How come there’s anything at all?

My last entry ended with some fundamental questions, that keep recurring in my thoughts and spilling over into this blog. How come there’s anything at all? What’s the point of our striving so hard in our lives? What are we trying to achieve? Are we really just automatons that serve to propagate the genes that we carry?

 

Of these questions, I find the first the most difficult to answer. How come there’s anything at all? I see two distinct possibilities. One is that there was once nothing, and suddenly things sprang into existence. The other is that things (matter, energy, whatever) have always existed. Come to think of it, there’s a third possibility, and this is a mixture of the first two. It’s a near certainty, according to scientists, that matter and energy did, actually "spring" into existence with the Big Bang around 13 billion years ago. Here, space and time came into existence as well, and you could therefore conclude that things have been around ever since time existed, technically forever. The concept "before the Big Bang" does not make any sense, because since time only came into being with the Big Bang, there could not have been any "before".

 

I’m not entirely happy with this explanation. It’s just a description of the situation. An infinitely cycling universe – big bang, expansion followed by contraction, a big crunch and another big bang – doesn’t solve anything either. It doesn’t explain where all the matter/energy come from, and I cannot bring myself to accept that something can come out of absolutely nothing. There has to be an overriding structure that gave rise to all we see around us. To my mind this enigma is the most compelling pointer to a creator that/who is still beyond our understanding. Still but not necessarily forever beyond our understanding. Throughout the centuries we have learned so much. We have crept closer to total understanding, and even if we were never to actually reach that particular stage, nothing should keep us from unravelling evermore the mysteries of creation.

 

Wow. That should be enough speculation for one night. I’ll deal with more fundamental questions another time. Good night.