why oh why?

    

Whenever some people have a terrible accident, they ask, Why me? To which an indifferent universe asks, Why NOT you? You are, after all, in the Great Lottery of Life, to receive all the possible good and bad accidents that Life has to offer. Luckily for you, most of the odds may be in your favor for now, and you may have a good chance at living satisfactorily quite a long while -- until the Final Accident trips you up.

After any accident (except that one), you might just wonder, why did I have this accident? Of course, if you hadn't had that accident, you could have asked yourself, why did I NOT have this accident? -- although you wouldn't have been quite sure what you had meant by "this accident."

In the same way, people are more likely to ask the great cosmological question, why is there something rather than nothing? rather than the flip side of the question: why is there nothing rather than something?

Yes, these conundrums are partly answerable by the Anthropic Principle, which, mediated through the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, pops up an infinite number of you's asking an infinite number of why's related to your various unique conditions in each universe of each you. 

Each why being equally unanswerable, of course. But the reason WHY this is so doesn't lie in Anthropic Principles or Many Worlds. It lies in the word why itself. There's a lot of world in a why!

Behind most whys there's a quest for causes - what caused this? But behind the biggest why of all, the cosmological why, is a quest for the definite reason, the intelligent explanation that would satisfy a human being who would like to believe there is a humanlike purpose behind all causes in the universe or all possible universes. In other words, it is a theistic why. 

Why did you take the garbage out? Why didn't you walk the dog this morning? Why did you hit your sister? These are the kinds of questions we humans shoot at each other all the time. For what reason did you do this? So naturally if we believed a humanlike design was at work in the world at large, a humanlike Creator, First Cause, and Puppet Master of all things, then we would have every reason to toss this question at him: Why did You do that?  

So far, none of the people asking God this question have gotten answers. Maybe God is pretty tight-lipped. Maybe He doesn't like having to answer to people for what He does. His human promoters say he has a "mysterious plan" which will end up seeming "wonderful" to us. Whatever. So far the only "plan" we have seen is the one they've made by putting words in His mouth, and their plan sucks. You definitely get the impression that if this First Caused was discovered to be different than they've made Him out to be, they'd be the angriest people in the world. They didn't care what the Creator was really like, they just wanted to speak for Him forever! 

No matter whether you believe in God or whether you don't, sooner or later you have to get off the Causality Bus, which is why the first sort of why, the quest for causes, sooner or later has to go bust. Either you trace everything back to a Uncaused God Who you don't know anything about and Who won't tell you anything about Himself, or you trace everything back to the world itself, and the causality tracks stop there.

Why do the causality tracks stop there? Because time began together with space, with this universe. There is no known reference frame in which "before" the beginning of the world or "outside" of the physical space of the universe (or multiverse) could have any meaning. Which is a fancy way of saying you don't get to ask why.

Causes in our physical universe are always associated with things that take place, well, in places, and we notice they happen because, well, they take up time. Without any known space or time, well, you haven't got much room left for a cause to answer why with.

Maybe there is an infinite number of causes reaching back through infinite shells of time in infinite nested universes -- but ouch! this makes my head hurt. And it doesn't seem any more plausible, or reassuring for that matter, than having to get off the Causality Bus sooner rather than later. This way, instead of a First Cause ghost, you get an uncaused multiverse that's right in front of you, and of course, always the possibility that this world is nested "inside" some other one, ad infinitum.

So, in conclusion, the problem is with our word why. Or rather, specifically, with what we normally take why to mean. We live out our normal lives among objects in time and space. We human beings don't have a lot of experience bumping into acausal multiverse T-Zeroes or tracking down nested causal chains to their longest infinity.

Our brains fell out of the hurly-burly of experiences of our immediate pre-talking hominid ancestors. They needed quick answers to causal whys to manage the world around them, and that's what they got. Things like EVERYTHING, that don't seem to have any cause, or that may be the result of a literally infinite sequence of causes, just don't compute. They are holy in the sense that they fall through the holes in our heads, the holes in our ways of thinking.

That touches them with a bit of awe, because they spread beyond our imagination. There may be things without "ultimate" causes! And we may be one of those things.