Why Does the Universe Exist? A Professor's Thought-Provoking Journey

Jim Holt, an American philosopher and journalist, was born into a world where no one asked why the universe exists, and the significance of this question wasn't clear. But one day, he realized it was indeed a profound question: "I vividly recall the moment when the mystery of existence first appeared before me... One day I went to the local college library and glanced at some impressive tomes: Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' and Heidegger's 'Introduction to Metaphysics.' There, in the opening pages of the latter book, under its intriguing title, I found myself confronted with the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' I still remember the shock I felt at the audacity of the question, its clarity, its simple power."

And so begins his book, 'Why Does the World Exist?'

He knows well the believers' answer to this question, but what about the non-believers? How do they bypass this question? This is also discussed at the start of the book: "Suppose you ask non-believers to explain why there's a world rather than nothing at all. Chances are they won't give you a particularly satisfying answer."

Yet, despite the grand ambition, Holt hits a dead end, acknowledging there's no satisfactory answer: "Faced with such arguments, the atheist (non-believer) generally shrugs and says that the world 'just is.' Maybe it exists because it always has, or perhaps it popped into existence suddenly for no reason at all. In either case, its existence is merely a 'brute fact.'"

Thus, throughout the entire book, Jim Holt describes his journey from one intellectual to another, professors and scholars, university presidents and college presidents. No one provided a satisfying answer that explains why and on what grounds he is an atheist.

Here's how a visit to one of the scholars went: "David Deutsch, a brilliant British physicist (born in Haifa), connected quantum theory to computer science, creating the theory of the universal quantum computer capable of simulating every possible reality physically. In his view, such a supreme computer must exist somewhere in the universe, and it is the key to the puzzle of our existence. Deutsch explains that in quantum mechanics, a particle and its antiparticle can spontaneously appear from the void, and our universe is just one among many universes."

Amazing. There's a master plan, and there's a mind that holds the plan, but where did this computer come from? As long as it's physical, we're left with the same question. A small unresolved issue. Although it is entirely possible that there's another central computer elsewhere in the universe that created the computer managing the world, solving the problem...