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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.

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