Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

This article grew out of my February 2017 Scientific American column titled “Imagine No Universe,” eventually expanding into a feature-length cover story for Skeptic, necessarily an order of magnitude longer to nuance the many possible answers to the question. As readers will discover, far from a famine of scientific and philosophic answers to the question, we have a veritable feast to dine on. Which will turn out to be more or less supported by empirical research in both particle physics and cosmology remains to be seen – and it could be many decades to a century before we have a solid grasp of the problem – but do not succumb to the theists’ transcendental temptation to evoke God as an answer in the teeth of so many elegant explanations already on our plate.