As has been said, posing this as a 'why' question is misleading and a problem. Now, I'll try to be as charitable as possible and interpret the question as:
"What is the explanation for the fact that anything exists?"
Once you see that this is a better way of seeing the question, addressing it becomes easier to those who are perplexed by it. Fundamentally, this question assumes a controversial principle known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which basically says that everything has a reason for why it is the case, either in the necessity of its nature or in an external cause. Questions like this seem to be an intractable problem because we're assuming the PSR must apply to everything, that it is an ontological truth. But of course, that doesn't seem to work. After all, what is the reason the that the PSR is true. There seems to be no logical contradiction in asserting that X has no reason or cause for why it is the case; it just is the case.
And further, I'll turn the question on it's head: Why do you expect there shouldn't be anything?
Why do you expect nothingness to be the expected state of affairs (if it can even be called that)? Sure, you might say it's the least arbitrary state of affairs since it has the least possible amount of ontological commitments, but this Occam's Razor objection has no binding power on reality, it's just pragmatic. It says nothing about what has to be the case, in other words, so it seems a useless objection when posed here.
But what kind of answer did you really expect to receive? None will likely satisfy you in the intuitive way we humans like, and those that do apparently satisfy some people, some of the time (usually "Cause GAWD!") are usually fundamentally flawed and don't really answer the question well.
"What is the explanation for the fact that anything exists?"
Once you see that this is a better way of seeing the question, addressing it becomes easier to those who are perplexed by it. Fundamentally, this question assumes a controversial principle known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which basically says that everything has a reason for why it is the case, either in the necessity of its nature or in an external cause. Questions like this seem to be an intractable problem because we're assuming the PSR must apply to everything, that it is an ontological truth. But of course, that doesn't seem to work. After all, what is the reason the that the PSR is true. There seems to be no logical contradiction in asserting that X has no reason or cause for why it is the case; it just is the case.
And further, I'll turn the question on it's head: Why do you expect there shouldn't be anything?
Why do you expect nothingness to be the expected state of affairs (if it can even be called that)? Sure, you might say it's the least arbitrary state of affairs since it has the least possible amount of ontological commitments, but this Occam's Razor objection has no binding power on reality, it's just pragmatic. It says nothing about what has to be the case, in other words, so it seems a useless objection when posed here.
But what kind of answer did you really expect to receive? None will likely satisfy you in the intuitive way we humans like, and those that do apparently satisfy some people, some of the time (usually "Cause GAWD!") are usually fundamentally flawed and don't really answer the question well.
