Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (12 page)

Could anything be more of an affront to the Principle of Sufficient Reason than a self-composing poem or a self-conjuring watch? Could anything be less self-explanatory than an Oscillating Universe, eternally bellowing in and out like some cosmic accordion, or an Inflationary Multiverse, endlessly frothing away like a just-uncorked bottle of Veuve Clicquot? Why such an absurdly busy cosmos? Why
any
cosmos at all, whether finite or infinite?

Why not nothing?

Interlude

Night Thoughts at the Café de Flore

“
E
t pour vous, monsieur? Du café? Une infusion?
”

The waiter posed the question in a tone of weary impatience. It was, after all, nearly closing time at the Café de Flore, on a late-winter night in Paris. The evening had been a hefty one, and I felt I needed something more fortifying than the options proposed. My companion, an aging but handsome voluptuary named Jimmy Douglas, suggested, as an alternative, a strongly alcoholic herbal concoction I had never heard of. It would, he insisted, buck up my liver.

It certainly seemed to have worked for him. Despite a life of riotous excess and free indulgence of his voracious and irregular appetites, Jimmy had remained preternaturally youthful. Friends called him Dorian Gray. (It perhaps helped that, as an heir to the Quaker Oats fortune, he did not have to toil for a living.) In the 1950s, he was the paramour of Barbara “poor little rich girl” Hutton, taking up with her after her fifty-three-day marriage to the international playboy/diplomat/polo-star Porfirio Rubirosa (a tough act to follow). In the 1960s, Jimmy threw a joint party for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in his grand apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which adjoined that of a former French prime minister. Now, decades later, he was regaling me with stories of Baron Gottfried von Cramm and Nancy Mitford and the Aga Khan, and urging me to decamp from New York to Paris, where, he claimed, the nightclubs were better and the bacterial flora kept one eternally young.

Sipping the bracingly pungent herbal stuff the waiter had brought me, I looked around the Flore. At that hour, the café was hardly the “fullness of being” described by Sartre. At a table in the back I spotted Karl Lagerfeld, with his characteristic ponytail, dark glasses, and high white collar, in hushed conversation with one of his muses, who was wearing what looked like black lipstick. Other than that, the place was pretty much empty:
le Néant
.

But then there was a noisy burst of activity. A woman of a certain age, evidently an old friend of Jimmy’s, breezed through the front door, accompanied by a pair of what appeared to be Cuban gigolos dressed in shell suits. Giggling and grinding their teeth, this trio sat down with us and began to jabber away. The woman’s face was a sallow mask of leathery jollity, and she talked in a low croak that put me in mind of Jeanne Moreau. I listened with a kind of ironic inattention, but my spirits began to flag.

It seemed a good time to leave.

The late-night air was chill and damp. As I started to walk back to my hotel, I glanced across the deserted square at the Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, built a thousand years ago. There, in one of the side chapels, reposed the body of Descartes. (Well, most of it, anyway—the whereabouts of his skull and right forefinger is a mystery.)

I wondered if Sartre, scribbling inside the Café de Flore, used to feel the Cartesian presence from across the square. And Descartes wasn’t the only philosophical specter lurking about. Directly across the Boulevard Saint-Germain from the café is the rue Gozlin, which runs for a single block. It is the last vestige of the rue Sainte-Marguérite, a medieval street that was absorbed into the boulevard during Baron Haussmann’s modernization of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. There, some centuries ago, stood the Hôtel des Romains, where Leibniz lived for two of the very happy four years of his life he spent in Paris.

What was Leibniz doing in Paris? As usual with him, intrigue lay behind his visit. He had come to the French capital in 1672 on a secret diplomatic mission to persuade Louis XIV to invade infidel Egypt rather than Christian Germany. The mission was not a success. “As to the project of Holy War,” the Sun King was said to have politely responded to Leibniz, “you know that since the days of Louis the Pious such expeditions have gone out of fashion.” (In the event, France invaded Holland.)

But Leibniz’s time in Paris was hardly wasted. It was while staying in the Hôtel des Romains, in his thirtieth year—something of an
annus mirabilis
for him—that he invented the calculus (including the
dx
notation and the elongated “S” symbol for the integral that are in universal use today). And it was at that hotel, in his room overlooking the present site of the Café de Flore, that Leibniz began to lay the foundations for his later metaphysical philosophy, which would culminate with the posing of the deepest of all questions:
Why is there something rather than nothing?

Both Leibniz and Descartes, in their rationalist way, confronted the mystery of existence. Both decided that the one sure ontological foundation for a contingent world like ours was an entity that carried within itself the logical guarantee of its own existence. Such an entity, they held, could only be God.

Like his philosophical forebears, Sartre too was a rationalist. Unlike them, he thought that the very idea of God was shot through with contradictions. Either a being has consciousness or it does not. If it does, it is
pour soi
(“for itself”), an activity rather than a thing, a “wind blowing from nowhere toward the world.” If it does not have consciousness, it is
en soi
(“in itself”), an object fixed and complete. God, were such a being to exist, would have to be both
pour soi
and
en soi
: both conscious and complete in himself. And that, submitted Sartre, is an impossibility. Still, this God-like combination of fluidity and fixity is one we humans cannot help aspiring to. Our desire to be radically free and yet absolutely secure in our identities is, for Sartre, nothing less than a desire to be God. It is
mauvaise foi
(“bad faith”), a sort of original sin. It was what, according to Sartre, my waiter at the Café de Flore was displaying. “
His movement is
quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid… . He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitious for the order of the customer… . He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at
being
a waiter in a café.” But a consciousness can never have an essence, like waiterhood or divinity. Thus God is a conceptual absurdity. And man is “a useless passion.”

Such Sartrean reflections engrossed me as I set out on my nocturnal walk home—past the elegantly illumined Théâtre de l’Odéon, around the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg, and then toward my hotel in Montparnasse—which was not far, as it happened, from the cemetery where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are buried (Susan Sontag too). The quiet that comes over Paris in the small hours—on some streets you can even hear the echo of your footfall, which is unthinkable in New York—made my thoughts seem clear and compelling and true.

The next morning, however, a metaphysical fog had descended on me again. I wondered whether there wasn’t something unwholesome about the Café de Flore. Sartre’s paradoxes seemed too easy to me, his ontological despair slightly off key. After all, Leibniz and Descartes were far greater philosophers than he ever was. And both of them were convinced that the world of contingent being—the one Sartre found so gooey and absurd, so permeated with nothingness—must rest on a secure and necessary ontological foundation.

There must be serious thinkers who still believed this. But I wasn’t going to find them easily on the Left Bank, not, at least, in this century. Better to look for enlightenment in a more cloistral, medieval setting. So, after grabbing a
tartine et café crème
at the bar of Le Select, I hauled my bags onto the Métro and headed to the Gare du Nord, there to catch the Eurostar train to London. Arriving at Waterloo Station a few hours later, I caught the tube to Paddington, where I hopped on a local train to Oxford, debouching from the station into that city of dreaming spires well in advance of cocktail hour.

“I HAVE BEEN
here before,” I thought to myself (rather derivatively) as I made my way down Oxford’s High Street. And I had—for the wedding of a friend just a few months earlier. Now it was midwinter, Hilary Term, and the clear light of the late afternoon leant an apricot glow to the Cotswold sandstone of Oxford’s colleges. Bells rang out over the gables, cupolas, and finials. Students hurried to and fro through the Gothic labyrinth of passageways, cloisters, alleys, and quadrangles. All around me I felt the soft breath of a thousand years of learning.

So much for the bogus poetry. Where was the next clue to the mystery of the world’s existence?

I had a pretty good idea. Years ago, in a stack of galleys I had been sent to review, one slim volume stood out. Its title,
Is There a God?
, was not in itself remarkable. Books with titles like that are a dime a dozen. What struck me were the credentials of the author, whose name was Richard Swinburne. He was a philosopher of religion, a practitioner of what is called “natural theology.” But he was also a philosopher of science, the author of rigorous treatises on space, time, and causality. And he was clearly a thinker alert to the mystery of existence. “It is extraordinary that there should exist anything at all,” I read on the back cover of the volume. “Surely the most natural state of affairs is simply nothing: no universe, no God, nothing. But there is something. And so many things. Maybe chance could have thrown up the odd electron. But
so
many particles!” What could account for the existence of such a rich and plenitudinous universe? And what could account for its many surprising features—notably its spatial and temporal order, its fine-tuned fostering of life and consciousness, its suitability as a theater for human action? “There is a complexity, particularity, and finitude about the universe that cries out for explanation,” he wrote.

The simplest hypothesis that explains the existence of such a world is the hypothesis that God is behind it—that was Swinburne’s conclusion. Admittedly, it was not a very original one. What was original was Swinburne’s methodology. He did not pretend to
prove
God’s existence by means of an abstract logical deduction, in the manner of Anselm, Aquinas, or Descartes. Instead, he used modern scientific reasoning. He endeavored to show that the God hypothesis was at least probable, more probable than its negation, and hence that belief in God was rational. “
The very same criteria
which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence,” Swinburne wrote. Each step in his case was painstakingly justified by appeal to the canons of inductive logic. He was especially expert in the use of “Bayes’s theorem,” a mathematical formula that describes how new evidence raises or lowers the probability of a hypothesis. Using Bayesian confirmation theory, Swinburne sought to show that on the total evidence—which includes not just the existence of the universe, but also its lawfulness, the patterns of its history, and even the presence of evil within it—it was more likely than not that there is a God. Intellectually, this struck me as a bravura performance. Yet I knew that it did not strike everyone that way. Swinburne’s fellow philosopher of science, Adolf Grünbaum, had been withering in his scorn for Swinburne’s pro-theist case, calling it “a very poor job.” Swinburne’s reasoning in behalf of theism was “unsound” and “defective,” Grünbaum had told me, full of “red herrings” and “strawmen.” Over the years, Swinburne and Grünbaum have tussled repeatedly in forums like the
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
. When I went back and read their exchanges, it was like witnessing a fiendishly intricate metaphysical Ping-Pong match. “
Why, oh why
,” Grünbaum irritably asked at one point, “does Swinburne reason with Leibniz that even the bare of existence of the universe imperatively calls for a ‘cause acting from outside’?”

Richard Dawkins was also skeptical, to say the least. In
The God Delusion
, Dawkins mocked Swinburne’s claim that the God hypothesis possesses the scientific virtue of simplicity, calling his reasoning “
a breathtaking piece
of intellectual chutzpah.” How, Dawkins asked, could a being who created and sustained a complex universe like our own, a being supposedly capable of monitoring the thoughts of all his creatures and answering their prayers (“Such bandwidth!”), be
simple
? As for Swinburne’s argument that the existence of an omnipotent and infinitely loving God could be squared with a world containing evil and suffering, Dawkins deemed it “
beyond satire
.” He recalled a televised discussion in which Swinburne (in Dawkins’s words) “attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble”—at which point a fellow panelist, the Cambridge chemist and arch anti-theist Peter Atkins, growled at Swinburne, “
May you rot
in hell.”

A man capable of producing such bold reasoning about the cosmos, and of evoking such acidulated reactions among his foes, was clearly a man worth talking to. Swinburne had recently retired from Oxford, where he had been the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion and a fellow of Oriel College. When I managed to get in touch with him, he was the soul of kindness, inviting me to come over to his residence in North Oxford for tea and a chat.

So the next afternoon I left my hotel on the High Street, made my way down Queens Lane, passed under the Bridge of Sighs and by the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, and emerged finally onto the broad Woodstock Road, which I followed for a mile or two to North Oxford. I chanced to notice an Eastern Orthodox Church as I turned off the main road to seek the address Swinburne had given me, which proved to be that of a 1950s modernist apartment block bordered by a row of handsome Edwardian brick houses. The still winter air of the neighborhood was improbably rich with birdsong. It seemed a good portent.