Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (25 page)

Perhaps, I suggested to him, it might help to think of the matter the other way around. Even if an abstract need for goodness did not in itself provide a very compelling reason for a cosmos to exist, it at least provided
some
reason. And in the absence of a countervailing reason—a reason that would oppose the existence of the world—goodness alone might be enough to secure the victory of Being over Nothingness. From a physical point of view, after all, the universe doesn’t seem to cost anything: its total energy, when the negative gravitational energy is balanced against the positive energy locked up in matter, is zero.

Leslie welcomed this reasoning. “In the absence of a nihilistic force fighting the existence of things,” he said, “
any
valid reason for their existence would tend to bring about their realization. You might dream up a sort of demon that was opposing the existence of things. But then, I ask, where did that demon come from?”

What about Heidegger, though? Didn’t he believe in an abstract annihilating force? The Nothing that “noths”?

“Maybe he did, but I don’t,” Leslie replied. “If you actually read Heidegger, he’s very obscure on the question of explaining existence. But he’s been interpreted by the theologian Hans Küng as holding that the word ‘God’ is just a label for a creative ethical principle that’s producing the world. So Heidegger may well be in the Plato-Leslie camp!”

Leslie himself, for all his theologically flavored talk of “divine minds,” had little sympathy for the traditional concept of God. “If my view is true,” he said, “what you are stuck with is an infinite number of infinite minds, each of which knows absolutely everything worth knowing. You can call each one of them ‘God’ if you want, or you could say that God was the entire infinite collection. Or you could even say that God was simply the abstract principle behind them all.”

I recalled an observation that the orthodox Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne had made when I talked to him in Oxford. God can’t be an abstract principle, Swinburne had insisted, because an abstract principle cannot suffer. And, when we suffer in a good cause, our creator has an obligation to suffer along with us, the way a parent has an obligation to suffer along with a child. The world would be a less good place if it weren’t created by a God who shared our suffering—so Swinburne had claimed. And an abstract principle of goodness can’t do that.

“Hmm,” said Leslie very slowly. “That sounds like an argument for the existence of a Supreme Masochist. I find it hard to swallow
the notion
that the world is
improved
by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it’s all better.”

Perhaps Leslie was more a pantheist then, in the style of Spinoza. Spinoza’s God was not a personal agent, like the traditional deity of Judeo-Christianity. Rather, Spinoza equated God to an infinite and self-subsistent substance that encompassed all of nature.

“A lot of people thought Spinoza wasn’t talking about God at all,” Leslie said. “They called him an atheist. And if you want to call me an atheist, that’s fine by me. Words like ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’ and ‘God,’ they’ve moved around so much that they’re practically meaningless. Who really cares? I do consider myself a Spinozist, however, for two reasons. First, I think Spinoza was right that we’re all tiny regions in an infinite mind. And I agree with him that the material world, the world described by science, is a pattern of divine thought. But I also think that Spinoza himself was really a Platonist. That’s not the standard view, of course. In his
Ethics
, Spinoza argues that the world exists as a matter of logical necessity. But the
Ethics
was not Spinoza’s best book. His best book was an earlier one,
A Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being
. And there Spinoza pretty clearly runs the view that it is
value
that is creating everything—that the world exists because it’s
good
that it should. When he got to
Ethics
, he wanted to prove everything in geometrical fashion, so he gave what looks like a logical proof, and not a very convincing one, that there must be an infinite substance. Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.”

Whether Platonic or Spinozistic, Leslie’s view of reality had a certain beauty about it, I thought: the beauty of an ontological pipe dream. Yet, for all the rigor of his arguments—and he was never at a loss for an argument to rebut any objection—could his axiarchism (value rules!) really be taken seriously as the ultimate explanation for all existence?

As I was to discover, many thinkers have taken it quite seriously. Among them was the late Oxford philosopher (and staunch atheist) John Mackie. In his powerful book-length case against the existence of God,
The Miracle of Theism
, Mackie devoted an entire chapter, titled “Replacements for God,” to Leslie’s axiarchism. “The notion that the mere ethical
need
for something could
on its own
call that item into existence, without the operation of any person or mind that was aware of this need and acted so as to fulfil it, is, no doubt, initially strange and paradoxical,” Mackie wrote. “Yet in it lies also the great strength of extreme axiarchism.” Leslie’s theory, he went on to say, “offers the only possible answer to the question which underlies all forms of the cosmological argument, the question ‘Why is there anything at all?’ or ‘Why should there be any world rather than none?’ ”

Obviously, Mackie observed, no explanation in terms of a “first cause” could answer the ultimate question of existence, for such an explanation would merely raise the further question of why that first cause—whether it be God, an unstable chunk of false vacuum, or some other still more exotic entity—itself existed. But Leslie’s explanation for the existence of the world did not have this defect, Mackie observed. The objective need for goodness that he posits is not a cause. It is rather a
fact
, a necessary fact, one that does not call for any further explanation. Goodness is not an agent or a mechanism that creates something out of nothing. It is a
reason
for there being a world rather than nothingness. In the end, though, Mackie remained skeptical of Leslie’s axiarchism. He was not convinced that “something’s being valuable can in itself tend to bring that thing into existence.”

And neither was I. Metaphysics is all very nice, I said to Leslie, but what hard evidence did he have for his extraordinarily speculative claim about the existence of the world?

He reacted with barely disguised exasperation: “I’m always a little astonished when people say, ‘Look, there’s no evidence for your view.’ Well, I say, there’s one rather striking piece of evidence:
the fact that there is a world rather than just a blank
. Why do they discount this? The sheer existence of something rather than nothing simply cries out for explanation. And where are the competitors to my Platonic theory?”

Well, he had a point there. So far, at least, none of the other solutions I had heard proposed—those based on quantum cosmology, or on mathematical necessity, or on God—had held up. At this point, Platonic goodness appeared to be the only cosmic suspect out there.

Still, there seemed to be something circular about Leslie’s use of evidence. The world was brought into existence by goodness. And how do we know that goodness can bring a world into existence? Because the world exists! If axiarchism was to amount to more than an empty tautology, Leslie was going to have to produce some additional evidence in its favor—something beyond the sheer existence of the world.

And so he did.

“A further bit of evidence is that the world is full of orderly patterns,” he said. “Why does the universe obey causal laws? And why laws of such simplicity, rather than vastly more complex ones? In the last century, philosophers of science have doubted whether the causal orderliness of the universe could ever be explained. But it does seem to
need
an explanation. After all, order is improbable, not to be expected. There are so many more ways for a world to be a complete mess than to be nice and orderly. So why do elementary particles perform their mathematically elegant pirouettes? For a Platonist like me, such regularities are accounted for in the same manner that the presence of something rather than nothing is accounted for—by their ethical requiredness.”

“Causal orderliness” seemed to be more of an aesthetic value than an ethical one, I noted.

“I’ve never been able to see the difference between the two,” Leslie said. “All value is about what
ought to exist
. By the way, there’s a third bit of evidence for my Platonic theory: the fact that the fundamental constants of nature are fine-tuned for intelligent life.”

But, I objected, couldn’t this appearance of cosmic fine-tuning be explained by science? Suppose, as physicists like Steven Weinberg believe, our universe is but one region of a multiverse. Suppose further that the constants of nature take different values in different regions of this multiverse. Then, by the anthropic principle, isn’t it to be expected that we should find ourselves in a region where those constants are favorable to the evolution of beings like us? No need for Plato when you have a multiverse!

“There are a couple of ways I can react to that,” Leslie said. “The fact that the multiverse hypothesis is an alternative to the axiarchic hypothesis doesn’t mean that
both
of them can’t be strengthened by evidence of fine-tuning. Let me tell you a little parable, the parable of the vanished treasure. You’re on a desert island, and you’ve buried a treasure chest there. The only other people on the island are Smith and Jones. One day you go to the place where you buried the treasure chest, and you try to dig it up. And it’s not there! Now, the fact that it’s not there increases the probability that Jones is a thief, but it also increases the probability of the competing hypothesis that Smith is a thief. In the same way, the discovery of cosmic fine-tuning strengthens the probability that the multiverse hypothesis is correct, but it also strengthens the probability that my axiarchic hypothesis is correct.”

He went on to make a far more subtle point—a point that, as far as I could tell, was entirely original: the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t really solve the mystery of fine-tuning at all.

“Notice,” Leslie said, “that for life to evolve in the universe, each of the cosmic constants needs to be fine-tuned in a particular way
for many different reasons at once
. The strength of the electromagnetic force, for example, has to be in a particular narrow range,
first
, so matter would be distinguished from radiation and you have something to make living beings out of;
second
, so that all quarks wouldn’t turn into leptons, meaning there never would have been any atoms;
third
, so that protons wouldn’t decay so quickly that there’d soon be no atoms remaining, let alone organisms to survive the radiation produced by the decay;
fourth
, for protons not to repel one another so strongly that there’d be no such thing as chemistry, and hence no chemically-based beings like us.”

He continued with a
fifth
, a
sixth
, a
seventh
, and an
eighth
reason, each of greater technical complexity.

“Now,” Leslie said, having concluded the litany, “how is it that one and the same twiddling of the cosmic knob for the strength of the electromagnetic force should satisfy so many requirements? This doesn’t seem to be a problem that can be solved by the multiverse model. The multiverse model only says that the strength of the electromagnetic force varies by chance from universe to universe. But for even a
single
life-permitting strength to be possible, the fundamental laws of physics themselves have to be
just so
. In other words, those laws—which are, by the way, supposed to be the same all across the multiverse—must have
the potential for intelligent life built into them
. Which is precisely why they would be the sort of laws that an infinite mind might find it interesting to contemplate.”

It was an awfully tidy package, Leslie’s axiarchism. Whatever you thought of its mind-bending assumptions—the Platonic reality of goodness, the creative efficacy of value—you had to admire its completeness and coherence as a speculative construction. And I did admire it. But I wasn’t quite
moved
by it. It didn’t quite speak to my existential depths. It didn’t appease my hunger for ultimate explanation. In fact, I wondered how deeply Leslie himself was invested in it, emotionally speaking. Did he feel anything like a quasi-religious attachment to his theory?

“Um … uh … um … ,” he stammered, sounding almost pained. “I feel constantly
embarrassed
by the idea that I ought to be attracted to my system because, well, wouldn’t it be lovely if it were true. That is just pie in the sky, and I very much dislike it. I don’t have anything like
faith
in my Platonic creation story. I certainly haven’t
proved
its truth. Almost nothing of philosophical interest strikes me as being provable. I’d say my confidence in it is just a little over 50 percent. A lot of the time, I feel that the universe just happens to exist and that’s it.”

Was the possibility that the world might exist for no reason whatever disturbing to him?

“Yes,” he replied, “it is—on an intellectual level, at least.”

Still, I added, he must find it gratifying that a significant minority of other philosophers have come around to his view.

“Or to other views that are equally crazy,” he said.

WAS LESLIE’S AXIARCHISM
the long-sought resolution to the mystery of existence? Had the answer to the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
been available virtually from the beginning of Western thought, in the form of Plato’s vision of the Good? If so, why did so many subsequent thinkers—Leibniz, William James, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Stephen Hawking, to name a few—fail to see it? Were they all prisoners in Plato’s cave?