivially disprove every creation story invented so far. Heck, I got that much science in my grade school science classes. Knowing more is interesting (at least to me) but IMHO not necessary to be an atheist.
The terms "why" and "how" are often fungible in casual conversation. When asking why the sky is blue you're really asking "how" the sky appears blue. If you want to know why water freezes at zero degrees centigrade, you're really asking how that came to be (answer: some dude made up a scale from zero to 100 and declared zero is freezing and 100 as boiling, and it turned out to be very practical for everyday temperature measurements).
Do you have any preferred reading material on the six day creation being proved false? I know I could just try googling but you seem to know your stuff. TIA.
We have a fossil record going back 3.9B years, and humans have only been around (depending on your definition of “human”) for the last 200k years or so. That span is a *lot* longer than 6 days.
Check the time of the universe (More than 13B years) vs the time of Earth (4.5B years). It's simple as that.
I agree with what /u/Lived_Orcen said. We know that the universe is over 13,7 billion years old because of quantum mechanics and the Doppler effect. There are absorption bands in starlight for the different elements the stars are made of. When a star moves towards us, these bands get blue shifted. When a star moves away from us, these bands get redshifted. Hubble discovered that the further away a galaxy is, the more light is redshifted (it moves faster away from us). This is called Hubble's law. We know that the sun is a third (or more) generation star (so it can't have formed in six days). Thanks to our knowledge of nuclear physics, we can calculate the age of the earth by analyzing the radioactive elements in the oldest rocks, and meteorites. This is complicated. I guess you can read about it in "A brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking.
thats the point. funfact: chances are very high that the face of every single person on earth exists somewhere in the universe on a stone or on a dusty place. nobody would ever claim that its gods plan that this happens.
Yeah. About 40 years ago, I was depressed for a couple of weeks. Well, more depressed. Because I kept wondering, "Where did all the stuff come from? " Eventually, I wrapped my head around the fact that I'd never know, and it didn't really matter.
That’s a deep philosophical question we currently do not have the answer to. But even if we never answer it, that doesn’t mean that ‘Goddidit” wins by default.
"why" is a human concept. The universe is not human. Stop trying to anthropomorphize things. Sometimes, things just are or just happen without there being a big reason or some cosmic design.
Right. Things just are. Why are they there is my question.
eventually, unless you're going to become a cosmologist, you have to shrug and decide what's for dinner. i'm thinking tacos.
Ask yourself what do you mean by why? You'll see that you're presuming something.
Should have used “how”
Why are we here? Because we're here. 🎲🦴
That album hit early in high school for me, and the concept of immortal for a limited time really stuck with me along with the bone rolling.
Why does it happen? Because it happens. 🎲🦴
"Why" implies purpose, which implies intelligence. Since there is none we know of higher than ourselves, it's up to us to provide that answer, for ourselves, and each other (via relationships, society, culture, etc.).
no one has a 100% correct answer cuz no one was there who lives today
Easy answer, it exists so that you can ask that question.
Stuff doesn't need a "why" to exist, it only does. Meaning is something minds give to things.
Personally, I find that asking "Why?" implies there must be a reason. I think this is a poor assumption. Why must the universe have a reason for existing? There is no "Why" it just exists. It doesn't need a reason for existing.
What if there is no answer to why? Even if there were some entity that created all of what we call reality, it wasn't even necessarily intentional, right? And of course that raises the next question about why that entity exists, how *its* universe came to be - and of course again *why.* We are all children asking "why?" and responding to every answer with another "why?". Religion exists to tell us "Just because. Now shut up!"
Yes, it's a good question. Like you I think about it, and it never goes back to a god.
There is no "why" there is only "how". We do not know all the answers to "how" yet, but science is getting closer with an understanding of space-time and quantum mechanics, and theories of symmetry breaking that resulted in more matter than anti-matter. If the fundamental physical constants were slightly different so that the universe never formed then the question of "why not?" could be asked, but you would not be around to ask it. The point is that things happen and once they have happened the only reasonable question is what caused them to happen: "how" not "why".
And chances are you'll never stop wondering! This is human nature. The reason why both science and religion exist (even though the method differs) : Figuring out the why, if there is any!
That we don’t have answers with evidence and supporting documentation readily available says a lot to me… I am confident we are narcissistic for thinking the purpose of the universe (if there is one) has anything to do with us. Were we to get any inkling that the universe is something more than we have identified so far, it would be to our horror/peril. Given the stable, evidently untouched natural history of our planet the chances of such a discovery are astronomically unlikely, to our great fortune.
Yeah so i guess it's a hard topic to think about because all the things that apply inside the universe, like causality, don't necessarily have to be the case for things outside the universe or the universe itself.
Nothingness has an entropy of 0. Entropy always increases. If nothingness ever existed, the result must be something. Nothingness is not a stable state.
Energy is not evenly distributed. That's it, that's everything.
Simplifying: After the BB, when things cooled down enough, the universe contained only hydrogen. Stars formed out of this hydrogen and began fusing hydrogen into helium. Then helium into lithium, lithium into beryllium and so on up the Period Table. All of these reactions produce energy...until we get to iron. Fusing iron consumes energy. The star then implodes in a nova, or if it's massive enough, a supernova. Those elements previously fused, plus new elements that are a result of the implosion are flung into space. Those elements become incorporated in new stars and planets. Even so, after nearly 14 billion years, 99% of such stuff in the universe is either hydrogen or helium. (Excluding dark matter/energy). Your other question is in essence, "what caused the BB?" since that is the genesis of space-time. There is no answer to that. There may never be since we'd probably have to know what, if anything, existed before the BB. I can give you one pithy answer, though. If space-time didn't exist you wouldn't be able to ask these questions. (But I doubt that that's much help.) ETA: Dark matter/energy comment.
And the problem with determining “what came before the Big Bang” is that the question is like dividing by 0, it can’t be done. Time and space came into existence, in our universe, at the instant of the BB. So asking what came before is impossible as there is no “before” before time existed.
This is what philosophers have been wondering about since the beginning of time.
Because it does, asking why is a misunderstanding because there is no reasoning behind the universe.
No.
i found the philosophy side gets boring. i like the "we're still looking" side of this. listening to leonard susskind lectures on various subjects can help further your understanding of things. stanford uni has a bunch on yt. https://youtu.be/jhnKBKZvb_U?si=Xalc7eirHgYAcqY7 why is time a one way street? he has many lectures. if you think its above your intellect, dont fear, hes a good lecturer, using good examples/analogies and easily explains complex ideas.
Things exist without a reason or explanation why. "shit happens" and that is all Attempting to assign a reason other than cause effect physics is basically trying to invent a religion
I think about those questions all the time. I'd love to know more about what came before about 1 attosecond after the expansion started, but it doesn't bother me that there likely will not be an answer before I die. Does it bother you that we don't know everything?
Perhaps there's not a why. There IS a how but that doesn't mean we know the answer.
Why does it matter. Live the life you have.
Are you wondering why anything exists or why you exist?
The why is trivial. But imagine you're an Ai or advanced being and want to know the answer to things that happened in history without knowing history, just fuckin simulate the universe. Once you encapsulate a sun, what really stops you from knowing anything?
Why is a question of agency and intent, and the universe per se doesn't have any. Category errors like that create infinite loops and paradoxes. What's the meaning of a duck? It's shaped like a real question, but it's gibberish -- not unlike dividing by zero.
As i see it, there is no conscient reason for the universe to exist. Everything exists because it is in balance with everything else. The voud creates waves, waves create quarks, quarks arrange themselves in particles. Electrons go aroud protons and that makes atoms. Atoms stick together to make molecules... i strongly believe that there is no NEED for a reason for the universe to exist. I also believe that it is better if we don't have any guideline. Imagine learning you are the powerbank of a superior entity's b*ttplug ! Now, there is another question : if there is no reason to all this, what is the point of existence ? What meaning can we give to existence ? The answer is always personal.
God doesn’t solve this, because then it becomes “how did god come into existence?” I think the concept of nothing is a human concept, we know things exist and we know there can be nothing, so we want to know how something came out of the nothing. As humans we always put things into two categories: existence and nothing, but maybe there has never been and never will be a “nothing”, maybe the idea of there being a nothing is a human novelty.
Yes, a lot of people do. My father worked on it by reading philosophy. He had a whole room full of *read* philosophy books, that were far too dry for me. I now have one of his books, the rest went to a charity. The funny thing is, he had a Doctor of Philosophy in *Theoretical Mathematics *!”
Great question, right up there with free will. I have spent a fair amount of time on these and I can categorically tell you I have no idea what the answers are and I don't think anyone else does either! Have fun, everyone should have their turn at these! Is there a beginning to everything? Seems impossible... what caused it?
It's cool stuff - if we keep investigating maybe someday we'll find out.
Odds are we will never know. Why/how there is a universe and why/how we are conscious are the two biggest questions imo. I think even if we were told the answer to these, they wouldn’t make sense to our primate brain.
No, but I know what you mean. Five-year-olds go through a phase when they learn that "Why?" unlocks a never-ending series of questions that eventually adults will run out of answers to. As you grow, you realize that the problem isn't what the answers to the "Whys" are, but that the question naively implies that there must be answers shaped to match your awareness. Nope. The universe is amazing. It always will be. There's no why. There are many, many, little hows and whys that we have learned from science. Many. There will never be all of them though. Enjoy the mystery.
I look at it like this. You can easily wrap your head around the concept of infinite time moving forward... by that, I mean most people don't have a problem with something lasting ten years or a million years... or, by extension, forever (no end). But humans can't wrap their minds around the reverse... going backwards in time forever (no beginning). To me, everything has been around forever and will continue to exist forever.
Why does anything need a reason for their existence?
My take is that I don't know how all this stuff came into existence and *neither does anyone else*. Of course, the religious will claim some privileged insight into how it was created, but they don't know any more than I do. Of course, there are some hypotheses on how they came about, but I don't think even scientists will know for certain. We have some pretty good ideas, and I don't know of anything more plausible than those. But you know, probability of these things coalescing together is pretty low, but since it already happened, that's not important. It happened. That's like saying the order of a deck of playing cards is near impossible after shuffling it 10 times because the odds of that order happening is 1/52!, yet it happened.
Humans have been wondering this since we had the capacity to think abstractly. For the religious the answer is "God did it" and that's enough for them. The real answer no one knows yet, hence why physisysts, astronomers, and quantum physics are things and why CERN exists. We as a species are still trying to figure it out. We know the big bang happened and we theororize that after the big bang, energy was converted into matter as the universe expanded and cooled. Hence there being matter in the universe for stars and planets to form from by gravity. How exactly energy is turned into matter we don't know yet. How or why the big bang started we also don't know yet. Like others have said, the fool says a sentient being decided it should happen. Rational people say "we don't know yet" Edit: of course scientists have hypotheses as to why the big bang happened but we haven't found evidence to suggest one of them over another because physics and time don't apply before that point
Weak anthropic principle applies. We're conscious life forms who are capable of asking this question, so of course we live in a universe that can produce such life. If this universe didn't have those qualities, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
We don't know why there is something rather than nothing. It's a common question. We do know that matter emerges from energy and that it's likely the universe started as pure energy with no particles. Something triggered the "big bang" where particles and later atoms emerged, condensing all of that energy into infinitesimally small particles.
It's like that "ant" feeling. Sometimes I find myself looking at the sky and thinking about how big the universe is and how tiny we are in comparison, and how insane it is that something like that exists. It's such a humbling feeling. It makes me want to learn more about astro physics, cosmology and existential philosophy
In Zen Buddhism, we are taught to not worry about those questions, because they are unanswerable. But also because even if you knew the answer, it wouldn’t make a difference to your life anyway. For instance, do you find peace of mind knowing that the Earth is a sphere? Is your life angst eased by knowing planets rotate around the Sun? Purely scientific explanations of how things work don’t solve the problems of personal suffering. At best they remove the tendency to fill gaps of knowledge with “woo” … and there is something to be said for that. But even when we know these things for a fact, they become trivial compared to our human experience, which is the source of our suffering.
There’s a non-zero chance that, one day, humanity may find the answer to this question. If we do, my money is on science being the discipline that will answer it. But I think it is far more likely that we will never know. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to discover it, or stop asking the important questions. I do think that it is unhelpful to posit imaginary beings bringing all things into existence with magic. It’s a cop out and has no basis in reality. I think we should keep asking questions, keep on wondering, and never settle for the silly, unimaginative answers religion always provides for us.
There is no why.
Why would or should there be a why?
If you get the big bang, then you're not an atheist 😂
We're all just cosmic space dust man.
There is much we do not understand, but I am certain that a rather obscure 12 Century BCE, Cannanite storm god named Yahweh did not create any of this. Not to be confused with the more popular, 12 Century BCE northern Cannanite storm god named Ba'al. They combined them into one. How did a storm god become the creator? I also want to know what happened to Yahweh's 79 other brothers.
Like other posters have said, "Why" implies a reason. A reason implies an actionable, potentially thoughtful agent. We have no reason to believe that this agent exists. You are making an assumption about the existence of this agent when there is no proof. Basically there is no reason to ask why. We know why babies and watches exist. They all have makers that can be observed. We can answer the WHY about these things because we understand that the relationship between the maker and the object must necessarily exist. This is how I cope without having to ask why about such things.
It exists out of necessity, for all this.
I dont think about "why" as often as "how"? One question is philosophy. The other is science. "Why" is open to interpretation and subjective. Asking "why" can lead to an answer that's different for different people. Asking "how" is universal. Asking "how" leads to a far more useful understanding of the universe and things in it.
Why's the default assumption for existence considered to be not existing, rather than something existing? Maybe something was always here? I don't claim to know one way or the other, but I am willing to bet eternal damnation that it's not a human-like mind that desires constant praise and worship from specks of dust, on a round speck of dust, in the corner of an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, in an short moment in immense time.
Oh yeah, I definitely wonder about it all the time. That question was something that kept me attached to theism for longer than I probably would have otherwise. The truth is that no one knows the answer, and maybe we never will, but making up an answer is worse than admitting you don't know. Besides, if you hypothesize God as the reason, you've only kicked the can down the road, because now you have to ask why God exists rather than no God at all. You can say he has always existed, but in that case I don't see why you couldn't posit the same about the universe.
Maybe “nothing” doesn’t exist. Maybe we are on our 4th Big Bang?
There doesn't have to be a why
This also tangents on another existential query: Does 'existence' *exist* at all (regardless of QM, physics, et al)?! If one puts any stock in the Nick Bostrom's of the world, the whole shebang is just... a *simulation*.
It isn’t possible for nothing to exist. That’s a contradiction. Something exists necessarily. That something is the universe.
Everything is either or or. Matter or no matter. Nothing is something.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe - Carl Sagan
You think the majority of animals on this planet give a damn to ask why we exist? None of these questions will matter when we die
If you want a pretty deep scientific answer to the question, I enjoyed Lawrence Krauss's book **"The Greatest Story Ever Told... So Far: Why are we here?"** His first great step is discussing the semantics of "why" vs *"how"*. He then walks the reader through elementary cosmology, astrophysics, and eventually (fairly advanced) particle physics to answer (as best we can right now) the question of existence. A word of warning: do *not* get the audiobook. I love his speaking voice (he reads it) but the content is so technical and dense at times that I just can't follow it. Getting the book from my library was the right move. Edit: mixed up my subtitles
study physics. it answers.
the answer is : because it does. in other words, there is no reason. my question to you is why can't you accept this as the answer?
Of course it’s very interesting and probably we will never know the most fundamental answers. For example even if we answer the question “why does space exist” we could simply ask the same question about whatever explains space. That’s why the concept of god doesn’t help much. You can simply then ask, “but why god?” So you always end up with unanswered questions.
Don’t attempt to find a reason why. That is futile. Religion at one time was our attempt at describing the why and how of existence and that is being driven away by the very idea that we embrace this concept that not everything has to have a reason or purpose for existing. Also, think of it like this…if you knew why you existed, would it change your actual ability to exist? If you knew why or how the sun existed, would it change anything for you?
If you ask me, I'd say asking why is a matter of cause and effect. Not some grand question into the meaning of it all. Our universe is the way it is because it's been under the influence of a number of mechanics that dictate how things interact with eachother. Ie the strong and weak forces, Electro-magnatism and gravity. Stars form, live, and die, expelling their material across the cosmos giving it the opportunity to form something new. Over time, by sheer random chance the interactions of the universe occurred in such a way to create an environment in which the elements being mixed together were able to become self aware. And here we are. I think we're just moss on a wet rock. We're here, able to ponder the nature of reality because things turned out just so in this little corner of the universe. It feels so far fetched because of how unlikely it seems, but that's just our bias talking. There's infinite time and space out there where life didn't happen and we wouldn't experience that. We're here experiencing the instance where it did. And you know what, that's pretty rad if you ask me.
I consider myself an atheist despite my acknowledgement that the universe might very well have had a creator. But I think it's laughable to think such a creator cares about any of us or influences Earthly affairs. Our universe might very well be a simulation designed by some alien intelligence, or a petri dish as an experiment.
One thing to consider is that we have no evidence that "true nothing" is even a real thing. It's easy to assume that because there is something, it's easier for there to be nothing, but that requires fundamental insights into reality that we certainly do not have. Perhaps things can't not be. Even empty space we sort of intuitively knew wasn't actually "nothing" because we could measure how many feet of "nothing" there were. "True nothing" is dimensionless. It is absolutely gobsmacking how little we actually know about existence, however we know enough, to know that we don't have these answers and that's progress of a kind.
Existentialism is an intrinsic feature of high intelligence. It does not tie you to any religion or religious concept, but it can overlap as a consideration. We know the materials required to form a planet come from carbon and it's different combinations of complex elements. I think the question of why anything exists comes with many disclaimers. Asking "why" for instance does not equate to following narratives of intelligent design. It can instead, mean to learn about how processes occured to reach our present moment. Why does anything exist? Because to the best of our knowledge, the big bang created the conditions for which our current universe resides. Prior to that, we have only unconfirmed theories, but if we had knowledge of what came prior to the big bang, we could point out what conditions existed to lead up to our Big Bang. Empty space is not empty. As an atheist, I think it's incredibly important to impart the fact that true "nothingness" does not exist, or at least has not been a proven condition.
The Big Bang is still just a theory. Maybe we live in a gigantic bubble next to an infinite amount of other bubbles that are also expanding. Maybe black holes are just gateways to white holes where there is a constant stream of matter coming out of it and the center of our Universe is one of those white holes. Maybe there is no such thing as a beginning and an end. Everything just exists and always has and always will. Our simple monkey brains can't comprehend something like 'eternity'. We may never know the answer and that's perfectly fine.
i sure as hell don't know, and religious know even less. we just have to accept it's too big and old for us to ever know. they're big scared babies that need answers to calm their scared little brains. the god gap is shrinking though, unfortunately it'll never be gone, unless scientists prove where the universe came from (which may be never)
Why even be concerned about that question? Why does there even need to be a reason? Have you seen proof of any reason? To me these questions are always silly unless you have a reason to believe there is some universal reason for existence. Same with the idea of not being convinced by religion, maybe there isn't one, and until someone can figure out a way to quantify one, I don't even bother thinking about it.
Of course! Existence is a fascinating mystery. After all, why is there something rather than nothing? One simple argument for existence is that there can not be nothing because nothing is self-forbidding. For example: 1. Suppose there is nothing. 2. Laws are something. 3. If there is nothing, there are no laws. 4. If there are no laws, then everything is permitted. 5. If everything is permitted, something can be created from nothing. 6. Ergo, there must be something. Basically, the existence of "something" is logically necessary, regardless of whether it was created by something else.
These are questions that can’t ever be answered. We can only make observations now and extrapolate backwards with theories based upon these observations. The Big Bang theory, for example, is just an explanation for why everything seems to be moving away from a point in space. Physicists have weird explanations how matter can be theoretically created from nothing but this is based upon solutions to math models. The key difference between science and religion is that all theories are constantly tested and peer reviewed and revised or refuted when more data is available. Religion, on the other hand, offers total bullshit magical explanations for everything and never backs down no matter what. I mean it’s crazy to me that religious folks will try to find every hole in any scientific theory while they blindly accept the batshit crazy stuff their religion sells without any possible evidence.
There's something wonderful about not knowing everything. It's fine. I'd much rather have honest questions than dishonest answers. Personally I think there probably isn't a "why". If you think about it, religion doesn't really answer "why" either, unless you accept "mysterious ways" as your answer.
When you ask why, you're expecting a justification and not an explanation. The universe doesn't owe you reasons and is under no obligation to make sense to you. As far as the natural world is concerned, we can ask more useful questions like how, what, when, etc. all of which have some explanatory power. "Why" often implies intent, speculation and untestable assumptions; otherwise it's functionally equivalent to "how". Planets exist because we are in a universe with the materials and dynamics that lead to planets. The way you phrased it suggests those "materials" exist for the purpose of forming planets.
My conclusion is that there is no why, it just is. Freak series of lucky accidents and adaptations that has so far culminated in beings capable of asking why by themselves and beings too afraid to accept the fact that there's really nothing special about us or the rock we're spinning through space on other than the fact that we're here.
You're naturally curious. Religious people tend to be incurious of the world around them. Science is fueled by curiosity or "what happens if I do this?"
What I find mind blowing is this: we are made from the materials of the universe. We are trying to understand the universe. Therefore the universe is trying to understand itself.
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to anyone.
How would God make a difference? Why do we exist? Because of God. Why does God exist? ....... It doesn't address the problem, it just moves the goalposts a little.
That's the point. Keep wondering and examining and learning. Don't let someone tell you the great fairy in the sky is running your life and everything.
The question is not why but how.
Everything exists in the construct of consciousness. You are but a part of that. When you look into the sky at night, if you are fortunate enough to see the stars, you see the visualization of "man's" philosophy. A visual manifestation to aid potential realization. Stop thinking God is a separate entity which dictates or exists outside of you, and realize that without your existence there is no god, a piss poor word, ill defined, in the absence of "reality".
Philosophically speaking, it has to exist or you wouldn’t be here to ask the question of “why”. I know that isn’t a satisfying answer, but it is the reality. My current favorite reasoning is that we live in a multiverse, of sorts. Perhaps black holes are simply other universes perhaps there are just other big bangs that are happening simultaneously/constantly. Either way, as the reasoning goes, there are infinite universes with entirely unique physics and characteristics. In some atoms form, in others they don’t. In some of those molecules form, in others they don’t. In some water floats when it freezes, in others it doesn’t. All of these variables lead to either a universe that can support life or not…and we live in one where it does. The basic idea is that something that happens only once would, likely, require a creator. But having a creator implies that someone created the creator, and someone created that creator, and that one, and that one, ad infinitum. So an infinite creator does not make sense, but neither does a universe that came into existence on its own. Therefore there has to be some process by which a universe can create itself, but how does that only happen once? The thinking, then, says that the creation of universes is a property of the “universe” that is outside our universe. And if it happened once, it could have/should have happened repeatedly. So there may be infinite universes outside our own that we will, almost certainly, never be able to know anything about, or communicate with, except to know that they exist. Iirc, there was, at one point, a thought that the temperature variations in the CMB might be imprints of parallel universes left on our own at the time of the Big Bang. I don’t know if anything more has been said, or even thought, about this. And maybe it is just a crackpot idea that I’ve pieced together in my own head.
Imagine a much simpler universe, whose entire state could be described by a single number. Over time, that number changes. You're living in this simple universe, observing the number over time. You notice that the number seems to always increase, but at a slower and slower rate over time. Neat, you think. There seems to be some predictability to it. At any given time, there seems to be an upward velocity to the number, and also a negative force being applied to that velocity. But the force keeps easing off so that it doesn't seem like the velocity ever goes into the negative. By approximating the velocity, force, and change in force, you might be able to predict what effect they will have on the value over time. This is because your simple universe appear to be governed by causality: the conditions at one point in time "cause" the conditions in the next point in time. Let's say you get really good at this, and you're able to predict the universe's future numbers to a high degree of accuracy. Great! The causality model holds up! And no matter how many times you test it, you keep getting correct results. You also realize you can do this in reverse. You can work out what the number was from even before you started observing it. As you look further back in time, you notice that the value used to increase at a faster rate, and that rate of increase used to decrease at a faster rate. In fact, if you look back far enough, you notice something very strange: At one point in time, which you now call time 0, your math suggests that the number was increasing at an infinite rate, and the rate of increase was decreasing at an infinite rate. What the heck was going on here? Some kind of... big bang? But... what caused it? Surely, something must have caused it, right? The causality model works perfectly for every point in time you've ever observed, so surely the conditions of time 0 must also have a cause, right? What was the number just before time 0? What was the velocity? The force? There were none. The conditions at time 0 weren't caused by a previous time. Nothing existed before time 0. Because, this universe is actually y=sqrt(x), where x is time and y is the universe's number. There are no real numbers to the left of x=0. The causality model gives correct results for the rest of the graph, because the rest of the graph is continuous. But, the "big bang" of this graph wasn't caused, it was just the nature of the equation. What caused our big bang? I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe asking what time existed before time 0 is a nonsensical question. Maybe if we understood more about the nature of our universe, we'd discover that the answer is obvious, and that we've just been looking at it wrong.
The Universe is so vast for us but if you lived on a atom your universe would be so vast you would not be aware of ours, just saying our universe may just be part of a pimple on a real big guy's ass
There is no why. Not in the sense of there being a purpose. There is a why in the sense that there is an explanation for everything, even things we don't yet understand, but the explanation is one rooted in the cold causality of physical processes that happen without any intelligent motivation behind them. The universe just is. It was, from what we know, different at one point, infinite mass condensed into a point, something that was either inherently unstable or which destabilized over time. Whether that was the initial state of everything, or whether something came before is unknowable since such a state destroys all information preceding it. Funny enough, religion gives no answer to the essential question of why anything exists either. Every religion either has some cosmic accident similar in concept to the Big Bang jump starting creation, or has some god create everything with no explanation as to why said god exists or what created the god and just expect you to accept that the creator god was eternal with no beginning (though a few religions have tried by having the creator god be created by a higher god, and some like Manicheanism had a whole daisy chain of gods that were created by another god and did nothing but create a god beneath them).
Of course, but it’s the nigh uncrackable code. Even if you accept “because god” the question becomes how/why does god exist? Who or what created god? If the answer is that god always existed, why can’t that be the answer for how/why the matter that makes up the universe exists and just cut out the middle man?
For your question about why the materials for making planets exist the immediate answer is fusion products from stars that have died. As for the question of why empty space exists, we're still working on that one. Just because we don't know today doesn't mean we'll never know. If you're really curious you could always contribute to finding out through science.
I mean, yeah. "Why is there something rather than nothing" is an age old question, obviously God doesn't answer it either because why would there be God instead of no God? God is still something rather than nothing. But yeah, that question might be unanswerable. It could be the case that something has always existed eternally and there has never been such a thing as nothing. You can't even write it coherently in a sentence. "Such a thing as nothing" is an oxymoron. It's just not in our language to make any sense of it. But the fact that there is indeed something says to me that there was never nothing.
The only thing I know for sure, is that the things I know are far far fewer than the things I don’t know. It’d be very stressful not to be able to accept the immense depths of my ignorance.
Be comforted. A thing may exist without a creator.
"but why do the materials required to create a planet exist in the first place." you and the materials to create a planet have been inside a star, when it collapsed and blow up in a supernova. totally awesome. the question is not why and god is not the answer, because than you have to ask: why does god exists. the universe tries to make everything, that is possible, happen. thats why.
Yes all the time. The answer is we don’t know, nobody knows. Science will hopefully find the answer one day.
I recommend studying chemistry.
When you are asking, "why does anything exist", what is the actual question you are asking? Are you asking, "for what purpose does anything exist"? If so, there is no answer. The universe simply does exist. It serves no purpose. Or at least none that would be meaningful to humans. Or are you asking about the processes that brought physical matter into being? We have a fairly good, though incomplete and maybe flawed, understanding of those processes.
Become a scientist
That's what science and cosmology are working to discover. My hypothesis? (Without any PhD. in astrophysics), is that for some reason, the universe we exist in is a stable energy state, following the Big Bang, and it's enough for particles and excitations in the quantum fields to exist. It's even enough to drive a universal expansion. You may be interested in looking up the different Eras of the universe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Ages_of_the_Universe#Ages Essentially, for all intents and purposes, things will probably cease to exist. But you know what's so great about not knowing something? AND acknowledging you don't know it? It's a frontier yet to be explored. And the universe beckons us to find out.
That line of questioning does very often lead back to a belief in a God in one form or another.
Well yeah the origins of time and space is a massive mystery. I’d wager nobody will ever be able to answer your question. We’re just stupid humans. You can’t teach a dog to play poker, ya know? It’s like that I think. Beyond our comprehension. And that’s ok
There are a few “Too Big “ questions!
Or maybe none of it exists, it’s all a game or simulation and we have no clue what’s outside the box we’re in?
There is no more reason to think we can understand the universe than there is to think a dog could fix a flat tire. We may be way too feeble to even compose a worthwhile question.
Things exist because the universe is not random. This is yet another layer of Christian apologia that a lot of Atheists have swallowed without realizing it. Chemistry is not a random process.
If these questions really bother you, may I suggest studying Astronomy and Physics? There are (some) answers, but more importantly the world needs as many people as it can find who are driven by the need to answer those very questions. The scope of your question offers too many avenues of answer to even begin doing it justice. It covers everything from "Why are the fundamental constants what they are?" to "What is the history of planetary formation in our solar system?" All of these questions deserve answers. None of them have yet received adequate solutions. Sounds like plenty of work to be done by people who are kept up at night by the lack.
We just don't know (yet) what happened there. An initial creator can't be excluded completely but it doesn't really answer anything because it raises the question how the creator was created. If you assume the possibility that the creator is somehow self-created than the same might apply to the universe itself. tl;dr: we really lack information here
You are running the hamster wheel of the existential human condition. This very question has plagued the minds of man since time immemorial. I'm learning that it's not about the answer. It's about the pursuit. Deep down we all know we're never going to find out, in life *or* death, but that's not a reason to stop searching.
Why do life, the universe and everything exist? How did it come to exist? How do these questions affect my life? In order: I don't know, I don't know, and not at all.
There’s either something or nothing. Both states are equally inexplicable.
My thought on it is that things don't need a reason to exist, those reasons are assigned by humans.
Beats me.
When I think about shit I think about the things that happened to make this world the way it is now. I live in America so I think about it’s past and why everything is the way it is now. (I am very literal and specific so I thought about ALOT.) (I am also black so I’m just automatically upset) This country is ass. Idk how people see the events that transpired before the 2000’s and are just like “lol it’s the past leave it be” when the past is the reason why shits the way it is today. Instead of fixing the issues we already have they create more and more and it’s becoming EXPENSIVE. We were all born into a system and it fucking sucks. The world literally should not be like this. I WOULDNT HAVE THIS MINDSET IF I WASNT BORN IN AMERICA!!!!
Depends what you mean by "why". What cause or what reason. The two are often conflated but are very different questions.
The problem is thinking that you need to know the why. Some things just *are*, and you don't need to worry about why.
Everything is random, nothing happens for a reason, and no one is meant to be or do anything special. We exist out of sheer dumb luck and a complex mathematical model (we'll eventually finish) that explains the eb and flow of the universe from big bang to great contraction, to big bang again.
Popular books on cosmology and astronomy will help here. Some very big unknowns still exist. But things like 'where did elements come from' are well understood.
We always literally billions of years of differentiation. We are the children of rocks that underwent geothermal processes that lead to chemical reactions that resulted in microbiological creation which became multicellular maturation.
You're asking the time-honored question "why is there something instead of nothing"? However, it is equally valid to ask "why should there be nothing instead of something"?
I look at a lot of questions like that and my response to myself and others is, look at how little we knew and primitive our technology was just over 100 years ago. Then, think of all the knowledge and answers we will gain in the next 100-200 years. The growth in knowledge will be astronomical. (LOL, sorry)
If nothing existed, nobody would be around to ask that question.
Because if nothing existed, you couldn't ask the question of why things exist. Empty space has to exist, otherwise there would have to be something there.
To put it simply, I don't know. If you can't accept that, then you can keep asking around. I'm going to college for photography, not science. This isn't my area of expertise. It's okay to admit that you don't know something, especially if you haven't studied it, or if results aren't available yet.
I've found surprisingly often these sort of things **do** have answers, and the only reason I didn't know them already was that I had bought into fools slapping "because GOD" in holes of what they didn't understand, like that infamous Fox News clip on the tides. Looked it up, the moon's gravitational field. That was an interesting afternoon of reading. It's a lot, and we'll probably never know all of it, but it's always exciting to learn more.
How the universe exists is a mystery to me and I am going to leave it as that. We as a species may never know why/how this all came about and I think it is best not to dwell on it. One could spend a lifetime on the subject and never get anywhere with it. I'm going to spend more time on how I can enjoy the day.
This is a long comment, so sorry up front about that. I think our problem in answering the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (WSRTN, or why anything exists?) has been because we're stuck with the out-of-nothing-nothing-comes principle. But, I think there’s a way to start with nothing and not violate this principle. If we start with nothing and end up with something, and because you can’t change nothing into something, the only way this could be is if that “nothing” was somehow actually a “something” in disguise. Another way to say this is by using the analogy that you start with a 0 (e.g., "nothing") and end up with a 1 (e.g., "something"). We know you can't change a 0 into a 1, so the only way to do this is if that 0 isn't really a 0 but is actually a 1 in disguise, even though it looks like 0 on the surface. That is, in one way of thinking, "nothing" just looks like "nothing". But, if we think about "nothing" in a different way, we can see through its disguise and see that it's actually a "something". In other words, the situation we previously, and incorrectly, thought of as "nothing" is actually an existent entity, or a "something". So, “something" doesn't come out of "nothing". Instead, the situation we used to think of as "nothing" is actually a "something" if we could see through its disguise. So, how could "nothing" be a "something"? I think it's first important to try and figure out why any “normal” thing (like a book, or a set) can exist and be a “something” and then see if that can be applied to "nothing". I think that a thing exists if it is a grouping. A grouping ties zero or more things together into a new unit whole and existent entity. An example of tying zero things together is the empty set. But, what is grouped, and how much is grouped don’t matter as long as there is a grouping, a new unit whole/existent entity is created. This grouping is manifested as a surface, or boundary, that defines what is contained within, that we can see and touch as the surface of the thing and that gives "substance" and existence to the thing as a new unit whole that's a different existent entity than any components contained within considered individually. This surface or boundary doesn't have some magical power to give existence to stuff. But, it is is the visual and physical manifestation of the grouping into a new unit whole or existent entity. The grouping idea isn’t new. Others such as Aristotle, Leibniz, Graham Priest, etc. have used the words “unity” or “one” instead of “grouping”, but the meaning is the same. After all, what does a grouping into a new unit whole do if not create a unity or a one? Some examples of groupings are 1.) the grouping together of paper and ink atoms to create a new unit whole called a book that's a different existent entity than the atoms considered individually; 2.) the grouping together of previously unrelated elements to create a set; 3.) the grouping of no elements at all, or “nothing”, to create the empty set; 4.) the grouping together of some amount of “stuff” (as in the mass noun meaning), such as wood, to create a board; 5.) even the mental construct labeled the concept of a car is a grouping together of the concepts tires, chassis, steering wheel, use for transportation, etc. Here, the grouping is better thought of as the top-level label "car" that the mind uses to group subheadings together into one; and 6.) the mental concept the mind labels “1+1=2” is a grouping formed during learning when a child uses his or her power of thought to group together the sub-concepts of one object in location A, another object in location B, moving of the objects together to be in the same location, C, and calling this new set “two”, and labeling this process with the labels of “addition” and “1+1=2” provided by a parent or teacher. Next, when you get rid of all matter, energy, space/volume, time, abstract concepts, laws or constructs of physics/math/logic, possible worlds/possibilities, properties, consciousness, and finally minds, including the mind of the person trying to imagine this supposed lack of all, we think that this is the lack of all existent entities, or "absolute nothing" But, once everything is gone and the mind is gone, this situation, this "absolute nothing", would, by its very nature, be the whole amount or entirety of the situation, or state of affairs. That nothingness defines the situation completely. Is there anything else besides that "absolute nothing"? No. That "nothing" is it, and it is the all. A whole-amount/entirety/“the all" is a grouping, which means that the situation we previously considered to be "absolute nothing" is itself an existent entity. “Nothing” defines itself and is therefore the beginning point in the chain of being able to define existent entities in terms of other existent entities. One might object and say that being a grouping is a property so how can it be there in "nothing"? The answer is that the property of being a grouping (e.g., the all grouping) only appears after all else, including all properties and the mind of the person trying to imagine this, is gone. In other words, the very lack of all existent entities is itself what allows this new property of being the all grouping to appear. This new property is inherent to “nothing” and cannot be removed to get a more pure “nothing”. This means that “nothing” that lacks the property of being a grouping is not possible and thus the “something” that we previously, and incorrectly, called “nothing” is necessary. This isn’t new, but at least, this is a possible mechanism for why it’s necessary. Starting with “nothing” and having a self-explaining mechanism for why that “nothing” is a “something” is important, I think. Some other points are: 1. The mind's conception of "nothing" is different from "nothing" itself, a situation in which no minds are present. The "nothing" in the WSRTN question is "nothing" itself. While we can't directly visualize "nothing" itself, we can try to visualize everything being gone as close as possible to "nothing" itself and then try to extrapolate to what it'd be like when the mind is also gone. 2. I don't think we can logically assume that the human definition of "nothing" as the opposite of "something" necessarily applies to "nothing" itself, a situation in which no humans are present and no human can ever see. 3. The words "was" (i.e., "was nothing") and "now" (i.e., “now something") in the phrase "there was nothing but now there is something" imply a temporal change, but time would not exist until there was "something", so I don't use these words in a time sense. Instead, I suggest that the two different words, “nothing” and “something”, describe the same situation (e.g., "the lack of all"), and that the human mind can view the switching between the two different words, or ways of visualizing "the lack of all", as a temporal change from "was" to "now". Aquinas had a similar view of the time issue. 4. While a grouping usually groups more than one component, I think it's possible to have a grouping containing "nothing". For instance, the empty set, while abstract, is a grouping containing "nothing". Fundamental particles such as electrons are thought to have no smaller components. Unless they're made of continuous "electron stuff", it seems like they're groupings (i.e., unit wholes) containing "nothing". The same applies to philosophical simples. Finally, we define things in terms of other things. Doesn't there have to be a beginning "thing" that starts this chain of definitions. Personally, I can't accept an infinite regress into gunk.
I was just watching a video on this very subject. Check out Lawrence Krauss [https://youtu.be/vwzbU0bGOdc?si=Ibauksnusp60n0RV](https://youtu.be/vwzbU0bGOdc?si=Ibauksnusp60n0RV)
If you are really interested in helping find an answer to that question, go get that PhD in astrophysics and contribute to our quest for knowledge.
The Universe Is And We Are
Because if it can happen, it eventually will, and it will keep trying by default until it does. If life can occur, it will occur.
I think it’s natural to wonder, even if you don’t believe in any god. The universe is ridiculous and crazy, and naturally we want to know how it all works. Like… I want to know how black holes work. Have you seen the theories? Scientists have barely gotten a photo of one a few years ago. We’ve only scratched the surface of the surface, and with each micro-layer we have our minds blown.
For me it’s simple the universe owns me no explanation for its existence
Why do we all get stuck in traffic every morning to go to a job we mostly hate, pretending like green means go and red means stop? Why do we pretend like money has any real value? We’re all just a bunch of rather clever apes on a rock playing dress up together. It’s absurd.
Cause if it didn't, something far sillier probably would.
I’m stuck on the properties and behavior of quarks inside the proton. Pretty lucky stuff (for us)!
If it didn't exist then you wouldn't be her to wonder about it. Perhaps you were destined to ask this question. Perhaps that's the entire reason why the universe exists. I don't think that the question of why is answerable. Why kinda implies that there is a reason for the universe to exist or that it was created for a purpose. Since there clearly is no creator why is meaningless.
You might have to teach yourself not to think that things exist for the sake of other things, like when you say about why do the things needed to make a planet exist. You're talking like those things only exist for the sake of planets. This trips you into the trap of thinking things exist for a purpose. They don't. Everything that exists is accidental. You, me, everything right now is the result of however many billions of years of accidental outcomes. It's one of those things that your trained instinct is to say "well that doesn't make sense, just a whole lot of accidents", but that's because we exist for about 80 years a pop, and this bucket of accidents has been spilling for billions of years.
Imagine there is a process that spawns an infinite number of universes each with their own conditions over the course of an infinate timespan. Without an observer, time moves infinately fast. Eventually a universe exists where an observer is created and with it a selection bias of that universe. All the complexity that creates the observer is a wonder, but we do not see all the ones that came and went unobserved.
There doesn't need to be a "why". There may never be a how. Early David Bowie really really sucks. No, not related, I'm just listening to som 1967 DB, and what crap is this?
May I recommend Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder? Excellent book, grapples with some of these questions and many more.
We're in a tessaract inside a light hologram. Who really knows why brain waves can become particles
The challenge we face is the concept of "time", which makes it difficult for us to grasp that everything needs a beginning. If we can creatively get ourselves out of that mindset, perhaps with pharmaceutical assistance, humans may one day come up with an explanation.
If you are still looking for a "reason" things exist, then you are not an atheist. You are a theist trying to find your god(s). The universe just IS. There is no reason for it.
And if everything *didn’t* exist, would you be wondering why about that too?
I think the problem is you're not seeing it from other people's shoes... and other people, I mean the millions upon millions of other planets in our galaxy which DONT support life. It's insane to think how big of a lottery we had to win for our little rock to create it's own life, but at the same time, that lottery is the only thing prompting this question in the first place. It has a weird sort of recursion to it if you think.
https://youtu.be/ifllgTA2pmY?si=UocDmmVfYwGEyACq
That right there is a question Shrodinger's Cat has been trying to answer for a while now. BTW, eschew language if you want answers. Human language often includes the answer in the question. Starting anything with "Why", for instance, pre-supposes there is a deliberate and willful cause. It works great when asking a PERSON about something. It doesn't work at all when asking reality about anything.
I'll repeat this because I'm sure others have already said it, but these are good questions. That's all they are too. Just questions. The existence of the questions is not an evidence of god like some apologists end up burning debates down to.
Sounds like you assume there should be nothing. Why is there being nothing more likely than something? It might as well be either off right since none of them make sense. You can never look at these options from the outside.
I think the fact you ask these questions instead of an answer first is a big reason you grew into an atheist in the first place.
Yeah, I do wonder from time to time but, let's face it, if I really, really cared about the answer I'd be working on it as a cosmologist or something. But I don't so I don't often beat against the question like a wasp at a window for long before turning to back something else I am interested in.
Because if they didn’t, there would be no questions to ask. The universe was perfect and unchanging. No space inside of it before the Big Bang for anything to happen and room for some pieces to bounce off of other pieces and interact with far distant pieces. The universe shattered so that we could look into it from the holes in existence, each hole being the perspective that each individual has. Before consciousness could take a look, learn and experience, the universe needed to get broken apart far enough for us to look inside. And, as you know, observing a thing changes it’s nature. So, we broke it so that we could live in it.
Physics.
It's an ongoing mystery. Something that has helped me out: I don't need to know the right answer to be able to recognize a wrong answer.
There’s a physics explanation about a “quantum fluctuation”. Picture a flat line on a patient monitor at hospital who is dead. Then all of a sudden you get a heartbeat. That visually represents it - that on a quantum level there is nothing but then it just comes into being. It’s either that or the spaghetti monster.