ABSTRACT

Let us remind ourselves how the recent debate about metaphysical nihilism began. It began in 1996 with a paper by Peter van Inwagen concerning the question ‘Why is there anything at all?’ 1 He made it clear that his concern was with whether there might have been no concrete objects—that is, in the language of possible worlds, with whether there is an ‘empty’ world, in which no concrete objects exist. He was not concerned with whether there is a world in which no objects at all, either concrete or abstract, exist. In his opinion, there is an ‘empty’ world in this sense, but only one such world, from which—in conjunction with some other assumptions—he concludes that the probability of there being ‘nothing at all’ (in his sense) is zero. The other assumptions are that there are infinitely many possible worlds and that all of them are equiprobable. 2 In the course of his discussion of this issue, van Inwagen remarked that he could not see any way of arguing for the impossibility of there being ‘nothing at all’ other than by arguing for the existence of a necessary concrete being, such as God—and he does not consider that such an argument can be sustained, for reasons that he explains in the paper.