Why is There Anything at All?

The question beneath every question about meaning, purpose, God, and ourselves.

Prefer video? You can watch this essay’s companion teaching here.

The world-renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, spent his life thinking about time, gravity, and the architecture of the universe. And yet, near the end, there remained a question he couldn’t answer.

“Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

If we live long enough, Hawking’s question finds us, too. It finds us in a delivery room, cradling a newborn. It finds us at a graveside, watching dirt fall over a coffin. It finds us on a commute, when the day’s distractions are on pause and we are left with the fact that we are here, and we don’t entirely know why.

The Question That Comes Looking For Us

Most of the time, we avoid Hawking’s question altogether. We have bills to pay, reputations to maintain, and futures to worry over. The urgent protects us from the ultimate. But only for so long. The ultimate returns in awe and wonder, in suffering and fatigue, and in the emptiness that follows the achievement we thought would finally complete us, but didn’t.

When Hawking’s question comes for us, most of us reach for one of two answers. The first is that we are here by accident. We are the lucky, or unlucky, products of a universe that did not plan for us, does not know or care about us, and will not remember us after we are gone. There is no design or designer behind us, no destiny before us, and no voice calling us by name. So we scramble to create whatever meaning we can before the lights go out.

Albert Camus faced this with admirable honesty. He gave us Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it roll back down and begin again and again and again. For Camus, dignity was found not in escape, but in defiance. The world is absurd, and you keep living in it anyway.

Camus refused cheap answers, and there is integrity in that. But if the universe has no meaning given to it by its Creator, then every bit of meaning must be manufactured by us. We become our own authors, priests, absolvers, witnesses, and hope.

Our own lords and saviors.

That may sound liberating.
But eventually, it becomes exhausting and terrifying.

The second answer to Hawking’s question is less philosophical and more second nature, especially to those of us who’ve been formed by American ambition. It treats the world as raw material in the service of “Project Self.” People, places, and things become resources to exploit. Friendship becomes networking. Rest becomes recovery for more grinding and productivity and making a name for ourselves. Even our bodies and souls become “things” to manage, improve, and measure.

Beneath all of this is an anxiety that says:

“It’s up to me to justify my own existence. I must become successful enough, admired enough, needed enough, liked enough, and good enough to silence the fear that maybe I am not enough after all.”

One answer to Hawking’s question says your life has no predetermined meaning, so you must create your own. The other says your life has no anchored worth, so you must achieve it on your own. The first leaves you alone in a cold, indifferent universe. The second leaves you alone inside a never-finished performance review.

And it’s not good to be alone, for any reason.

The World as Gift

There is a third, more hopeful answer to Hawking’s question. It is neither sentimental nor easy. But if it is true, it is the only answer complete and durable enough to sustain and bring meaning to a human life:

“In the beginning, God created.”
“God said... and there was.”

The old theologians’ phrase for this is creatio ex nihilo, or creation of everything out of nothing, and of life out of no life. God did not make the world by rearranging scraps he found lying around the universe. There was no universe lying around. Before matter, energy, space, time, dust, water, earth, or sky, there was God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Eternally glad, alive, loving, and sufficient.

Then, with love and creative energy in his heart, God spoke.

Genesis does not begin with violence, negotiation between good and evil, or some cosmic accident that somehow organizes itself into worlds and galaxies and fingerprints and eyeballs and kidneys. It begins with words.

“Let there be light.”
And there was light.

The origin of everything did not happen by chance or necessity. It did not happen because God was lonely, needy, bored, or under obligation. It happened because God is love, and because love wanted it to happen. The world is not a meaningless void. It is the generous gift of God’s creation, spoken into being and sustained even now by the will and word of the One who made it.

Creation is not just the story of how things began. It is the truth about what things are and how they are meant to work. A tree is not merely lumber. A body is not merely a machine. A child is not merely a genetic event or a lump of cells. A neighbor is not merely an obstacle, threat, project, inconvenience, or resource, or opportunity.

And neither are you.

You are not an accident with appetites and thirsts. You are not a résumé with a pulse. You are not a brand, a burden, a diagnosis, or a problem to be solved. You are a creature who bears the Image of the Most High God.

This is humbling, because you are not God.
It is liberating, because you do not have to be.

The Hand That Made You

But the gospel does not leave us with reverence alone. The God who made the world has come near and declared himself to be with us and for us. He is holy, holy, holy. And above all, he is love. He is transcendent, and he is near. He is Other, and he took on human flesh and walked among us.

When Paul stood before the philosophers in Athens, he said that the God who made the world is not far from any one of us, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We are not merely under him, watched by him, or tolerated by him. Through Christ, we are in him. Our existence is borrowed breath. It is life sustained by Another. His mercy has been our lifeblood since our first cry.

Paul says similar things in Colossians. All things were made through the Son, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). Not held together by luck, competence, or the fragile scaffolding and cracked foundation of our best laid plans. All things were, and are, held together by Christ alone. The hand that made the cosmos is also the hand that came looking for you at great cost to himself. The voice that said, “Let there be light,” is the voice that cried out from a cross:

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

This means you do not have to prove that you deserve to occupy space. You do not have to earn your place or justify your own existence or make a name for yourself or create your own meaning. You were not put here because you were useful to God, impressive to God, necessary to God, or profitable to God. You are here because you were wanted and loved before time began. You are here because in him and by his finished work, you are declared forgiven, blameless, and beloved.

You are not your own, but have been bought with a price. As the catechism says, you belong, body and soul, to your faithful Savior Jesus Christ. You exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Glory and joy, not performative religion. Self-surrender, not self-invention.

Glory.
And joy.

You did not call yourself into being. You do not hold yourself together. And thank God, you do not have to. You are being held together right now by the One who made you, the One who came for you, and the One who will not let you go.

The only fitting response, once this settles into your heart, is to say thank you.

And to know exactly why you mean it, even though you can’t comprehend it.

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