People insist matter and energy couldn’t exist without a god to create them. Fine. Then what created God? Whatever stands to God as God stands to the universe? Most believers never deal with that question. But turn it around and the atheist has a matching problem: if no god made the universe, how can matter and energy simply have always existed, with no beginning at all?
Here’s what nobody likes to admit. Every answer eventually hits the same wall. Something has to be the stopping point, and whatever it is, it exists without a prior cause. The theist and the atheist aren’t choosing between a brute fact and no brute fact. They’re choosing which brute fact.
The theist posits a self-existent Mind. Theologians call this aseity: God existing from and of Himself, depending on nothing. The naturalist posits a self-existent physical foundation: spacetime, a quantum field, perhaps a multiverse. Neither side escapes an uncaused starting point. That strips away the cheap rhetorical advantage both sides like to claim, the theist accusing the atheist of believing in “something from nothing,” the atheist accusing the theist of inventing a cause out of thin air. Both are standing on the same kind of ground. They just disagree about what’s down there.
The theist’s answer, and its cost
Serious theologians do answer “what created God.” The Kalam argument says whatever begins to exist has a cause, and God never began. Aquinas and Leibniz went further and called God a “necessary being,” something whose nonexistence is impossible, unlike planets and people, which could have failed to exist.
The weakness is obvious once stated. If you’re allowed to declare something uncaused and self-existent, why not grant that status to the universe itself, or whatever underlies it? The answer given is that the universe changes, has parts, and began, while God is simple and unchanging. But that’s a definition doing the work, not a discovery.
And it smuggles in cargo. To turn a brute fact into a God, you have to add consciousness, intention, will, power, and personhood. A self-existent physical reality requires none of that. By the ordinary rule of thumb that the simpler explanation should be preferred, an uncaused universe beats an uncaused mind with plans. The doctrine of divine simplicity tries to sidestep this by declaring God not complex at all. But that defines the complexity away rather than showing it isn’t there.
The universe’s answer, and what physics says
So how can the universe have always existed? Physics changes the question more than people expect.
First, our sense that everything needs a beginning was formed entirely inside time, where events have befores. But in relativity, time is part of the universe, not a container it sits in. Hawking and Hartle’s no-boundary proposal goes further: near the beginning, time behaves mathematically like a direction in space, and the history of the universe rounds off smoothly, with no edge and no starting instant. On that picture, asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what lies ten miles north of the North Pole. It isn’t a hidden place. It’s a question that doesn’t apply. The universe would have existed at every moment there has ever been, which is all “always” can mean, yet still have a finite age.
Second, the Big Bang isn’t established as an absolute beginning. It’s where our equations break down. Some models treat it as a transition from an earlier phase. A theorem by Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin argues that expanding universes can’t be eternal into the past, but it applies to classical spacetime, and nobody yet knows what quantum gravity does at that edge.
Third, matter and energy aren’t as rigidly conserved as the question assumes. Energy conservation doesn’t hold globally in an expanding universe, and some calculations suggest the total energy of the cosmos may be zero, positive mass-energy balanced by negative gravitational energy. That doesn’t produce something from nothing, but it undercuts the intuition that an enormous pile of stuff had to be manufactured out of a void.
The problem with “nothing”
The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” may itself be broken. When physicists say “nothing,” they usually mean the quantum vacuum, which is very much something: it has fields, fluctuations, and laws. The philosopher’s “nothing” means no properties, no laws, no existence of any kind. It’s entirely possible that kind of nothing isn’t a state that could ever have obtained. If so, something had to exist. That wouldn’t explain why this universe exists rather than some other, but it would take away the image of being plucked from a void.
Where this leaves us
Nobody knows why there is something rather than nothing. But the symmetry holds. An eternal, self-existent universe is no more mysterious than an eternal, self-existent God, and it’s simpler. Invoking God doesn’t dissolve the mystery. It relocates it and declares the inquiry closed.
Our discomfort with that is a fact about our psychology. These brains evolved to track the cause of a snapped twig or a falling rock, not the origin of reality. Whether physics and mathematics can ever carry us past the wall, or whether some questions are permanently out of reach for the kind of animal we are, I don’t know. I’ve hit that limit more than once, the point where the thinking just stops finding purchase. I suspect everyone who pushes hard enough gets there.
Living beside the wall
Faced with that, there are roughly three responses. You can despair, treating the absence of an answer as a verdict on your life. You can leap to an answer like God because the wall is intolerable, then call the question settled. Or you can look straight at it, admit it’s there, and live well and laugh anyway.
Only the third stays honest about the evidence. And it doesn’t have to be grim. The classic absurdist image is Sisyphus straining at his rock, finding his dignity in solemn defiance of an indifferent cosmos. But if existence is a brute fact with no author, solemnity is as unearned as worship. There was never a grand script, so the lack of one is no tragedy. We are brief, conscious arrangements of stardust trying to make sense of the room we woke up in. That deserves curiosity, humor, and a little color.
That answer has a name: purpleism.org
And if existence comes with no author, the other side of that coin is becoming one: anchorfield.org
Purpleism and Anchorfield are separate, independent projects, paired here only for this post.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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