I just love the host. He seems to know all the jargon. After the guests give a long articulate answer, he just throws "oh you mean x", where "x" is a seemingly well-known jargon term given to whatever the guest was talking about. It really speeds up the process of extracting every last bit of knowledge the guests have on the subject.

The answer is straightforward. There is something rather than nothing because there always has been something; it is the basis of all that comes from it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the host of all hosts. The quality of Closer to Truth and the quality of his questions together with the caliber of guests... makes this a show considered to be one of the GOATs. Yes... of all time... and space.

Listening to this dialog in the morning is enchanting nonetheless, more so with coffee

Getting a strong sense that the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme is playing in Robert’s head after about one minute of this topic discussion.

This was one of the best answers to this question that I've seen so far on this show. I agree that ultimately the answer has to bottom out in a brute fact (but not 'god'). I think that either 1) 'nothingness' is an ontological impossibility and therefore 'something', in it's most primary form has to be the brute fact underlying reality or 2) 'something' and 'nothing' are ultimately non-different at the lowest level of reality. I'm sure the answer is much more complex and elegant than we can ever imagine.

The ultimate tough question, but they offer a good way to tackle it -- what form must the answer take or not take. Interesting discussion.

There is something rather than nothing so that nothing can know itself.

my favorite question.

Brute fact does not explain "complexity" too (as Kuhn rightfully notice) ...would be a bit too much of a lucky chance. SO is something that exist necessarily, in a no-time environment ... most probably a kind of consciousness.

Phew! I just love this channel...

I'm starting to agree with the notion that the universe is indeed just a brute fact. Perhaps somehow arising from Platonic abstractions. The universe just has to necessarily exist.

"Nothing" only exists as the opposite of something, as "something" only exists as the opposite of nothing. In both cases, "something" and "nothing" are required to make sense of either idea. The even more interesting reality is that there is not one square inch of any part of our reality where you'll find absolute nothing. "Nothing" is merely a concept provided for understanding a multitude of other ideas regarding reality. So not only can't there be nothing, but nothing isn't even a thing. It can't exist. OK, now I need an aspirin.

It seems to me that he starts out by saying the answer can't be causal, but then he claims that there must be a necessary being that caused the universe to exist. That's causal. Even if he just claims there are some things that are necessary, then where did that necessity come from?

good start.

Awesome

Coherence; truth in the grand sense. If it's not coherent, it is not.

I appreciate his point about eliminating causal and contingent explanations, but I find necessity unsatisfying too. Necessity is surely a relational characteristic. If reality was born of an egg, what would it mean to say that egg was necessary? Necessary to what and why? How would one explain the necessity? How would one even know it was necessary? My own view on this is that, with this question, we have reached the limit of our understanding. We are creatures born in a tiny aspect of a fundamentally casual universe. We simply can't conceptualise a reality beyond.

Absolute nothing is impossible. Because the fact that something exists at all means you can never eliminate possibilities.

The question seems like a real question...even a deep question. As others have said, absolute nothing doesn't exist. It is a concept, an abstraction of the mind with no corresponding reality. "Why is a mouse when it spins?" At first glance, this seems like a real question, too. When I was 13, I started to think and experience that uncanny question as well. The fact that anything existed suddenly became weird. Existence itself seemed unlikely. I thought I was going insane. Like a zen koan, the only way to answer that question is by changing your perspective. You have to see the absurdity of the question itself. Existence doesn't have a cause, because that cause too would exist. Rules that apply to items within a set do not necessarily apply to the set itself. Just my 2 cents.

Saying something necessarily exists is a lot different from saying there is a necessary 'being'. That aside, I liked this chap a lot more than most of the guests that come at the question with a religious background.

A while ago Leibniz said the universe is contingent but God is necessary so God is the answer etc.

It is far more productive to alter the angle of the question, after you see that the answer to the question doesn't need to make you happy. example: how ordered is it possible for the universe to be? Is a singularity possible? Is a singularity less or is entropy less? is less possible?

The fault is in the question itself. Our language allows us to ask questions that do not have an answer within our current understanding of "reality", whatever that turns out to be. We need to better understand reality and consciousness before asking "why" and "how" the universe is what it is. Our language is not up to the challenge because neither are our brains.

We live everyday life on the assumption that something cannot come from nothing yet the universe began. Interesting discussion.

As an organism, like all organisms, we have senses of things, including time and space in our case as people, and as people we have our own sense of time and space in reality, realized naturally as well as artificially. Truth, however is not reality. Truth is not for organisms. Only Awareness, which is more like intuition than knowledge, can realize Truth. In Truth, as much as there is something, there is also nothing. As much as there is space and time, there is also non-space and time-less. (Namaste❤️🙏)

The question presupposes a fundamental difference between something and nothing and a reason or purpose for the universe. I feel the answer combines something/everything/nothing and does away with the notion of why in favor of how.

5:39 very hard question for any guest to answer :)... but since something requires something else as a source then the nature of the 'source' something has to be considered as being at least as complex as to enable the existence of the something we observe... everything, we observe, is following specific patterns that can be calculated mathematically, to a certain degree of precision... so, in order to enable existence of something, the 'source something' requires at least the ability to control and arrange the "element/s" of existence in a specific way as to enable their interaction among them... unless the element/s have these properties to begin with... even though, we still don't know if we're dealing with a limit space, energy, and time, erything derived from the source seems to be very attracted to these basic elements as without their possession their existence would not be possible... but to me it seems as everything without a structure/identify, or even when deformed out of its intended purpose will loose its structure/identify and cease to exist... 🤔

How did it start, why, and who or what started it all?

Perhaps the unsatisfying answer to the question "Why" is the appearance of the necessity to ask the question at all.

The answer is Intellectually at this time we are incapable of understanding the truth of our reality.

Robert - think you would be good to refer to millenia old mystical and meditative traditions with this question -- per those: both "nothing" (void) and "something" (substance) exist, and, both give rise to each other and are flip sides of the same reality.

The people who say that it's just a brute fact that there is anything at all, that there is a universe, are basically saying that the universe itself is a necessary being, aren't they? If we instead of "the universe" say "existence itself" then it becomes more obviously why existence itself is a necessary being. Existence itself has to exist because that's what existence means.

The question is "the beggar's wound" of purposeless seekers.of knowledge: "Knowledge for its own sake out of curiosity", instead of KNOWLEDGE ONLY FOR PRACTICAL SATISFACTION OF THE NEEDS OF BEINGS is the culprit.

Hegel’s Science of Logic is by far the most sophisticated attempt to answer this question ever given. Anyone who seriously wants to grapple with this question needs to read the Logic, at least up to the section on infinity.

At the 8:22 mark, you say, "...an ultimate blank forever." Is not an ultimate blank "something"?

I'd like to see an interview with world renoun Dr. Pim van Lommel from the Netherlands..His paradigm of consciousness!

Brians idea of necessity seems (to me) to imply causation.

Of all the unanswerable questions this is the most unanswerable.

If there was Nothing, than what would halt Everything?

I don’t think we know the definition of nothing. It is easy to assume we do, but we don’t. We compare nothing to something. Both cannot exist simultaneously, and so the can never be compared. Nothing can never realize something and vice versa.

The answer to this may be dismissed because it's too simple. The answer? Persistence. This is like time, but time is a measurement of persistence, whereas persistence itself is the property being measured. If there's truly nothing, there's nothing to persist. So, nothing, by definition, is a non-persistent state. The only thing that can persist is something.

Imagination - Process of Pure Creation The process of creation starts with thought - an idea, conception, visualization. Everything you see was once someone's idea. Nothing exists in your world that did not first exist as pure thought. This is true of the universe as well. Thought is the first level of creation. Next comes the word. Everything you say is a thought expressed. It is creative and sends forth creative energy into the universe. Words are more dynamic (thus, some might say more creative) than thought, because words are a different level of vibration from thought. They disrupt (change, alter, affect) the universe with greater impact. Words are the second level of creation. Next comes action. Actions are words moving. Words are thoughts expressed. Thoughts are ideas formed. Ideas are energies come together. Energies are forces released. Forces are elements existent. Elements are particles of God, portions of ALL, the stuff of everything. The beginning is God. The end is action. Action is God creating - or God experienced. Hang on. There's one thing more I have to tell you. You are always seeing what by your terms you would define as the "past," even when you are looking at what is right in front of you. I am? It is impossible to see The Present. The Present "happens," then turns into a burst of light, formed by energy dispersing, and that light reaches your receptors, your eyes, and it takes time for it to do that. All the while the light is reaching you, life is going on, moving forward. The next event is happening while the light from the last event is reaching you. The energy burst reaches your eyes, your receptors send that signal to your brain, which interprets the data and tells you what you are seeing. Yet that is not what is now in front of you at all. It is what you think you are seeing. That is, you are thinking about what you have seen, telling yourself what it is, and deciding what you are going to call it, while what is happening "now" is preceding your process, and awaiting it. To put this simply, I am always one step ahead of you. My God, this is unbelievable. Now listen. The more distance you place between your Self and the physical location of any event, the further into the "past" that event recedes. Place yourself a few light-years back, and what you are looking at happened very, very long ago, indeed. Yet it did not happen "long ago." It is merely physical distance which has created the illusion of "time," and allowed you to experience your Self as being both "here, now" all the while you are being "there, then"! One day you will see that what you call time and space are the same thing. Then you will see that everything is happening right here, right now. This is....this is....wild. I mean, I don't know what to make of all this. When you understand what I have told you, you will understand that nothing you see is real. You are seeing the image of what was once an event, yet even that image, that energy burst, is something you are interpreting. Your personal interpretation of that image is called your image-ination. And you can use your imagination to create anything. Because - and here is the greatest secret of all - your image-ination works both ways. Please? You not only interpret energy, you create it. Imagination is a function of your mind, which is one-third of your three-part being. In your mind you image something, and it begins to take physical form. The longer you image it (and the more OF you who image it), the more physical that form becomes, until the increasing energy you have given it literally bursts into light, flashing an image of itself into what you call your reality. You then "see" the image, and once again decide what it is. Thus, the cycle continues. This is what I have called The Process. This is what YOU ARE. You ARE this Process. This is what I have meant when I have said, you are both the Creator and the Created. I have now brought it all together for you. We are concluding this dialogue, and I have explained to you the mechanics of the universe, the secret of all life. Okay. Now as energy coalesced, it becomes, as I said, very concentrated. But the further one moves from the point of this concentration, the more dissipated the energy becomes. The "air becomes thinner." The aura fades. The energy never completely disappears, because it cannot. It is the stuff of which everything is made. It's All There Is. Yet it can become very, very thin, very subtle - almost "not there." Then, in another place (read that, another part of Itself) it can again coalesce, once more "clumping together" to form what you call matter, and what "looks like" a discreet unit. Now the two units appear separate from each other, and in truth there is no separation at all. This is, in very, very simple and elementary terms, the explanation behind the whole physical universe. Wow. But can it be true? How do I know I haven't just made this all up? Your scientists are already discovering that the building blocks of all of life are the same. They brought back rocks from the moon and found the same stuff they find in trees. They take apart a tree and find the same stuff they find in you. I tell you this: We are all the same stuff. (I and the Father are One Energy) We are the same energy, coalesced, compressed in different ways to create different forms and different matter. Nothing "matters" in and of itself. That is, nothing can become matter all by itself. Jesus said, "Without the Father, I am nothing." The Father of all is pure thought. This is the energy of life. This is what you have chosen to call Absolute Love. This is the God and the Goddess, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. It is the All-in-All, the Unmoved Mover, the Prime Source. It is that which you have sought to understand from the beginning of time. The Great Mystery, the Endless Enigma, the Eternal Truth. There is only One of Us, and so, it is THAT WHICH YOU ARE.

I emailed them this exact question a couple weeks ago and this video I made too. See below. I have screenshots of the email if need be.

Does the question 'Why is there anything at all?' contain within itself the implicit assumption that existence is contingent? I think it does and I reject it. As Ayn Rand said, Existence exists.

Patience. Patience my brother. Have you ever asked a pregnant woman why she would choose patience over impatience? 9 months acausal living and increase in insight of self-control.

Well thanks for that, I’ve just had an embolism.

Is there an Axiom of Existence? It is not causal but simply a fact where it's denial is logically absurd, making existence logically necessary. It can't be any other way. Similar to the 'brute fact', but with a logical description.

OK the "necessary beings" they are still 'something' why not energy which can neither be created nor destroyed? The concept of "nothing" is a difficult concept but can be grasped when thought about carefully

"there can be only one answer". his answer

So far as we know, the only 'thing' that exists necessarily is the quantum vacuum energy. Right?

In THE VOID the only presence that makes sense (and is necessary) is infinite possibility. It’s only necessary because you can’t eliminate it. This is the wave function quantum mechanics talks about. In fact, experiments show that at the level of quantum wave function there is energy, and to remove that energy to create an ‘absolute void’ would require more energy than the wave function contains. This wave function (see Sean Carroll) is one thing. There is one wave function that includes the entire apparent universe. Because it is one, it is incomparable and therefore without dimension. Because it is one there is nothing for it to travel through and nothing to travel through it, so there is no time. It has no beginning and no end, therefore it is eternal. It modulates within itself and dreams the apparent universe into apparent existence. This is the One Mind zen (and Vedanta) has spoken of for millennia: an eternal, incomparable, impersonal field of infinite possibilities dreaming. To ask why would imply cause and effect, but there is only IT. “I am that I am.”

This particular question is sounding more and more like a peculiar example of Gödel's incompleteness axiom.

"[T]here could have been nothing" (0.12s) maybe paradoxical, since prohibited temporal precedence is a necessary condition of nothing before something *. * This is a.necessary condition for that if that cannot exist without this.

The seemingly illogical existence of nothing from our perspective certainly lends weight to the existence of God or the simulation hypothesis or both?

Ooh, me likes Brian. Anything before the universe couldn't be casual because it would itself be a thing (in the universe). You got my attention! That something necessary is the universe. A brute fact. Shute, then Brian loses my respect with the old jump from something necessary/first to a 'necessary being', out of nowhere. What was the point of the last 4min if you were going to assert something based on nothing previously said!!!??!?

Can a ''necessary something'' also be a ''first cause'' ?

Wouldn't it be easier to ask the opposite of truth for reason... "why lie, why is there untruths, how does false negative exist?" Take for example, achievement. What defines the typical route of success. What are all the things in society that provides a trusted formula through modern conventions to create symbols of achievement. Can a single mother of 5 children be a successful independent sole earner? Are we redefining reasons, in the lies that is all around us?

Why’s there something rather than nothing? Blackholes exist. A blackhole within a blackhole separated by spacelike curves of spacetime.

Why nothing rather than something?

By relying on definitions Leftow can introduce the concept of a necessary Being which caused the universe to exist. But using definitions, we can just as easily define the universe itself as a necessary Entity. Ultimately both rely on accepting as brute fact the existence of Something (rather than nothing). And adding a necessary Being then looks superfluous. The underlying problem is that our notions of causality and logic have formed from our observations of how the existing universe appears to work. It's those 'in-universe' observations which are the basis for our human concepts of causation and logic, (and we know we humans aren't perfect observers and thinkers). We can't step outside the universe to see what, if any, rules apply there, it doesn't even make sense to us that a state of nothing can have rules like causation or logical necessity, when there isn't even time or space. We're simply not equipped to answer the question, because the way humans model the universe through our experiential observations and thinking are geared to navigating the universe from within it.. Inserting a god of the gaps as an 'explanation' for what we're not equipped to explain is a possibility, but one which doesn't get around our limitations in a way which can make it demonstrable. It's just saying you don't think the universe itself is inexplicable, so there must be a cause which inexplicably doesn't have a cause itself. And calling that inexplicable necessary first cause God, a term which carries a lot of other baggage. When we're simply not equipped to answer a question, saying ''Don't know'' is the only correct answer.

A thing like this universe being non material at heart would mean there was no beginning and no cause. These things we think happen did not really happen meaning the big bang only happened on a certain non fundamental level.

How can something exist without a cause? Just standing there forever. That means that everything is on replay. Forever. But how the f**

I think that this question is only half of a bigger one, which I ponder sometimes. The other half is this: Why is there THIS thing rather than the near-infinite number of possible OTHER things? So there is something, but why this something and not another?

Necessarily something must exist, because non-existence cannot, by definition, exist!

Patience, and the control of not falling back into the world of impatience. The world of impatience will kill both a mother and her unborn child. Every holy texts in existence today teach Patience and why you must remain in control - be patience. By being patient, you activate parts of you that will allow new abilities, especially and including excellent communication with another. Your own main job on this earth is to grow, order and dictate within you how you wish your day to go, not look into the beginning and end of the universe around you.

please, put Max Tegmark and this guy in the same room, that could be productive

There is something because nothing doesn't exist

I beleive I know the answer. There is NOTHING but consciousness. Consciousness is fundamental. There is nothing else. Now within this fundamental consciousness we experience everything. We experience all matter, universe everything. However nothing actually exists as separate or outside of consciousness. An example is a dream. We can experience sitting on a beach with a beautiful sunset sipping a pina colada. However when we wake up we realise there was no beach, no sunset and no pina colada. However we did experience them in consciousness. This helps give us a clue. Consciousness is the only reality.

The notions "Something" and "nothing" are contingent upon a subject-object relationship which implies Subjective conscious awareness.

Wrt the number 12... the number 12 can't exist in its own, it requires 1, 2, 3 etc to infinitely, and then of course the rational and irrational numbers too. If something is necessary then so are all its implications

6:23 ... when it comes to God on the other hand many philosophers think we know a good deal about what God's nature would be like uh they would say that God is a perfect being that he's omniscient omnipotent perfectly good and so on [I really thank you, Robert, I love and carefully listen to many of yous videos which give me inspirations. Same as you, I also really want to know those question you asked and then share my thoughts here and my facebook. God's characteristics human wishes are partially true according to my understanding and scriptures, e.g. his omniscient and omnipotent because of his infinity. However, his perfect western culture may not get the real point leading misunderstanding, e.g. Isaiah 45:7, KJV: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. According to my understanding the original words, literal interpretation suppose to be light is formed by selection pressure, dark is freely in ultimate chaos, work with plan and wisdom give you shalom, if doing nothing disaster will come, and I had set all these in default.] the infinite beings is a ceaseless creativity. it's unnecessary for human's need. The infinitely many things in default generate God The Best, then there is something as I said in BTS pp: All cosmoses are simply running over back of indeterminate form, 0×P∞, and driven by a perpetual machine, God The Triune, from whom every quantum fluctuation pops up.

Why is there something? It is easy. INFINITY =1/x(delta) +1. Infinity is real. How do we know this? Because Infinity describes all numbers. A number is a set in space that changes with space. Infinity requires no start or stop but we can get a causal and effect event inside a system of infinite points. This event we can call it a spatial segment of a changing set.

If there was a creator god it would have to be far more complicated than the universe and everything contained in it. A sculptor is more complicated than a slab of marble but didn’t cause the marble to come into being.

Stephen hawking once said the possibilities are endless

Did you know that there is no inherent illumination or luminosity in photons? “Light,” as such, cannot be found there. Photons are, perhaps, ‘packets’ of energy which have the properties of both spread-out waves and localized particles. Photons only take on the appearance of being luminous as they arise within consciousness, in our mind’s eye. It may be that photons are spread-out energy potentials that fill the immensity of space, and only take on the appearance of being a localized discrete particle of “light” when we become aware of them in consciousness, in this actualized awareness we call mind. Thus, you are the light of the kosmos. This “light” is only arising in us. The world outside of a mind is perfectly ‘dark,’ or empty, unactualized in any way. Of course, what else could it be? What would perceive it as illuminated, or as any “thing”? All of our thoughts are the activity of consciousness, modulations of that consciousness, incarnations within that pure consciousness, rays shining from inside that consciousness. We are agents of that consciousness, emerging from within that consciousness. All there is to experience is the knowing of it, and that knowing is God’s own Self in us, living in us, the source of our life, the energy of consciousness itself. We could say that God lives in us, since consciousness seems to have become localized in this particular body-mind. Or we could say that we live in God, since all that we perceive arises in that consciousness, including our body-mind. Thus, Jesus was right to say, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10-11, 20). Both are true, and they are true of us as well. We are arising within God, and God is arising within us as well. Sometimes this is called “mutual indwelling,” the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, also called perichoresis or co-inherence in Christian terminology. God is the field of consciousness in which all knowing occurs, in which all thoughts and perceptions and feelings and sensations arise, like waves in the ocean. Our body-mind and its thoughts are like localizations within that consciousness, temporary manifestations of that Ultimate Reality, expressions of that consciousness, that being, that One. God becomes veiled and hidden from our awareness when the thoughts that arise in and from consciousness believe they are something separate and discrete from the consciousness in which they are arising. The thoughts form a separate entity, a dualistic subjective ego, a separate self identity, an independent being, an “Adam/Eve,” which thinks it is apart from infinite nondual divine consciousness and Ultimate Reality. This seems to be the “Fall,” the beginning of duality and separateness and alienation from God’s Presence. But how could thoughts be separate from the consciousness in which they have arisen? They can’t, but that is exactly what our thoughts and our self-identification with them think they are. It is a kind of psychological illusion. The thoughts take on their own separate identity apart from pure nondual consciousness, forming a self, a person, an entity, seemingly cut off from its own source and essence. Once we look at it like this, it seems impossible, and that is because it is. Our ‘self’ is never actually separate from the source in which it arises, thoughts are never separate from the consciousness in which they emerge, the wave is not separate from the ocean. The thoughts that make up our ‘self’ are just finite actualizations or relative localizations of the infinite potential of absolute consciousness, or Divine Being, or Ultimate Reality. In Christian symbolism we call this the incarnation of God. In Buddhism it is the Dharmakaya that incarnates as the Nirmanakaya Buddha. In Hinduism it is Brahman that manifests itself as each Atman. God becomes incarnate in reality, in the flesh, embodied, in us and all things. There is no time, no space, nowhere we can go, nowhere we can be, that will be outside of this Presence of God, outside of this consciousness, beyond the borders of God, or the Ultimate Reality. God is always present, and is Presence itself, awareness itself, consciousness itself, the “spirit of life” within us, from which we derive all being, all knowing, all our substance, every thought, every sensation. It all arises in God. This is perhaps why, in order to pierce the veil and know God directly, contemplative practices such as meditation help train us to transcend thought, to go back to the source of thought itself, beyond all thoughts of self, to recognize that from which it all arises, this pure open vastness of nondual unitive at-one consciousness. Do you see why we cannot “think” God? Nothing that arises in consciousness as a thought will be that consciousness in which it is arising. No relative finite manifestation in consciousness can be the absolute pure infinite consciousness, even though every manifestation or relativization or actualization of that consciousness is made up of nothing other than that consciousness. God is Present even while we are trying to comprehend God, even in the midst of that very comprehension. God is what makes that attempt at comprehension even possible. God is the very field in which we are trying to know God. When we let go of the trying, the conceptualization, surrendering the thoughts that are trying to know themselves, and rest in the pure still silent open awareness of being, that is when the realization of God may dawn on us, as us.

Context may have helped you understand your question! Why is there something in my bank account rather than nothing? Why is there something in our reality rather than nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing in the physical universe? The question is based on the dellusion that we know what the container is.

📍5:19

In the beginning there was the word.....

What about the Higgs Boson? Maybe if we fully understood the Higgs, we’d see its self-evident necessity. And it seems to have a lot of control over fundamental reality. So, every few trillion years it gives rise to a universe? That seems a more simple posit than the operatic god of the theists.

Atheists who propose that the universe exists necessarily face the challenge of explaining the origin or cause of this necessity. They may need to address why the universe possesses the properties and conditions that make its existence necessary in the first place. Theists who assert that God exists necessarily encounter similar questions. They need to explain the source or origin of God's necessity and why God's existence is self-contained and not contingent upon anything external.

god fursiously taking notes 😅😅😂😂😂

I submit a fourth alternative answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing? That is that the question itself is bogus. Just because it is grammatically correct doesn't make it a legitimate question. I assume existence exists and time is in the universe. The speaker assumes, by way of taking the question before us as legitimate, that the universe is in time. He assumes the universe is contingent and secondary and that 'nothing' is noncontingent and primary. To him, 'nothing' is the something that something was created out of by some noncontingent entity. For me the noncontingent primary entity is the universe itself. The universe is not just another thing in the universe. To talk about it as if it were is to go down a rabbit hole that Ocham would abhor. To say the universe is just a brute fact is to give the question semi-legitimacy. It is not to have the insight that the answer is in linguistics not in physics. A necessary self-existing being, conceived as God or the universe or something else, is thereby said to have aseity.

1 Timothy 6:16 King James Bible Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen.

"I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam, I'm (Necessary Brute Existence.)" -- Popeye. 😅

The buck stops with God. Hard to believe but truly true. Else you wouldn't die, what is death why death? Because God makes it happen as if you won't feel it.

I have never seen RLK so humbled and frustrated by a guest since his interview with Christopher Isham. The only way to deal with RLK and this question is to ask him what answer he expects or what kind of answer could bring finality to the question. This guy cuts him off at the pass by saying the answer could not be causal, nor contingent. RLK had no rebuttals to that so he asks the guest "well, what kind of answer could it be?". The guest remains noncommittal and simply puts forth some ideas. Now these ideas are not intuitive. It would be hard to make them explanatory so Kuhn finally gives up on this one.

There is no more unscientific question than a question that begins with “why”. It’s really a dumb question.

This is such an impossible question in my opinion. Personally, i think the universe never had a beginning and will never end. It may change forms but never end. The idea that the universe never had a beginning or i must say, rattles my mind. Of course, I can be completely wrong.

John 1: The Word Became Flesh 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

‘Something out of nothing’ is an absurd idea. If there is a tree, it must have come out of a seed, whether the seed was seen by anyone or not. Sometimes you see a tree sprouting from a crack on the roof of a building. Where did it come from? From a seed which the wind must have blown on to the roof. A tree can only grow from a seed. Similarly, existence can only come from existence. This is what the Upanisad is suggesting when it says that before the world was manifest there was existence, one without a second. The word means ‘existence.’ The Vedanta scriptures describe this existence as a state of being. It is one without a second. It is pure, all-pervasive, beyond thought and speech, and formless. It is consciousness. Some philosophers maintain, however, that before the world originated there was nothing, one without a second. They claim that the world emerged from this nothing. Let’s explain this state of nothingness. A sage once explained nothingness in a simple way as follows 'Look at those trees. The trees are meditating. Meditation is silence. If you realize that you really know nothing, then you would be truly meditating. Such truthfulness is the right soil for silence. Silence is meditation. 'You must be simple. You must be utterly naked in your consciousness. When you have reduced yourself to nothing--when your self has disappeared, when you have become nothing--then you are yourself close to God. The man who is nothing knows God, for God is nothing. Nothing is everything. Because I am nothing, you see, because I am a beggar, I own everything. So nothing means everything.' From state of nothingness we move to awareness. Now how to see this awareness briefly every day our atma (Soul) is covered with ego that is why your being is clouded. Once you subside the thought and challenge the thought everything abides in the self. The self free and you are happy. Modern example of this a brief glimpse that is when you take selfie of your self You become briefly happy. At that point your Atma shines. When Atma shines God shines. This is spirtual teachings taken from the upanishad in Hindiusm which has extensively discussed this subject thousands of years ago.

Why not a causal loop? Many people would think a causal loop is paradoxical, but I think we don't know enough about space & time & energy to be sure. In science fiction time travel stories, one of the common tropes is the causal loop.

There will be nothing at all though when you die.

A story about Nothingness and existence There lived once a boy named Svetaketu Âruneya. To him his father said: 'Svetaketu, go to school; for there is none belonging to our caste, darling, who, not having studied (the Vedas), is, as it were, a Brahmin by birth only.' Having begun his apprenticeship (with a teacher) when he was twelve years of age Svetaketu returned to his father when he was twenty-four, having then studied all the Vedas,--conceited, considering himself well-read, and stern. His father said to him: 'Svetaketu, as you are so conceited, considering yourself so well-read, and so stern, my dear, have you ever asked for that instruction by which we hear what cannot be heard, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived, by which we know what cannot be known?' What is that instruction, Sir?' he asked. 'Fetch me from thence a fruit of the Nyagrodha tree.' 'Here is one, Sir.' Break it.' 'It is broken, Sir.' 'What do you see there?' 'These seeds, almost infinitesimal.' 'Break one of them.' 'It is broken, Sir.' 'What do you see there?' 'Not anything, Sir.' The father said: 'My son, that subtle essence which you do not see there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists. 'Believe it, my son. That which is the subtle essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art That.'

Boredom. Boredom is why there exists something.

There does have to be an explanation for existence, otherwise there would be nothing. The answer is that existence is relative to the observer. Mathematics describes possible consistent structures and its logic works independently of our universe. It is meaningless to say that mathematics or any mathematical structure exists in an absolute sense, but within a possible structure there can be observers that are aware of their own place in that structure. To these observers that structure exists and is their universe, because that is how they would see it, just as we see our universe as existing.

The particles united and created God and God created the Universe with the big bang 26.7 billion years ago.

Keep in mind that ''existence does not exist'' It is not an attribute.

Physical interactions, matter, fields cannot cause the existence of fields matter and their laws. Why? By their scientific definition. Science will never answer this very obvious and relevant question.

Here is a simpler question: WHY do we (humans) ask WHY?