WHY IS THERE BEING RATHER THAN NOTHING? THE BIG BANG DOESN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION.

WHY IS THERE BEING RATHER THAN NOTHING? THE BIG BANG DOESN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION. As I have said, Mary Jane does the metaphysics and philosophy in our household. There are questions in philosophy that I gave up on a long time ago. One of them is: why is there being rather than nothing? I was heartened to see this review by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate of Jim Holt’s book which takes on the question: WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST? (link via Arts and Letters Daily). My first post on this blog was about my wonder at learning that there is evidence of the Big Bang in our night skies in the form of radio static. Rosenbaum and Holt both argue that the Big Bang and the related “inflationary universe” theory have nothing to do with the question: why there is being? Rosenbaum and Holt both quote Andrei Linde, a proponent of the inflationary universe theory: “I found that the only thing needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred thousandth of a gram of matter…. That’s enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into billions and billions of galaxies we see around us….” Rosenbaum and Holt agree that, as Rosenbaum puts it, “the ‘inflationary universe theory’ “doesn’t really explain how something came from nothing, but how something really, really big came from something really, really small.”