I am an atheist, and I hear a lot about existence v. non-existence a lot. And one thing that has been really bothering me is, how can things exist? How is it possible for us, for anything, to actually exist in a tangible sense? I actually heard once that matter exists because there is no other alternative. What is the reasoning behind that, and what other answers are out there?
logicel
Victor Stenger has put it very nicely:
How do we define nothing? What are its properties? If it has properties, doesn’t that make it something?
and
As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”
Read the rest of his article here.
That anything can exist, especially humans, with their uncanny abilities like consciousness, can appear to be counter-intuitive. I wonder often why this rather odd question is considered so intriguing. Is it because of our conscious awareness that we are mortal, that we came out of nothing so to speak and will return to that state, causes us to focus on the so-called meaningfulness and strained plausibility of nothing?
SmartLX
Try the law of conservation of matter and energy.
As far as we know, matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted back and forth. Since matter exists now, the simplest logical conclusion is that it has always existed in some form, and always will. Further, there is no known way for it to have ever not existed. Perhaps that’s the sense in which there’s no alternative to its existence; since it’s here, there’s no way to get rid of it.
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