The
Mystery of Existence asks the haunting question: Why does
anything exist? Anything of any kind, anywhere. The first edited volume
to cover an extremely wide variety of solutions to what must be the
ultimate mystery, it features dozens of luminaries. They range from
Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Leibniz, and then to modern thinkers.
These include physicists Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg,
philosophers Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit, philosophers of religion
Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, and the Dalai Lama. Some answers
are philosophical, some are theological or religious, and yet others
come from physics and cosmology--fields in which debate on the deep
origin of all reality continues to rage.
Whether you believe the universe began with a quantum-fluctuation big
bang or in the creative consciousness of a divine designer, here is a
feast for the mind. With enlightening introductions to each section, and
offering a wealth of suggestions for further reading, The
Mystery of Existence provides general readers, students, and
researchers with a readily accessible map of the many diverse paths
humans have followed when confronted by the most baffling of all enigmas
-- Why is there something rather than nothing?
