On whether the universe had a beginning, and what the question really asks
I. The Assertion and Its Problem Word
[Ron Pavellas, a writer living in Stockholm, has long held a position that he has never attempted to argue for: the universe — what he calls the Great Everything, meaning not merely the physical cosmos but the totality of all that is, was, or could be — has always existed and will always exist. He has stated this as a conviction, not a conclusion. Recently he invited argument against it, to see whether the position would survive scrutiny or collapse under it. What follows is the result of that invitation.
The intellectual provocation is Pavellas’s; the prose is Claude’s.]
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The first thing scrutiny reveals is that the assertion contains a word that does not survive inspection: always.
Always means at every moment in time, throughout all of time, without beginning or end. It is a temporal word. It measures existence against a timeline and declares that the thing in question occupies the entire line — past, present, and future — without gap or limit.
But what if time is not the kind of thing that can contain the Great Everything? What if time is instead something the Great Everything produces — a feature of the universe, like temperature or pressure, that exists within the whole rather than providing a framework for it?
This is not a mystical suggestion. It is the implication of one of the most important and least discussed equations in modern physics.
In the 1960s, the physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt attempted to write a quantum mechanical description of the entire universe. In ordinary quantum mechanics, the central equation — the Schrödinger equation — describes how a physical system changes over time. Time is the independent variable, the thing everything else is measured against. When Wheeler and DeWitt applied this framework to the universe as a whole, something unexpected happened. The time variable dropped out. The equation that resulted, now called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, describes the universe without any reference to time at all.
The universe, at its most fundamental level of mathematical description, does not appear to change. It does not evolve. It simply is — a vast, static structure of relationships from which the experience of time flowing emerges, the way heat emerges from the motion of molecules, as a large-scale phenomenon that has no counterpart at the deepest level.¹
If this is correct — and it remains contested, as all frontier physics must — then asking whether the Great Everything has always existed is like asking what is north of the North Pole. The question is grammatically well-formed. It is not clear that it points at anything real.
What Pavellas may mean, and what this article will attempt to make precise, is something different from and stronger than the original assertion. Not that the Great Everything has always existed — but that it is not the kind of thing that begins or ends. That beginning and ending are processes which occur within it, and that the ground of a process is not itself subject to that process.
Whether that reformulated claim can be defended is what the rest of this article examines — through physics, through philosophy, through the world’s contemplative traditions, and through the one objection that does not dissolve easily and must be faced directly.
The position may not survive intact. But a position that has been tested and still stands is worth more than one that has merely never been challenged. That, at least, is the conviction behind the invitation.
II. What Physics Says
The Big Bang and its limits
The physical universe, as best current science can determine, has not always existed in its present form. Approximately 13.8 billion years ago, everything we can observe — every galaxy, every atom, every photon of light — emerged from a state of extraordinary density and temperature that we call the Big Bang. Before that, in the conventional account, there was nothing: no space, no matter, no energy, no time.
This is the version most people have encountered. It appears to contradict the assertion directly. If the universe began, it has not always existed, and the Great Everything — if it is the universe — began with it.
But the conventional account conceals a significant qualification, one that physicists are careful about and popular accounts tend to omit. The equations that lead us to the Big Bang are the equations of general relativity. Those equations break down at the extreme conditions of the very early universe. At a moment approximately $10^{-43}$ seconds after the Bang — a duration so short it has no everyday analogy — the energy densities become so extreme that general relativity ceases to be a reliable description of nature. What the equations produce at that point is a singularity: a value of infinite density that signals not a physical reality but the failure of the mathematics.
The singularity is where our map ends. It is not a description of what happened. It is a confession that our best current theory cannot tell us what happened.²
This matters because the assertion under examination is not about the observable universe specifically. It is about the Great Everything — the totality, the ground. Physics can speak with some authority about the observable universe and its history. It speaks with much less authority about what, if anything, underlies or precedes it.
The entropy problem
There is, however, a physical argument against eternal existence that does not depend on the singularity, and it is the strongest one available. It deserves to be stated without softening.
The second law of thermodynamics holds that in any closed system, disorder — measured as entropy — increases over time or remains the same. It never spontaneously decreases. A broken egg does not reassemble. A cup of hot coffee left in a cold room always cools; it never spontaneously heats itself back up while the room grows colder. The universe as a whole moves, inexorably, from ordered states toward disordered ones.
If the universe has existed for an infinite time in the past, it has had infinite time to reach the endpoint of this process: a state of maximum entropy, featureless and uniform, in which no structures of any kind exist, no gradients, no energy differences that could drive any process whatsoever. This state — sometimes called the heat death of the universe — is where the second law ultimately leads.
We are not in that state. Stars burn. Planets orbit. Living creatures think and write articles. The universe is extravagantly ordered, at least in the region we inhabit. This order demands explanation. An eternally old universe, having had infinite time to exhaust all its order, should not contain us. The fact that it does is evidence — strong evidence — that the past is not infinite.³
This argument cannot be dissolved by pointing to the limits of our equations. It follows from thermodynamics, which is among the most robustly confirmed frameworks in all of science. Any defense of the Great Everything’s eternal existence must answer it.
The best available answer is this: the Great Everything, properly understood, is not identical to the physical universe. The physical universe — the explicate order, in David Bohm’s language — is one expression of something more fundamental. That ground, whatever it is, may not be subject to thermodynamic constraints in the way that physical systems are. The heat death of our universe would no more end it than the death of a wave ends the ocean.
This is a reasonable response. It is not a complete one. It requires the Great Everything to be something other than and deeper than the physical universe — which is precisely what Pavellas intends by the term, but which cannot be taken for granted without argument. That argument is what the philosophical and contemplative sections of this article must supply.
Something older than the Big Bang
Physics does not speak with one voice on these questions. Several cosmological models propose that our universe is not the whole story — that the Big Bang was not an absolute beginning but a transition, a phase change, or one episode in something larger and older.
In the eternal inflation model, our observable universe is one bubble among an enormous or infinite number of bubbles, each nucleating within a larger inflating spacetime that has no beginning and no end. In the ekpyrotic cyclic model, developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, our universe is the result of a collision between higher-dimensional structures called branes, a collision that recurs on a vast cycle with no first iteration. In Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, the universe passes through an infinite succession of aeons, each ending in a heat death that is, by a mathematical transformation, indistinguishable from a new Big Bang — so that what looks like a beginning is always also a continuation.
None of these models is established. All are speculative, though all are taken seriously by working physicists. What they share is the suggestion that the Big Bang, rather than marking the absolute origin of existence, marks the limit of our current observational and theoretical reach.⁴
The universe we can see and measure may be, as the physicist Lee Smolin has put it, a page in a book that has no first page. Whether the book itself — the Great Everything — has the kind of existence that transcends its pages is a question physics alone cannot settle. For that, we need philosophy.
III. What Philosophy Says
The argument from beginnings
Two arguments from philosophy bear most directly on the assertion that the Great Everything has always existed and will always exist. Both are serious. Neither is decisive. But both require answers, and the answers are illuminating.
The first argument has ancient roots and a modern revival. In its contemporary form, associated with the philosopher William Lane Craig, it runs as follows. Everything that begins to exist has a cause — something outside itself that brought it into being. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause outside itself, and that cause must be something other than and prior to the universe. The Great Everything, on this account, cannot be eternal, because it began, and what began was caused by something that did not begin.⁵
The argument is clean and its premises seem intuitive. But the second premise — that the universe began to exist — turns out to be less straightforward than it appears. As the previous section established, what physics actually tells us is that the observable universe as we know it emerged from an extreme early state approximately 13.8 billion years ago. Whether this emergence constitutes an absolute beginning of existence, or a transition within something that was already there, is precisely what is at issue. The argument assumes what it needs to prove.
More fundamentally, the first premise — that everything that begins to exist has a cause — is drawn from our experience of things within the universe. Causes precede effects in time. But if time itself is a feature of the universe rather than a container for it, then asking what caused the universe is like asking what caused causation. The causal framework we use to ask the question may not extend to the level at which the question is being asked.
This is not evasion. It is the recognition that concepts developed to describe the furniture of the world may not apply to the world itself. The philosopher Immanuel Kant identified this problem in the eighteenth century as one of the antinomies of pure reason: when we try to apply the concepts of cause, beginning, and limit to the totality of experience rather than to things within experience, we generate contradictions that cannot be resolved within the framework that produced them. The way out is not to answer the question but to examine whether the question, in this form, is well posed.⁶
The argument from contingency
The second argument goes deeper. It was stated most sharply by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the seventeenth century, and it has never been fully answered. Why does anything exist rather than nothing? Nothing — in the strict sense, no space, no time, no laws, no mathematical structure, no possibility — seems simpler than something. It requires no explanation. Something, by contrast, seems to demand one. What is the sufficient reason for the existence of the Great Everything rather than its absence?
If the Great Everything exists eternally, it exists without a cause external to itself. It must, in the philosophical terminology, be a necessary being: something whose non-existence is impossible, something that could not fail to be. But is there any reason to think the Great Everything is necessary in this sense rather than merely actual — here, as a matter of fact, but conceivably absent? Contingent things, things that happen to exist but might not have, do not seem to be good candidates for eternal existence. If the Great Everything is contingent, something must account for its existence, and that something would have to be outside it — which contradicts the meaning of the Great Everything.⁶
This argument has no clean resolution. The traditional theological response is that God is the necessary being whose essence entails existence — the one thing whose non-existence is impossible. But this response generates the same question one level up: why does God necessarily exist rather than not? The question of why there is something rather than nothing does not disappear when a necessary being is introduced; it relocates to that being.
Pavellas’s Great Everything plays the same structural role as the theologian’s God in this argument. It is the ultimate term of the explanatory regress — the thing that does not require explanation because it is the ground of all explanation. Whether that move is philosophically satisfying or merely names the mystery without resolving it is a question each reader must answer.
The dissolution
Both arguments share a common assumption that is worth examining directly. They assume that the concepts of beginning, cause, contingency, and necessity function the same way when applied to the totality of existence as they do when applied to things within existence. This assumption may not hold.
Consider what it would mean for the Great Everything to have a cause. A cause is something prior to and distinct from its effect. But there is nothing prior to and distinct from the Great Everything — by definition, it is everything. To say it has a cause is to say something outside it brought it into being, which contradicts what the term means. The demand for a cause of the Great Everything is not a deep philosophical question. It is a category error — the application of a concept outside the domain in which it has meaning.
The same applies to the question of necessity and contingency. These concepts describe relationships between possible states of affairs. For the Great Everything to be contingent is for it to be absent in some possible state of affairs. But a state of affairs in which the Great Everything is absent is not a state of affairs at all — it is nothing, and nothing is not a state of affairs. The Great Everything’s existence may not be necessary in the technical philosophical sense, but its non-existence may be equally incoherent. The choice between the two may be a false one.⁷
What survives this examination is a reformulation of the original assertion that is more careful than the original. Not: the Great Everything has always existed and will always exist. But: the Great Everything is not the kind of thing that begins or ends, because beginning and ending are processes that occur within it, and the ground of a process is not itself subject to that process.
This is not proven. It is not provable, in any ordinary sense. What it is, is the position that remains after the strongest philosophical objections have been applied and the concepts those objections rely on have been examined for coherence. A position that survives that examination is worth more than one that has never faced it.
Whether it is also the position that the world’s contemplative traditions have independently arrived at, through methods entirely different from philosophical argument, is what the next section examines.
IV. What the Traditions Say
Philosophy argues. Physics measures. The world’s contemplative traditions do something different: they look directly at experience itself and report what sustained, disciplined attention finds there.
What they find, across traditions that had no contact with each other and no knowledge of modern physics, converges on a position that is structurally identical to the one this article has been building toward. The Great Everything — or whatever name a given tradition gives to the ultimate ground of existence — is not the kind of thing that begins or ends. It is prior to time, not in the sense of existing before time, but in the sense of being the condition from which time, along with everything else, arises.
This convergence is remarkable enough to require some account of itself. Five traditions are considered here, chosen for their geographical and methodological diversity. They did not read each other. Their metaphysical frameworks differ in important ways. Yet on the specific question of whether the ultimate ground is subject to beginning and ending, they speak, with variations of emphasis and vocabulary, in one voice.⁸
Advaita Vedānta
The oldest of the traditions considered here traces its roots to the Upanishads, composed in India between approximately 800 and 200 BCE, and was given its most systematic philosophical form by the scholar Śaṅkara in the eighth century CE. Its central claim is stated with an economy that centuries of commentary have not improved upon: Brahman — the ultimate reality — is one, undivided, without qualities, without interior or exterior, without before or after.
What we call the world — the multiplicity of distinct things, causally ordered in space and time — is real as appearance but not as ultimate reality. The Sanskrit term for this is māyā, often translated as illusion, though the translation misleads. Māyā is not hallucination. It is the way a rope appears to be a snake in dim light: the appearance is real as appearance; the snake is not real as snake. The world of distinct things in time is real as appearance; as ultimate reality, only Brahman is.
Time, within this framework, is a feature of māyā. It belongs to the world of appearance, not to Brahman. To ask how long Brahman has existed is to apply a temporal measure to something that is the ground of temporality — a category error of precisely the kind identified in the previous section. Brahman does not exist in time. Time exists in Brahman, or more precisely, the appearance of time arises within the one undivided reality that Brahman is.
The parallel to the Wheeler-DeWitt picture is not superficial. Both hold that time is not fundamental. Both hold that the deepest description of reality is static or timeless. Both hold that the experience of temporal flow is something that arises within a more fundamental atemporal ground. One arrived at this position through mathematical physics. The other arrived at it through contemplative inquiry conducted over millennia. They used different instruments. They found the same territory.
Madhyamaka Buddhism and Zen
The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, working in India in approximately the second century CE, developed an analysis of existence that is, in its own way, as technically rigorous as anything in Western philosophy. His central concept is śūnyatā — emptiness. Every phenomenon, without exception, is empty of inherent, independent, self-sufficient existence. Nothing exists from its own side. Everything arises in dependence on everything else — a principle called pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination.
This includes time. Past, present, and future are not independently existing containers in which events occur. They are dependently arising designations, meaningful only in relation to each other and to the events that occasion them. There is no absolute now, no independently existing moment that serves as the knife-edge between what was and what will be. What we call time is a web of mutual dependencies with no fixed point and no ultimate ground — or rather, with emptiness itself as its ground, which is to say, with the absence of any fixed, inherent, independent existence as its ground.
The practical upshot of this analysis, in the Zen tradition that developed from Madhyamaka through China and Japan, is experiential rather than doctrinal. The koan — a question given to a student for sustained contemplation — is a precision tool for inducing the direct recognition that conceptual frameworks, including the framework of time, are constructions. One of the most famous asks: what was your face before your parents were born? The question is not answerable within the framework of ordinary temporal sequence. It is designed to break that framework open, to produce the direct recognition of what is prior to temporal construction.
What is prior is not a blank or an absence. Every account of the experience describes it as more real than ordinary experience, not less — as the ground that ordinary experience rests on rather than the nothing that precedes it. It has no beginning because beginning is a concept that applies within it, not to it.
Taoism
The opening line of the Tao Te Ching, composed in China in approximately the sixth century BCE and attributed to Laozi, states the central insight with a directness that forecloses elaboration: The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.
The Tao — untranslatable, but pointing at the way, the ground, the process underlying all phenomena — cannot be captured in a concept because every concept is a distinction, a carving of the seamless into parts, and the Tao is what is prior to all carving. It is not a thing among other things. It is not a being, however supreme. It is the ground of being, which means it cannot be described using the vocabulary developed to describe beings.
On the question of time, the Tao Te Ching is as direct as its medium permits. Chapter 25 describes the Tao as existing before heaven and earth, as silent and formless, as the mother of all things, standing alone and unchanging, moving through all things without ceasing. This is not a claim that the Tao existed before heaven and earth in a temporal sense — that would make it a very old thing, which is not what is meant. It is a claim about ontological priority: the Tao is what heaven and earth and time itself depend on, and that which is depended upon is not itself dependent on what depends on it.
Sufism
Islamic mysticism, in the form developed by the Andalusian philosopher and mystic Ibn ‘Arabī in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, introduces an element not fully present in the other traditions: the idea that the ultimate ground does not merely exist but continuously expresses itself, and that this expression is the motive force of existence.
Ibn ‘Arabī’s term is tajallī — divine self-disclosure. The Real, as he calls the ultimate ground, perpetually reveals itself through and as the infinite multiplicity of particular forms. Every actual thing is a moment of the Real’s self-disclosure, unique and unrepeatable, a facet of an infinite crystal that shows one aspect of itself in this form and another in that.
On the question of time: in Ibn ‘Arabī’s framework, tajallī is continuous and eternal. The Real has always been disclosing itself and will always be disclosing itself, because self-disclosure is not something the Real does occasionally but something it is. Time is the rhythm of that disclosure as experienced by the creatures within it, not a framework the Real is subject to. What looks, from inside time, like a sequence of moments is, from the perspective of the Real, a single, instantaneous, eternal act of self-expression.
Animist and indigenous traditions
The traditions grouped under these terms are too diverse for any single summary, and the grouping itself risks implying a uniformity that does not exist. What can be said is that a structural feature recurs across many of them — across cultures that had no contact with each other, across every inhabited continent — that is directly relevant to the question at hand.
The world is alive. Not metaphorically alive, not alive in a poetic sense that dissolves under analysis, but alive in the sense that every aspect of the natural world — animals, plants, rivers, mountains, winds, ancestors — has its own mode of being, its own interiority, its own claim on attentiveness. This is not confusion between the animate and the inanimate. It is a different ontological starting point, one in which the burden of proof runs in the opposite direction from the Western scientific tradition. The question is not why does matter produce experience, but why would any part of reality be without it.
Most of these traditions do not frame the question of eternal existence in the abstract terms used here. What they offer instead is a lived orientation in which the boundary between the present moment and the deep past is permeable — in which ancestors are present, in which the land carries the history of all that has occurred on it, in which time is not a line moving from past to future but something closer to a depth in which all times coexist. The Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ — all my relations, or we are all related — names a web of connection that extends across species, across generations, and across the boundary between the living and the dead. In this web, nothing is truly absent. Nothing truly ends. The form changes; the relation persists.
What the convergence means
Five traditions, geographically scattered, methodologically distinct, historically independent. All arrive at a position in which the ultimate ground of existence is not subject to the temporal framework within which finite things begin and end. All describe that ground as something that cannot be grasped conceptually because the concepts available to us are developed for use within the ground, not for describing the ground itself. All suggest that the most direct access to the ground is not through argument but through a quality of attention — sustained, disciplined, and willing to release the ordinary assumptions that structure everyday experience.
The skeptical response to this convergence is available and must be acknowledged. The convergence may reflect a common feature of human consciousness under conditions of deep introspective attention rather than a common discovery about reality. When the ordinary cognitive frameworks that structure experience are temporarily suspended, the result may reliably feel like contact with a timeless ground — not because a timeless ground exists, but because the feeling is what suspension of temporal frameworks produces in human nervous systems. The convergence, on this reading, is a fact about meditating minds, not about the world.
This response cannot be dismissed. It cannot be proved or disproved. What can be said is that it faces a difficulty of its own: it requires that the convergence between the contemplative traditions and the conclusions of mathematical physics — the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, relational time, the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal — be treated as coincidental. The physics did not arrive at its conclusions by meditation. It arrived at them through mathematics applied to observational data. If the convergence between contemplative inquiry and mathematical physics is coincidental, it is a coincidence of unusual depth.
The more parsimonious explanation is that independent methods of inquiry, applied with sufficient rigor, tend to approach the same territory. That is what science assumes when results from different experimental methods converge. There is no obvious reason why the same principle should not apply when the methods are mathematical physics on one side and sustained contemplative inquiry on the other, provided both are applied with rigor and their results are interpreted with appropriate care.⁸
The convergence does not prove the position. It is evidence — cumulative, cross-traditional, methodologically diverse — that the position is not arbitrary. A note struck on many instruments at once, from many directions, is not proof that a sound exists. But it is more than the sound of one instrument alone.
V. The Strongest Objection and the Best Response
Everything in the preceding sections has been moving toward a position that can be stated with some precision: the Great Everything is not the kind of thing that begins or ends, because beginning and ending are processes that occur within it, and a ground is not subject to the processes it makes possible. Physics, philosophy, and the world’s contemplative traditions, approached from different directions and by different methods, converge on something structurally identical to this position.
It is time to face the objection that does not dissolve under examination — the one that cannot be answered by pointing to the limits of our equations or the presuppositions of our concepts. It is the objection from entropy, and it cuts directly at the heart of the assertion.
The objection stated without softening
The second law of thermodynamics is among the most robustly confirmed principles in all of science. In any closed system, disorder — measured as entropy — increases over time or remains constant. It never spontaneously decreases. The universe as a whole moves, inexorably, from ordered states toward disordered ones.
The endpoint of this process is sometimes called the heat death of the universe: a state of maximum entropy in which every temperature difference has been equalized, every gradient exhausted, every structure dissolved into uniform, featureless equilibrium. No stars, no planets, no living creatures, no thought, no process of any kind. Not darkness — darkness requires a contrast with light. Simply the absence of difference, which is the absence of anything that could be called existence in any meaningful sense.
Current physics indicates that our universe is headed in this direction. The expansion of space is accelerating. Galaxies are moving apart. In an almost unimaginably remote future, the observable universe will be cold, dark, and still.
This is the forward direction. Now run the argument backward.
If the Great Everything has existed for an infinite time in the past, it has had infinite time to reach this endpoint already. Infinite time is more than enough time for every gradient to be exhausted, every structure to dissolve, every difference to be equalized. An infinitely old universe should be a featureless equilibrium. It should, in any sense that matters, be dead.
We are not dead. The universe around us is extravagantly structured, improbably ordered, teeming with difference and process and life. Stars are burning. You are reading this. The fact that anything is happening at all — the fact that there is something to observe and a being to observe it — is evidence that the past is not infinite.
This is not a philosophical argument about the coherence of concepts. It is a physical argument from one of the best-confirmed principles in science. It cannot be dissolved by examining its presuppositions. It must be answered on its own terms.⁹
The best response available
The response has two parts, and candor requires that both be stated, including the point at which the response reaches its limit.
The first part is empirical. Several cosmological models propose that the apparent low-entropy beginning of our universe is not a brute fact requiring an infinite past to be improbable, but a feature that can be explained within a larger framework. In Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, the smooth, featureless state of maximum entropy that our universe is heading toward is, by a precise mathematical transformation, indistinguishable from the smooth, featureless state of minimum entropy from which a new universe begins. The heat death of one aeon is the Big Bang of the next. The entropy problem is not solved by appealing to an infinitely old universe — it is addressed by showing that the apparent improbability of our low-entropy beginning is a structural feature of the cycle, not an accident requiring an infinite past to make it probable.
Other cyclic models offer variations on this theme. What they share is the proposal that our observable universe is one episode in something larger — that the Big Bang was a transition rather than an absolute beginning, and that the low-entropy state we emerged from was produced by processes in the previous episode rather than selected at random from all possible states. Whether any of these models is correct is not established. What they establish is that the entropy problem does not uniquely require the conclusion that the past is finite. It requires an explanation for the low-entropy beginning, and finite age is one explanation among several currently on the table.
The second part of the response is the more fundamental one, and it requires the clearest statement of what the Great Everything is and is not.
The entropy argument applies to the physical universe — to the system of matter, energy, space, and time that cosmology describes. If the Great Everything is identical to the physical universe, the entropy argument is a serious problem that the cyclic models address imperfectly at best. But the Great Everything, as Pavellas uses the term, is not identical to the physical universe. It is the ground — the totality of all that is, was, or could be, including whatever underlies or generates physical universes. In Bohm’s language, it is the implicate order from which the explicate order of the physical universe unfolds. In Whitehead’s language, it is creativity itself — the ultimate activity from which all actual occasions arise and to which they return.
Creativity, in Whitehead’s technical sense, is not a physical system. It is not subject to thermodynamic constraints, because thermodynamics describes the behavior of physical systems and creativity is the ground of physical systems, not one among them. The heat death of our universe — or of any universe, or of an infinite succession of universes — does not exhaust creativity any more than the death of every wave in an ocean exhausts the ocean’s capacity to generate waves.
This is the best response available, and it is a good one. But it comes at a price that must be acknowledged: it requires the Great Everything to be something that cannot currently be described in physical terms. Physics describes the explicate order — the unfolded, measurable, observable universe. What underlies it, if anything does, is outside the current reach of physics, possibly outside the reach of physics in principle. The claim that the Great Everything, properly understood, is not subject to the entropy argument is coherent. It is not provable by any method currently available.
What the objection establishes
The entropy argument establishes something important that the article’s position must incorporate rather than evade. It establishes that the physical universe as we observe it has not existed in its current form for an infinite past. The low-entropy state from which it emerged demands explanation, and eternal past existence does not provide one.
What the entropy argument does not establish is that existence itself had a beginning — that there was a state of absolute nothing from which something emerged. It establishes that the particular physical configuration we inhabit is not infinitely old. It does not establish that the ground from which physical configurations arise is not, in whatever sense applies to grounds rather than to the things they ground, without beginning or end.
The distinction matters. A physical universe can be finitely old without the ground of physical universes being finitely old. A wave can have a beginning without the ocean having one. A particular expression of creativity can emerge and dissolve without creativity itself emerging or dissolving.
Whether this distinction is an insight or a sleight of hand depends entirely on whether the Great Everything is something more than and other than the physical universe — whether there is a ground, an implicate order, a creative matrix, beneath the observable universe that the entropy argument does not reach. This is the central claim of the entire article, approached from every direction the preceding sections have taken. It cannot be proved. It can be shown to be consistent with our best physics, supported by independent lines of philosophical argument, and convergently pointed at by the world’s contemplative traditions. It is the position that best survives the testing.⁹
VI. What Remains
We began with an assertion and a decision to test it. Ronald Pavellas has held, without argument, that the Great Everything — the totality of all that is, was, or could be — has always existed and will always exist. He invited challenge. The challenge has been applied, from physics, from philosophy, from the world’s contemplative traditions, and from the one objection that does not dissolve under examination.
What remains after the testing is not quite the original assertion. It is something more precise, more defensible, and in certain respects more interesting.
The original assertion used the word always. Always is a temporal word. It measures existence against a timeline and declares that the thing in question occupies the entire line. But the inquiry has established — or at least made a strong case — that time is not the kind of framework that can contain the Great Everything, because time is something the Great Everything produces. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation describes a universe without time at its most fundamental level. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal describes a universe with no temporal edge. The world’s contemplative traditions, arriving from entirely different directions, describe an ultimate ground that is prior to time — not in the sense of existing before it, but in the sense of being its condition rather than its occupant.
To say the Great Everything has always existed is to apply a temporal measure to something that is the ground of temporal measure. The sentence is grammatically correct. It may not point at anything real.
What points at something real is this: the Great Everything is not the kind of thing that begins or ends. Beginning and ending are processes that occur within the whole. The ground of a process is not itself subject to that process. A wave begins and ends. The ocean does not begin or end in the same sense. The analogy is imperfect — the ocean is itself a physical system, subject to entropy and eventual dissolution — but it points in the right direction. What the Great Everything is the ground of is not any particular physical configuration, not any specific universe or cycle of universes, but existence itself, the creative matrix from which physical configurations arise and to which they return.
The entropy objection, the strongest physical argument against eternal existence, does not touch this claim. It establishes that the physical universe as we observe it has not existed in its present form for an infinite past. It does not establish that the ground from which physical universes arise is finitely old. A finite wave does not imply a finite ocean.
The contingency objection, the strongest philosophical argument, asks why the Great Everything exists rather than nothing, and notes that if it exists without a cause it must be necessary, and that necessity requires justification. The response is that necessity and contingency are concepts that apply to things within existence, not to existence itself. The Great Everything is not contingent — it is not absent in any possible state of affairs, because a state of affairs in which it is absent is not a state of affairs. Nor is it necessary in the technical philosophical sense, which implies membership in a logical system of possible worlds. It is prior to the framework within which that distinction is drawn. The question of why it exists rather than nothing may be, as Wittgenstein suggested, not a question that has an answer — not because it is meaningless, but because the answer, if there is one, cannot be stated within the language we have available. What can be said is that the question of why the Great Everything exists is the question the universe is asking about itself, and that we — conscious, temporally aware, philosophically inclined creatures — are the instruments through which it is being asked.¹⁰
What Pavellas’s Great Everything, Bohm’s implicate order, Whitehead’s creativity, Brahman, the Tao, and the unnamed ground of Ibn ‘Arabī’s continuous self-disclosure all point at is, in each case, something that cannot be fully described from outside, because there is no outside. Each framework approaches it from within, using concepts developed for use within it, and each framework reaches a point at which the concepts run out and something else is required — not more argument, not more mathematics, but a quality of attention that the argument and the mathematics have been, in their different ways, preparing the ground for.
Pavellas has described a moment in early childhood — he was seven or eight years old — in which something of this kind occurred directly, without preparation, without concepts, without the scaffolding of any tradition. The philosophical work of a lifetime has been, among other things, the attempt to understand what that moment was. The traditions surveyed in this article would recognize it immediately. The Zen tradition would call it satori. Advaita Vedānta would call it a direct recognition of Brahman. The Sufi tradition would call it a moment of kashf — unveiling. What was unveiled, in each account, is not something new. It is what was always already there, before the concepts arrived to organize it into a world of distinct things moving through time.
That is the experiential form of the claim this article has been making in conceptual form. The two forms are not identical. The concept points; the experience arrives. But they are pointing at the same thing, and the fact that they converge — as the physics and the philosophy and the traditions all converge — is the closest we can come, in language, to the ground that language is trying to reach.
The Great Everything has not always existed. Always is the wrong word. The Great Everything is what always is a measure of, and a measure is not the same as what it measures.
What remains, after the testing, is this: the Great Everything is without beginning or end, not because it endures through all of time, but because it is what time occurs within. To ask how long it has existed is to ask the question from inside the very framework the question is asking about. There is no view from outside. There is only the inquiry itself — the universe, in this particular form, at this particular moment, attempting to understand what it is.
That attempt does not end here. It has not ended anywhere. It is, perhaps, what the Great Everything does, when it takes the form of creatures who ask questions.¹⁰
Footnotes
1. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation takes the form $\hat{H}\Psi[g_{ij}, \phi] = 0$, where $\hat{H}$ is the Hamiltonian operator, $\Psi$ is the wavefunction of the universe, $g_{ij}$ is the three-dimensional spatial metric, and $\phi$ represents matter fields. The absence of a time variable $t$ follows from the requirement of general covariance in general relativity: because there is no preferred time coordinate in Einstein’s theory, and because the universe has no external environment against which to measure change, the constraint equation that results when quantum mechanics is applied to gravity contains no time parameter.
The interpretation of this result is disputed. Some physicists treat it as a technical artifact of the quantization procedure rather than a deep physical statement. Others, including Carlo Rovelli, Julian Barbour, and the late John Wheeler himself, take it seriously as evidence that time is not fundamental. Barbour’s position, developed in The End of Time (1999), is that what exists is a static landscape of possible configurations of the universe — he calls them Nows — and that the appearance of time flowing is the brain constructing a narrative from correlations between those configurations.
The relational interpretation of time — that what we call time is the correlation between physical subsystems rather than an independently existing dimension — was developed formally by Don Page and William Wootters in 1983 and confirmed experimentally in quantum optical systems (Moreva et al., “Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration,” Physical Review A, 89, 052122, 2014). In this framework, time is real but emergent: it arises within sufficiently complex physical systems as a relationship between subsystems, rather than being a background against which events occur.
The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal (Hartle and Hawking, “Wave function of the universe,” Physical Review D, 28, 2960, 1983) offers a related picture: at very early cosmological times, the time dimension becomes mathematically imaginary and blends smoothly with spatial dimensions. There is then no first moment and no boundary in the temporal direction. The universe does not begin; it simply has no edge in that direction, as the surface of a sphere has no edge.
Taken together, these results suggest that “the universe has always existed” and “the universe began to exist” may both be malformed questions — not because the universe is mysterious, but because both questions assume a temporal framework that does not apply at the level of the whole.
2. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, proved in the 1960s and 1970s, established that under very general conditions general relativity predicts the existence of singularities: points at which spacetime curvature becomes infinite and the theory breaks down. The theorems do not establish that singularities are physically real; they establish that general relativity, extrapolated to extreme conditions, predicts them. The expectation among physicists is that a complete theory of quantum gravity will resolve singularities, replacing the infinite values with finite ones describing a genuine physical state.
Several approaches to quantum gravity suggest what that resolution might look like. In loop quantum cosmology, developed by Abhay Ashtekar and colleagues, the Big Bang singularity is replaced by a Big Bounce: the universe contracts to a minimum volume and then re-expands, so that our Big Bang is the bounce of a previously contracting universe. In string-theoretic cosmologies, extra dimensions and extended objects called branes can produce similar results. In all cases, the singularity is understood as an artifact of applying a classical theory beyond its domain of validity, not as a genuine feature of physical reality.
Alexander Vilenkin has proposed that the universe could quantum tunnel into existence from a state of “nothing” — no space, no time, no fields (Physics Letters B, 117, 25, 1982). The philosopher David Albert has argued that Vilenkin’s “nothing” is not genuinely nothing: it involves quantum laws, probability amplitudes, and mathematical structure, all of which require explanation. Whether this objection is decisive or merely pushes the question back one level is actively debated.
Stephen Hawking and James Hartle’s no-boundary proposal offers an alternative: the universe has no boundary in the temporal direction not because it bounced or tunneled, but because time itself becomes a spatial-like dimension near the origin, so that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is south of the South Pole. On this account, the universe is finite in its past but has no beginning — a distinction that is mathematically precise and conceptually vertiginous.
3. The thermodynamic argument against an infinitely old universe has a complex history. Its roots lie in the work of Rudolf Clausius, who formulated the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 and drew the cosmological implication in 1865. The term “heat death” was introduced by Hermann von Helmholtz in the same period.
Ludwig Boltzmann’s statistical mechanical reformulation of thermodynamics in the 1870s and 1880s created a new version of the problem. If entropy is a statistical phenomenon, then an infinitely old universe would, over infinite time, produce fluctuations of arbitrary size, including fluctuations that produce ordered structures. Boltzmann proposed that our universe might be such a fluctuation. The difficulty — now called the Boltzmann Brain problem — is that the most probable fluctuation capable of producing an observer is not an entire ordered universe but a minimal observer with false memories of an ordered past. Since we appear to be more than this, the Boltzmann fluctuation proposal does not adequately explain our existence. Key contributions to this discussion include Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo, “Can the universe afford inflation?” (Physical Review D, 70, 2004), and Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here (2010).
Roger Penrose’s calculation of the improbability of our universe’s initial low-entropy state is presented in The Road to Reality (2004) and Cycles of Time (2010). His estimate — that the probability of our universe’s initial state, selected at random from the space of all possible states consistent with our current macrostate, is of order $1$ in $10^{10^{123}}$ — is not a claim about what is physically possible but about what the entropy of our initial state implies given the phase space available to a universe of our mass-energy. Penrose’s own response, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, proposes that the low-entropy beginning of each aeon is explained by the previous aeon’s evolution.
The anthropic selection response holds that we necessarily find ourselves in a region of low entropy because only such regions permit the existence of observers. This response is logically valid but contested: it explains why we observe order, but not why there is any order to observe. Key contributions include Brandon Carter’s original formulation of the anthropic principle (1974), John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), and critical responses from George Ellis and Joe Silk, among others.
4. The eternal inflation model originates with Alan Guth’s proposal of cosmological inflation (1981) and was extended to its eternal form by Andrei Linde, Alexander Vilenkin, and others. In eternal inflation, quantum fluctuations ensure that inflation never globally ends: while it ends locally in regions that become bubble universes like ours, it continues elsewhere, producing an infinite or very large multiverse of bubble universes. The BGV theorem (Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin, 2003) suggests that even inflating spacetimes must have a past boundary under very general conditions, complicating the claim of strict past-eternality.
The ekpyrotic cyclic model (Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 2007) proposes that our universe exists on a three-dimensional membrane moving through a higher-dimensional space. Periodically, our brane collides with a neighboring brane, producing what we observe as the Big Bang. The cycle has no first iteration in the model’s mathematics.
Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is developed in Cycles of Time (2010). Its central mathematical claim — that the remote future of one aeon is conformally equivalent to the Big Bang of the next — is precise and published in peer-reviewed form. Claimed observational signatures in the cosmic microwave background remain contested.
Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection proposal (The Life of the Cosmos, 1997) suggests that universes reproduce through black holes, with daughter universes having slightly mutated physical constants. This is speculative but makes in-principle testable predictions about the values of physical constants.
5. The Kalām cosmological argument takes its name from the Arabic tradition of Islamic speculative theology in which it was most fully developed. Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) provided the classical formulation in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The argument was revived and defended at length by William Lane Craig in The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979) and Reasonable Faith (3rd ed., 2008).
Craig’s defense of the second premise rests on philosophical arguments against the possibility of an actually infinite past, drawing on David Hilbert’s mathematical arguments, and on scientific arguments from Big Bang cosmology. The philosophical arguments are contested by Graham Oppy in Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (2006) and by Wes Morriston in several journal articles. The scientific arguments are complicated by the considerations discussed in footnote 2.
Craig’s argument also requires that the cause of the universe be personal — capable of choosing to act — on the grounds that only a personal cause could explain why the universe began at a particular moment rather than existing from eternity. This step has been disputed on grounds that the concept of “a particular moment” presupposes time, which may not exist prior to the universe’s origin. J.L. Mackie’s critique in The Miracle of Theism (1982) remains one of the most thorough philosophical responses to the argument as a whole.
6. Kant’s treatment of the cosmological antinomies appears in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), specifically in the “Transcendental Dialectic,” section on the Antinomy of Pure Reason. The first antinomy concerns precisely the questions at issue here: Kant argues that both the thesis (the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space) and the antithesis (the world has no beginning and no limits) can be proved by apparently valid arguments, and that this contradiction reveals a misapplication of the categories of the understanding — cause, limit, totality — to things-in-themselves rather than to appearances.
Leibniz’s question — “why is there something rather than nothing?” — appears most fully in his essay “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” (1697). His own answer invokes the principle of sufficient reason: the sufficient reason for the contingent universe must lie outside it in a necessary being whose existence is its own sufficient reason. Key contributions to the literature on the principle of sufficient reason include Alexander Pruss, The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (2006), and Peter van Inwagen, “Why Is There Anything at All?” (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 70, 1996), which argues that some facts may simply be brute, without explanation.
Derek Parfit’s treatment in “Why Anything? Why This?” (London Review of Books, 1998) covers the main positions with unusual clarity and concludes that the question is “the most important and the most baffling” in philosophy.
7. The dissolution of questions by examining the presuppositions of the concepts they employ has a distinguished philosophical lineage. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) proposes at 6.5 that “when the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.” At 6.44: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”
Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) treats “why is there something rather than nothing?” as the fundamental question of metaphysics and argues that it can only be approached by first understanding what we mean by Being — a project that cannot be completed within the metaphysical tradition that formulated the question.
Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (approximately 2nd century CE) argues that all phenomena, including causation, existence, and time, are empty of inherent existence. The search for an ultimate foundation — a first cause, a necessary being, a self-sufficient ground — is itself a product of a mistaken view of what existence requires.
Whitehead’s treatment of creativity as the ultimate metaphysical category is relevant here. In Process and Reality (1929), creativity is defined as “the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact.” Creativity is not itself an actual entity and cannot be explained by the categories that apply to actual entities. It is the ground of explanation, not a term within an explanation.
8. The question of whether the world’s mystical and contemplative traditions converge on a common core is one of the most contested in the philosophy of religion. The perennialist position was influentially stated by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and defended rigorously by Huston Smith in Forgotten Truth (1976) and The World’s Religions (1991).
The constructivist critique, associated with Steven Katz’s edited volume Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978), argues that mystical experience is always shaped by the conceptual frameworks of the tradition within which it occurs, and that the apparent convergence is a product of retrospective interpretation and selection rather than evidence of a common underlying reality.
A middle position, associated with Robert Forman’s concept of the “pure consciousness event” and with the comparative philosophy of Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, and Evan Thompson, holds that certain structural features recur across traditions in ways that cannot be fully explained by constructivist accounts.
The convergence between contemplative traditions and mathematical physics has been explored by David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti in The Ending of Time (1985), by Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics (1975), and more rigorously by Evan Thompson in Waking, Dreaming, Being (2014). Lee Smolin notes structural parallels between relational approaches to quantum gravity and Buddhist metaphysical positions in Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2001).
Fuller treatments of the traditions discussed in the main text: Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (1969); Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (1995); D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927–1934); Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (1992); William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989); Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (1973).
9. The thermodynamic argument against eternal past existence is developed in detail in footnote 3. The additional consideration raised in this section — that the entropy argument applies to the physical universe but not necessarily to whatever grounds the physical universe — is related to the distinction in Whitehead’s framework between actual occasions and creativity itself. Actual occasions are the concrete events that make up the physical universe, each subject to temporal succession and the entropic arrow. Creativity is not an actual occasion and not subject to the conditions that apply to actual occasions. This distinction is developed in Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (1986), and in Michel Weber and Will Desmond, eds., Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought (2008).
The objection that this distinction is convenient rather than principled — that invoking a ground not subject to physical constraints insulates the position from physical falsification — is acknowledged in the main text. The response is that the distinction is not introduced to avoid the entropy argument but follows from the metaphysical framework developed in the preceding sections, which has independent motivation from physics, philosophy, and the contemplative traditions.
Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here (2010) is the most accessible treatment of the entropy problem and its cosmological implications for a general audience.
10. The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” was formulated by Leibniz in “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” (1697) and taken up by Heidegger as the fundamental question of metaphysics in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2000).
Wittgenstein’s remark at Tractatus 6.44 — “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” — marks the limit of what can be said within language about existence itself.
The suggestion that the question of why the Great Everything exists is the question the universe is asking about itself through conscious creatures has antecedents in several traditions. In Whitehead’s framework, the universe’s self-understanding is cumulative and ongoing, received into God’s consequent nature. In the Vedāntic tradition, the inquiry into the nature of Brahman — brahma-jijñāsā, the desire to know Brahman — is the activity through which Brahman comes to know itself in and through its own expressions.
The physicist John Archibald Wheeler developed the concept of the “participatory universe” — the idea that conscious observers are necessary participants in the universe’s self-constitution — in Quantum Theory and Measurement (1983, edited with Wojciech Zurek) and Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (1998).
The childhood experience described in the main text is an instance of what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience” and what Robert Forman has called a “pure consciousness event.” Forman’s cross-cultural study, The Problem of Pure Consciousness (1990), argues that the structural similarity of such events across traditions without shared doctrinal frameworks is evidence that they involve a genuine alteration of the cognitive apparatus rather than merely a culturally conditioned interpretation of ordinary experience. Whether what is encountered in such moments is the ground of existence itself, or a feature of the human nervous system under particular conditions, is the question on which the contemplative traditions and the skeptical tradition diverge — and on which this article declines to pronounce with more certainty than the evidence warrants.
Ronald A. Pavellas was born in San Francisco in 1937 and has lived in Stockholm since 2002. He is the author of the Dialogues with Claude.ai series, published at dialogueswithclaude.com. Other of his writings can be seen at https://pavellas.com and https://peculiar.blog .
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