Why is There Anything But Nothing?

I’ve been a skeptic from the time I was very young. I was a shy, quiet child, expect for when it came to matters of religious questions. I remember several conversations with my grandmother, a believer in the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) faith, in which I would question her so much about how she could believe that God existed that I made her cry. I’m not proud of that, but the weight of the question had held such importance and fascination for me even at a young age, that I felt compelled to probe it when the opportunities arose. My grandmother did not always appreciate my doubting, questioning nature.

I wouldn’t say that I now have faith in God. I don’t know that faith means much. I think experience is the thing—everything, actually. Without experience, I’m not sure that one has much of anything—a wish, a hope, a want, perhaps. Faith is an abstract, foreign concept to me. Nevertheless, if I were to describe the primary question that does give me a kind of budding of ill-defined faith, it would be this “why is there anything but nothing” question. I’ve pondered that question for as long as I can remember. If everything is meaningless, then there would be nothing, right? But there’s a whole lot more than nothing. Trees, the sky, air, this desk, the cat over there in the window, all the people living, going to work, day after day, raising families, on and on—they all exist. But why does anything exist at all? Why does matter exist at all?

It’s always been a sort of 51/49 proposition for me whether life ultimately has meaning. This question of why anything but nothing has kept me from the atheist camp and has swung the tables in favor of meaning. However, just because there is possibly meaning, it does not necessarily mean there is a personal meaning–though I wish and hope and want that there is. If there is an architect of the universe, is he, she, it anything like us and is God’s desire the same as ours? The universe does not seem to operate the way that our minds do. It seems much more objective and indiscriminate and so by extension is its meaning just as impersonal?