Why there is anything at all?

You've just downed a few cold beers, or a glass of the finest French sauvignon. You begin to feel a bit hazy - drunk, as it were - but in the midst of that sensation comes some rather philosophical thoughts. As you stared outside into the world through the windows of your own dormitory you begin to experience a sort of existential crisis - why is there something rather than nothing?

Well, you don't have to get wasted to be able to ponder on this question - but it helps to be, of course.

Thousands of years ago, many philosophers have got their heads bent backwards trying to uncover the truth that is "existence". Indeed, this is something that precedes even the Universe itself because like anything in nature - there must be an origin.

But what created that very Origin? The idea of cause-and-effect is heavily scrutinized when thinking of the origins of Origin?

To grasp a question as potent as this would probably require some sort of psychedelic day-tripping, or a chucking down of a barrel of some old Viking beer discovered in a shipwreck somewhere in the Baltic Sea - with your eyes opened.

We shall attack this question with a three-pronged approach; viewing it from 1) a Philosophical perspective, 2) a Religious perspective and 3) a Scientific perspective. Here comes nothing.

Philosophy
 "the first question which we have the right to ask will be, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

A long time ago, there was a branch of Philosophy known as Natural Philosophy that eventually became what we now call the modern sciences. As such, philosophy's purpose was to gain rational  understanding through observation albeit it failed because it looked at science as a qualitative subject instead of quantitative as it should be (and is, currently).

Aristotle spoke of existentialism in his Metaphysics describing existence as having four causes - the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause and the final cause. Very basically, for example, he explains a wooden table came to be because the material (wood), is shaped and designed(formal), by a carpenter (efficient) to create the table (final).

While this was applicable in answering questions on cause, it does not actually answer the more broader questions of how everything came to be. Id est what the hell is an atom and who was its father!?

In the Platonic Theory of Ideas, Plato himself believed our reality to be a world of ideas, and the physical world merely a copy of it. He provides us with an allegory; imagine a man chained in a cave unable to move. The sunlight shines behind him creating a silhouette of himself - a shadow. As he cannot move, he can only see the shadow in front of him and considers this shadow to be real. However, this shadow is simply a reflection of his own reality. It is just him. The sunlight represents reality.

Socrates described how the philosopher is essentially the man in the cave who managed to escape and realizing that the shadow they saw is not reality but simply a conjured appearance. As such, philosophers are said to transcend the boundaries of reality, as it were, and are able to truly understand reality.

Well, if only it was that easy.

It is true that philosophers have valiantly tried to uncover the enigma of existentialism, they have not as of yet succeeded. So the philosophical answer to this question, to put it very frankly is;

We don't know.

Socrates was said to be the wisest man in the whole of Athens because he realized he really knew nothing. Nothing about anything, or something else. This realization is literally the reason Western philosophy even existed in the first place.

Religion
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought" - Siddharta Gautama

Using religion to answer this question is pretty difficult. The reason for this is because religion emerged at the dawn of humankind - a time where humans were not particularly known for rational and critical thinking; they rather leave it up to the skies to decide their fate. Even today, many people believe strongly in a higher deity that is both interventionist as well as moralistic in nature. We don't actually know that for sure, though. What's more, we can't exactly prove, perceive or know-for-very-damn-sure - be it qualitatively or quantitatively - that there is such a higher deity.

This almighty, omniscient being can either be a flying genie, a wise man on a lotus whizzing in the skies or a computer programmer who managed to simulate an entire universe.

What is undeniable, however, is that religion is the number one way to provide answers to difficult and challenging questions because - well - it is much easier that way. Which scenario requires more strenuous, mental scrambling - 1) Develop pages long scientific/mathematical equations akin to the Boolean Pythagorean Triples to figure out how life got here or 2) lmao God created us that's why!

I think most societies of time immemorial would rather pick the latter. Not exactly because it is simply easier, but because they did not know as much anyways.

Some time ago, the Mythologists Eliade and Charles Long developed a special classification based on common motifs found across cultures around the world.

1. Creation ex nihilo where life and reality is planted like a seed by a divine being,
2. A progenitor commits metamorphosis several times to reach the final stage, the Now,
3. The proto-Indo-European Cosmic Egg mythology, where the universe is created from the hatching of a World Egg on the primordial waters of Earth,
4. Creation via the dismemberment of a Greek Primordial being(s),
5. The Earth diver mythology in which a divine diver plunged into the seabeds of cosmic waters to bring up sand and mud for creating the terrestrial world.

A couple of religions across the spectrum like Judaism, Christianity and Islam do share similar beliefs, especially regarding creation ex nihilo. It is not mutually exclusive to one, so to speak. Others believe we were created from the bringing together of order from disorder - where the metaphorical Order (good) is created out of Chaos (evil) to eventually form randomness. This is usually depicted as a cycle of sorts where after a time of Order comes Chaos and vice versa.

Religions and mythologies attempt to answer this question however what it does not explain is how these divine beings even got here in the first place. That is the true mystery.

Ceterus Paribus - with all things being equal - most religions believe in some sort of Apocalyptic prophecy in that at some point in time the world would end. In fact, some believe not just the world but the entire universe itself. For example, in Buddhism lies the important concept of impermanence - that nothing lasts forever. Not even the Phrom last forever. By understanding this, you have supposedly walked one step forward towards the famed Nirvana.

So we have religion to explain creation of the universe, and its eventual demise. But then again, who or what created these deities in the first place!? And why are they so significant in the delivery of such prophecies and teachings!? I don't think we will know to the nearest hundredth, but what we know now is all we've got.

Science
Lo and behold, science - as you may believe - may finally answer this important question. Spoilers: Read on to find out.

It is indisputable that science has brought us closer in answering that question in a few hundred years than philosophy and religion has in over thousands of years. I think this is a no-brainer for most. In physicist Lawrence Krauss' 2012 book "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing" where he proposes the idea that even in a vacuum there exists particles and antiparticles created out of seemingly nothing, the biologist Richard Dawkins delivered this very powerful quote:

"If  On The Origins of Species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology"

Wow. Well, I think that's quite overreaching it comparing Darwin's monumental original work to Krauss' otherwise re-hatched work of physicists that came before him. Anyways, its a great quote to start us off.

Many physicists like Krauss believe in different theories of how existence and the universe came to be. Some believe the universe formed when superstrings collided. To explain this further, the superstring theory posits that all particles in the universe can be divided into two belligerents - the fermions and bosons. Without fermions, there won't be bosons vice versa, at least according to theory. However, this has not been identified yet in experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. Physicists believe they have not yet identified them is because it requires a whack amount of energy to produce them, something perhaps similar to the energy produced immediately after the Big Bang. These particles may have existed in a Universe before ours, and shortly after it just got reduced to lower energy states observed today.

In regards to the also-popular theory of the Singularity before the Black Hole, I must say I do not have very good knowledge on the matter. According to physicists, the initial singularity contained the mass and space time of the Universe prior to the Big Bang. This theory is in accordance to General Relativity, the geometric theory of gravitation proposed by Albert Einstein. However, the reason I do not understand the Singularity theory is because if time and space is indeed intertwined as it is now, then where is the time when time itself does not exist before the Big Bang?

As mentioned before, a lot of these theories are currently being experimented upon using the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. This machine is the world's largest particle accelerator with the sole purpose of uncovering the enigma of the origins of the Universe. What a crazy thing. It basically accelerates two particles at double the speed of light at each other to witness the effects of the collision.

One of the most important discoveries by the Large Hadron Collider came in the form of the Higgs Boson particle. This particle was initially thought to be only  "Higgs-like" however after discovering properties mutually exclusive to the Higgs Boson particle, it indeed is the real deal.

The Higgs Boson, literally nicknamed the "God Particle" is so important because it drives us one step closer to validating the Standard Model. This particle proves the existence of the Higgs field - an invisible energy field that is splattered throughout the entire Universe. Its job is to imbue mass onto other particles thus explaining partly the building blocks of the Universe.

However, the caveat is: It does not actually explain it fully.

The existence of the Higgs Boson somewhat validates the Standard Model which attempts to identify the ingredients to make a Universe. However, it does not make it that much easier to unify the Standard Model with gravitational theory that is so crucial in understanding (and validating) the supersymmetry theory - the elusive theory of everything.

As such, science may seem to have answered this question, but in reality it hasn't really. The current science today is still not advanced enough to answer this question.

So, ditto I guess. Even in science, we do not know.

All in all, exploring the question of "Why there is anything at all" is so hard to comprehend because, if you view it on a psychologically point of view, our brains are designed for cause and effect. Our mental processes center around the dichotomies of causality and consequence that compels us to think of everything in this way. This proves to be difficult, as you have seen.

Otherwise, the future will hold the key to the Pandora's box that is the origins of Existence.