In the CS Monitor‘s book of review of Jim Holt’s Does the Universe Exist?, Troy Jollimore discusses the nature of the universe and the bizarre fact that most scientists and philosophers seem to assume that we have to prove how the universe appeared, as if what existed before the universe – if ever we can say something existed before the universe – was the “default state of affairs.”

He says:

Holt’s objection to the brute-fact view, then – the view, that is, that the existence of the universe as a whole has no explanation, most likely because it has simply always been around – depends on the questionable view that the existence of the universe requires an explanation: the idea that it is somehow surprising that the universe should exist, and that its nonexistence was more reasonable or more likely.

That frankly strikes me as absurd. Why would we assume this when all any of us have ever known is existence? Jollimore notes that Holt includes many scientists and philosophers who also believe this, but one, the philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum, apparently does not agree with this view. Jollimore quotes Holt as saying Grunbaum “finds the existence of the world utterly unastonishing. And he is utterly convinced that it is rational for him to be unastonished.”I am also utterly convinced it is rational to be unastonished, at least in the sense of the existence of the universe. (I reserve the right to be astonished by the beauty of the universe.)

According to Jollimore, Holt summarizes the view of Grunbaum thus:

Those who profess puzzlement at the existence of a world like ours – one teeming with life and stars and consciousness and dark matter and all kinds of stuff we haven’t even discovered yet – seem to have an intellectual prejudice, one that favors the Null World. Nothingness is the natural state of affairs, they implicitly believe, the ontological default option. It is only deviations from nothingness that are mysterious, that require an explanation.

Jollimore argues that Grunbaum believes the belief in the null void is a “metaphysical prejudice” and I couldn’t agree more. I would argue – and I have argued elsewhere about other things – that most misunderstandings about the nature of the universe and most of the arguments in favour of religion are based on such metaphysical prejudices. Western philosophy (and likely most Eastern philosophy) is built on such metaphysical prejudices that we take for granted because nobody has bothered to challenge assumptions made by a bunch of Greeks thousands of years ago.

Jollimore concludes:

There is no reason to think that an empty universe is any more likely to exist than one that is full of stuff. Indeed, the way we find out what is probable, and what is reasonable to expect, is by looking at how things are – and when we look at how things are, what we find is most decisively not an empty universe!…the existence of stuff, far from being surprising and standing in need of an explanation, is entirely unsurprising. It’s the status quo.

I am not trying to suggest that we stop wondering about the nature of the universe or the reason(s) for it, but I am suggesting that it might be fruitless. And I strongly support the idea that the universe should be accepted as the reality and the norm, and that some unknown thing that may or may not have existed before or outside of the universe should not be assumed to be anything (including empty) otherwise we are bound to make logical errors when trying to figure out what exactly it is we appeared within.