Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Why Is There A World?

Carlo Filice wonders why a god would bother to create a world.

Why is there a world? Even if this reality is mere appearance, dream, maya, it would still be something. There could have been nothing, as Leibniz famously observed. So, why this? And why one with conscious beings in it?

We don’t have agreed-upon answers to this question. The responses that have been proposed range from questioning the question, to a scientific brute-fact answer (“It just is”), to religious and otherwise supernatural half-answers, or non-answers.

Perhaps somethingness is the default natural state, hence not needing to be explained.

…