Questioning the Question

In Tyron Goldschmidt (ed.), The Puzzle of Existence: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing? New York: Routledge. pp. 252-271 (2013)
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Abstract

Why is there something rather than nothing? Apparently many people regard that question as a challenge to naturalism because they think it’s too fundamental or too sweeping for natural science to answer, even in principle. I argue, on the contrary, that the question has a simple and adequate naturalistic answer: ‘Because there are penguins.’ I then diagnose various confusions underlying the suspicion that the question can’t have such an answer and, more generally, that the question, or else some variant of it, can’t have a naturalistic answer at all.

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Stephen Maitzen
Acadia University

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