Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story

By Jim Holt
2013
320 pages / 11 hours and 47 minutes
Nonfiction

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Let us begin with a tiny little question: why does the world exist? What if I told you that you could find out almost everything you need to know about this question in fewer than 300 pages? Do I have any buyers? When Jim Holt published Why Does the World Exist?, the New York Times Book Review chose it as one of the five best nonfiction books of that year, and is absolutely deserving.

Holt takes on that most fundamental of all philosophical questions – why is there something rather than nothing? – and elegantly takes us on a journey through the philosophical, religious, and scientific attempts to answer this question. What is not to love about a book that summarizes Heidegger’s Being and Time (for those of you not familiar with it, it might be the most unreadable philosophical tome ever written) as “much ado about nothingness.” Okay, it is a philosophical joke and I will move on.

The question of why there is something rather than nothing is actually a modern one. No one seems particularly bothered by the specter of nonbeing until the 18th century. Though Heidegger is easy to make fun of, as I did earlier, he is the philosopher who drives us to amazement at the fact there is anything at all rather than nothing.

Of course the scientific minded among us are quick to jump to the big bang theory as the explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. But the more one thinks about this, the more untenable the explanation is. Even if you buy the big bang, what is it that, well, banged? If there was no space or time prior to this, how did it happen at all?

So Holt goes searching for cosmologists to offer answers to this most fundamental mystery. And while the reading isn’t always exactly easy, it is actually a lot of fun. Holt is excellent company and he talks to some of the most brilliant, creative, and entertaining minds of our time.

I have read enough science fiction to be vaguely familiar with some of the theories. For instance, almost everyone has seen a movie, watched a television show, or read a story that involved parallel dimensions. But there are actually many perfectly sane scientists who think the idea of multiverses is a perfectly plausible theory. There are those who think that only mathematical entities are real. Or maybe the universe is an extension of human consciousness. Is the universe somehow subjective?

In this brief review I cannot do justice to all of the theories in this book, but let me just make a suggestion as to why preachers should read it. In a world where traditional Christian cosmology is often depicted as a form of silly superstition, it seems as if other theories sometimes get a free pass. But this book shows that there is no clear scientific account of why there is something rather than nothing and why you should probably not expect one anytime soon.

And that’s not nothing.