In his latest contribution to this discussion, Masood asks why I feel that the question “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” is incoherent. It’s because I find it breaks down under either of the common senses of “why” – the causal or the teleological. In each case, the question self-destructs in two ways. Causality presumes a cause – something that made the “anything” happen. Teleology presumes an agent: one cannot have agent-less purpose. In each case, we presume “something”. Now, either we are faced with an “infinite regress” – “why does the cause/agent exist rather than nothing?” – or [my favourite] by invoking some antecedent “thing”, the “nothing” alternative is rendered moot! (Simultaneous annihilation of the antecedent and creation of the consequent feels like a stretch!)
The traditional way to make headway with the question is to constrain the universals (“anything” and “nothing”) to some category, assigning the causal or teleological agents to a different category. (This is the supernatural or religious turn.) Thus, “Why is there a universe rather than nothing? God made the universe, but God is not of the universe: She transcends it”. But this simply pushes the question back – why is there an agent/cause rather than nothing? At this point, most people adopt the device of decreeing that the two categories are causally or teleologically different; that it’s OK for a Prime Mover to be self-caused and eternal but not for everyday stuff. Of course this proposition is arbitrary and entirely unverifiable.
Those who believe that the orginal question must have an answer are pretty much forced into this dualism, of course. For myself, I have no need of that hypothesis; the question is not meaningful to me. I imagine that a psychologist would say that we actually start with the Weltanschauung of our choice/heritage (theist/dualist or atheist/materialist); we then interpret the meaningfulness of the question based upon our stance. Thus a theist believes that there is a Prime Cause, and therefore the anything or nothing question must be coherent. Etcetera.