A Question that Needs to be Asked

Before I get into writing too many super-creative pieces, there's a groundwork philosophical question that I need to get out of the way. It is, simply: Why is there anything? Honestly. We can debate all we want over the finer points of corporate income taxes, or why the sky is blue, or whether Batman could beat Spider-Man in a fight. But underlying these fun little arguments, we always take for granted that we're here to argue about them -- we are humans rather than amorphous patches of empty space. This doesn't seem to bother most people, but to me it seems a gaping void in our knowledge. The philosophy of civilization itself is a castle built upon a black murky nothingness that may or may not be stable enough to hold it up. The truth behind reality will be what determines "good" and "bad," so we shouldn't purport to know right from wrong until we can figure out what in the world decides such things anyway.

Somebody religious will tell you, simply and self-righteously, that things exist because God made them. But that doesn't really answer the question -- because where's God come from? Not to sound atheist, but not even God can postulate himself from nothing. Therein lies the problem: the only way to create an unshakable foundation for reality is to define something, and to define it without using anything else in the definition. That seems kinda hard.

But now I'm just rambling philosophy, which will soon get caught up in itself and get us nowhere. Physics, meanwhile, is just as confused as I am. By all accounts, and even if particle physics can be proven to be true without any underlying assumptions, the universe should create equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and this should all cancel itself out and result in nothing. Yahoo.

Anyway, I'll keep pondering that, although I doubt I'll get anywhere with it. In the meantime I'll write about some other stuff -- there's plenty of interesting topics in the world, even if we can't figure out why...