Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s meant to be the great unanswerable question. It’s certainly a poser. It would have been simpler if there’d been nothing: there wouldn’t be anything to explain.
Some people think that if we knew more, we’d see that there couldn’t have been nothing. That wouldn’t surprise me. Others go further: they think we’d see that there couldn’t have been anything other than just what there is: this very universe, containing just the kind of stuff and laws of nature it does contain. That wouldn’t surprise me either, nor – I suspect – Einstein: “What really interests me,” he said, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” (Einstein’s God is a metaphorical device: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses.”)
