Why is there Something Rather Than Nothing

Exploring Necessity, Contingency, and Reality

The Engine of Reality

It begins with a self-evident truth: Some things exist that don’t have to.

You didn’t have to exist. This planet didn’t have to exist. The universe, with its delicate laws and vanishingly improbable constants, needn’t have existed at all. Everything around us is contingent: it exists, but it could have been otherwise.

That insight is captured in the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR): For every fact, there is a reason why it is so rather than otherwise. This principle is the lifeblood of reason itself. Scientists live by it: every experiment, every search for explanation assumes that things don’t “just happen”.

If the PSR collapses, reasoning itself collapses with it. Without it, both science and and philosophy lose their compass.

The Translucent Orb

Imagine walking through a forest and finding a glowing, translucent orb lying among the trees. It’s an image created by philosopher Richard Taylor. You wonder why it is there. Your friend replies: “No reason, it’s just there!” Is that a good answer? Of course not.

Now enlarge that orb until it contains everything: every galaxy, every atom, every law of physics. Does its need for explanation vanish just because it got bigger? Of course not.

The cosmos itself is the orb. The question burns the same: Why is it here at all?

The Hume–Edwards Escape Hatch

Sceptics sometimes reply with what’s called the Hume–Edwards Principle: If you can explain every member of a collection, you’ve explained the collection. But this misses the essence of the question. Explaining why each domino falls does not explain why there were dominos to fall in the first place.

The Infinite Geometry Book

Alexander Pruss offers a sharper image. Picture an infinite line of geometry textbooks. Each was copied from an earlier edition stretching back forever. Each book’s existence is explained by the one before it. Yet the obvious question remains: Why are there any geometry books at all? Why not no books? Why not nothing?

Explaining each link in a chain doesn’t explain the chain itself.

The entire sequence of contingent things still demands a foundation, something that holds up the whole structure of reality without collapsing into the same problem.

From Contingency to Necessity

If anything contingent exists, and it self-evidently does, then its ultimate explanation cannot also be contingent. Otherwise, everything would hang on something else.

So the ultimate explanation must be:

• Necessary: it cannot fail to exist.
• Self-existent: it has its reason within itself.
• The ground of all else.

This is not optional; it’s where reasoning itself forces us.

What Kind of Reality Could That Be?

A. Not Material

Matter is composed, changeable, dependent. What has parts can fall apart: it is, by its nature, contingent.

So the necessary foundation of reality cannot be physical. It must transcend space, time, and the shifting dance of matter and energy.

In short, it must be immaterial and timeless.

B. Eternal Cause, Finite Effect

Could this foundation be an eternal law? No, for an eternal mechanical cause would yield an eternal effect. If a law eternally dictates “0°C”, water is eternally frozen. But the universe is not eternal in that way. It’s contingent, dynamic, a story unfolding.

That points not to a mechanical cause, but to a personal one. A mind can freely will to create at one moment rather than another. The only kind of reality that can suspend effect until it chooses is agency. And agency belongs to mind.

“Who Made God?”

This is the classic comeback, misguided but understandable.

The argument doesn’t say everything needs a cause. It says everything contingent needs an explanation.

There are two ways to explain a thing:

• Externally, like a painting explained by its painter.
• Internally, like a mathematical truth that holds by its very nature.

A necessary being falls in the second category: it exists because nonexistence is impossible for it. Asking “Who created the necessary being?” is like asking “Who is the bachelor’s wife?” The question self-destructs.

The Final Choice

When the dust settles, every worldview faces the same fork in the road:

Option 1 — Rational Foundation:
Reality is grounded in a necessary, self-existent, immaterial Mind.

Option 2 — Brute Fact:
Reality has no explanation. It simply is.

But the second view is, in the end, intellectual surrender. It dissolves the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the very rule that makes science and logic coherent. It asks us to build the house of reason on arbitrariness.

If the universe is a brute fact, explanation itself is an illusion. The closer you look, the less it has to offer.

Why the Argument Endures

This is why the Leibnizian Contingency Argument, which is what this is, can never die. Science is magnificent at explaining how the universe behaves given that it exists. The contingency argument asks why there is any reality at all: any laws, any matter, any “given”. As such, it does not compete with science. It transcends it.

Why is there something rather than nothing? You can answer it with a foundation, a Necessary Being. Or you can answer it with silence, a “brute fact” with no foundation. And the latter answer is rapidly losing traction even among modern sceptics.

Either way, you can’t pretend the question isn’t there. It is the towering question your mind was built to ask the moment it discovers that none of this had to be.