Philosophy This is a question for reasoning, not for experiment.
Try this at the kitchen table. Close your eyes and imagine nothing. Not black space, because space is something. Not silence, because silence needs ears. No time, no laws, no numbers, no you. Most people find they can’t do it. The mind keeps putting something back.
Yet here we are: 2 trillion galaxies, a planet with weather, and a person reading a sentence about nothing. The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz called it “the first question we have a right to ask”. Children ask it at bedtime. Physicists ask it in lecture halls. Here are the best answers on several sides, in their own words. The last step is yours.
“Or were they created out of naught? Or are they the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay, but they are sure of nothing!”
Qur'an 52:35–36 · Pickthall (1930)
Surah at-Tur (The Mount) is an early Makkan chapter. Here the Qur'an does not offer a formula; it asks a run of questions and leaves the listener to answer them. The Torah, far older, opens with a beginning of its own: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, JPS 1917).
What science shows, and where it stops
Modern cosmology is one of humanity’s great achievements. Three lines of evidence point to a universe that was once very hot and dense and has been expanding for about 13.8 billion years: galaxies moving apart (worked out by the Belgian priest-physicist Georges Lemaître in 1927 and by Edwin Hubble in 1929), the faint afterglow of the early universe called the cosmic microwave background (found in 1965 and mapped in fine detail by ESA’s Planck satellite), and the amounts of hydrogen and helium left over from the first few minutes.
But the Big Bang model describes how the universe changed from an early state. It does not, by itself, say there was a first moment, and it does not say why there was a universe to change. Physicists honestly disagree about what happened at or before the start. Some models have a beginning; others have a universe with no edge in time, or one that bounces, or one that sits inside a larger multiverse. None of these is confirmed.
In 2012 the physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a bestseller, A Universe from Nothing, arguing that quantum physics can explain how a universe could appear from nothing. The philosopher of physics David Albert replied in the New York Times that Krauss’s “nothing” is a quantum field with laws, which is already something. Where do the fields and laws come from? Krauss’s fellow physicist Sean Carroll, himself an atheist, has said that physics cannot by its own methods say why there is a universe at all.
That is why this is called a question of philosophy rather than science. Science explains one physical state by an earlier one, under laws. The question “why is there anything?” asks about the whole chain, laws included. Even physicists who think it has no answer agree that physics alone doesn’t settle it.
Here is a fact worth pausing on: one of the most famous arguments that the universe had a beginning was made by a Muslim, al-Ghazali, in eleventh-century Baghdad. His style of argument, the kalam, was revived by Christian philosophers in the twentieth century and is still debated in philosophy journals today.
The arguments, fairly
Contingency (Ibn Sina, about 1000 CE, later Aquinas and Leibniz): everything we meet could have failed to exist. Things that could have failed to exist need an explanation outside themselves. A chain of such explanations, however long, still needs one; so it ends in something that exists by its own nature, a Necessary Being. Maimonides set out his own version of it in The Guide for the Perplexed (II:1). He argued that a world of things that might not have existed points to One whose existence is necessary.
The kalam (al-Ghazali, later William Lane Craig): whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; so the universe has a cause, which must be beyond space and time.
Creation from nothing (Saadia Gaon, Baghdad, 933 CE): in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, the great Jewish scholar argued that the world is finite, made of parts and always changing. So, he reasoned, it cannot have made itself, and must have been brought into being from nothing.
The causal step may not apply. “Everything that begins has a cause” comes from experience inside the universe. It may not hold for the universe itself, and at the quantum level events seem to happen without a definite cause.
The universe may be the stopping point. If something can exist without needing an explanation, why not the universe, or its laws? Bertrand Russell said in his 1948 BBC debate with Frederick Copleston that the universe is “just there, and that’s all”. The philosopher Graham Oppy argues that a necessary first physical state is no worse an answer than a necessary God.
Physics may not need causes at its foundations. Sean Carroll argued in a 2014 debate that a complete model of the universe needs nothing outside it.
Where it stands
This is unresolved. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which surveys the debate, treats both the arguments and the objections as live. Serious thinkers stand on both sides.
What each faith says
Judaism
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Genesis 1:1 · JPS 1917
The Torah opens not with an argument but with a statement: God creates, and the world comes from God’s word. The rabbis taught that the very first letter of Genesis is bet, closed on three sides and open only forwards, as if to say: we can study what came after, but we cannot see behind the beginning (Genesis Rabbah 1:10).
Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, 1138–1204) begins his great code of Jewish law with this sentence: “The foundation of foundations and the pillar of all wisdom is to know that there is a First Being, who brought every existing thing into being” (Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 1:1). He thought philosophy could not prove whether the world had a beginning, and held to creation on the authority of the Torah.
Christianity
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made.”
John 1:1–3 · WEB
Christians speak of creation “out of nothing” (creatio ex nihilo): God did not shape some material that was already there; God gives existence itself. John’s Gospel opens with an echo of Genesis, naming the Word through whom all things were made.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) argued that even an eternal universe would still depend on God for its existence at every moment, the way light depends on a lamp. For Aquinas, creation is not mainly about a first moment long ago; it is about why anything is here now. That is why many Christians are relaxed about whatever physics finds about the beginning. Lemaître himself warned against using the Big Bang as proof of God.
Islam
“The Originator of the heavens and the earth! When He decreeth a thing, He saith unto it only: Be! and it is.”
Qur'an 2:117 · Pickthall (1930)
The Qur’an calls God al-Badi’, the Originator, who brings things into being without a model to copy: “The Originator of the heavens and the earth! When He decreeth a thing, He saith unto it only: Be! and it is.” (2:117, Pickthall). Only God is without beginning; everything else is created.
Muslim philosophers gave the world two of its most influential arguments here. Ibn Sina described God as wajib al-wujud, the One whose existence is necessary, and everything else as possible, needing something beyond itself in order to exist. Al-Ghazali argued that the past cannot be infinite, so the world began. They disagreed with each other, sharply, which is a reminder that reasoning about God has always been a conversation, not a slogan.
Without religion
“I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.”
Bertrand Russell, BBC radio debate with Frederick Copleston, 1948 · original English
Many non-religious people are content to say: we do not know, and that is all right. Bertrand Russell debated Frederick Copleston on BBC radio in 1948. He held that the demand for a cause behind everything is a habit of mind, not a law of reality. For him the universe could simply be there.
Others take the question further. Some physicists hope a complete theory will show that the universe needs nothing outside itself. Lawrence Krauss wrote A Universe from Nothing (2012); critics such as the philosopher David Albert replied that his ‘nothing’ still contained the laws of physics. Agnostics say the question may lie beyond us, and that honest not-knowing beats a borrowed answer. Many humanists would add that the question is no less thrilling without God. You can stand under the stars and feel the strangeness of existing, with no answer at all.
Same and different
All three faiths say the universe is not self-explaining: it exists because God gives it existence, and God alone is uncreated. They share the philosophers too, since Ibn Sina, Maimonides and Aquinas read one another. The differences are about how God creates: Christians speak of the Word, the eternal Son, through whom all things were made, while Jews and Muslims speak of God’s word or command without any distinction of persons. Many non-religious people share the question but not the answer, and hold that the universe, or its laws, may simply be the last fact.
A moment to reflect
- When you try to imagine nothing at all, what do you find yourself putting back?
- Is “the universe just exists” a satisfying stopping point for you, or does it feel like a shrug? Why?
- Does it change anything for you whether the universe had a first moment?
- If physics one day explained the whole history of the universe from the first instant, would the question on this page be answered?
Watch
Closer To Truth puts the question to physicists and philosophers on several sides.
The writer Jim Holt on why the question will not go away, with humour and clarity.
What physicists actually mean by “nothing”, explained carefully.
Sean Carroll gives the strongest short case that physics may need no outside explanation.
Do it together
Give everyone a box and ask them to put “nothing” in it. Then list what is still there: air, light, space, time. Talk about whether real nothing is even imaginable.
Write “God”, “the universe” and “we can’t know” on three cards. Each person stands by the one that feels most reasonable and explains why. Then everyone argues for a card they didn’t choose.
Visit a Dark Sky site (the UK has many, from Exmoor to Galloway) or simply a park after dark. Find the Andromeda galaxy with a free star app: its light left 2.5 million years ago.
Jewish families end the Sabbath on Saturday night with havdalah, ‘separation’. There is a braided candle, a cup of wine, a box of sweet spices and a blessing for the God who separates light from darkness. Ask a Jewish neighbour or a synagogue if you may watch, and talk about beginnings and endings.
Christians in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and many other churches say the Nicene Creed each Sunday: “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen”. Read it together slowly, and ask a Christian what ‘seen and unseen’ means to them.
Go deeper
- Cosmological Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) · article
- Planck and the cosmic microwave background (ESA) · article
- Genesis 1 with commentary (Sefaria) · scripture
- Qur'an 52 (Quran.com) · scripture
- John 1 (Bible Gateway, WEB) · scripture
- Saadya [Saadiah] Gaon (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) · article
- Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed II:1 (Sefaria) · book
- What is humanism? (Humanists UK) · article
Check yourself
Three quick questions. No score, nothing saved.
1. Who called 'why is there something rather than nothing?' the first question we have a right to ask?
2. What did Ibn Sina argue about the things we meet?
3. What kind of question does the page say this is?
Sources (7)
- Universe about 13.8 billion years old: ESA, Planck results
- About 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe: Conselice et al., Astrophysical Journal, 2016; NASA summary
- Albert’s review of Krauss: quantum fields are not nothing: David Albert, New York Times, 23 Mar 2012
- Contingency and kalam arguments and objections; Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Oppy: Reichenbach, Cosmological Argument, SEP
- Carroll: causes not part of fundamental physics vocabulary (2014 debate): Sean Carroll, blog, 24 Feb 2014
- Lemaître’s 1927 expanding-universe paper: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Georges Lemaître
- Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing: SEP, Nothingness
