The great rejections

The letter bearing the news that “there is no mystery of existence,” though unexpected, did not exactly come out of the blue. A week earlier, the New York Times had published a review I had written of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. In the review, I had suggested that the question Why is there something rather than nothing? might be the theist’s final bulwark against the encroachments of science. “If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world,” I had observed, “it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label ‘God.’ ” And this observation had touched a nerve in my correspondent, a man called Adolf Grünbaum.

The name was hardly unknown to me. In the philosophical world, Adolf Grünbaum is a man of immense stature. He is arguably the greatest living philosopher of science. In the 1950s, Grünbaum became famous as the foremost thinker about the subtleties of the

space and time. Three decades later, he achieved a wider degree of fame—and some notoriety—by launching a sustained and powerful attack on Freudian psychoanalysis. This brought down on him the wrath of much of the psychoanalytic world and landed him on the front page of the science section of the New York Times.

All of this I did know about the man. What I hadn’t been aware of was Grünbaum’s implacable hostility to religious belief. He was particularly irked, it seemed, by cosmic mystery-mongering as a strategy for shoring up belief in a supernatural creator. As far as he was concerned, the question Why is there a world rather than nothing at all? was not a path to God or to anything else. It was, to borrow a term from his native German, a Scheinproblem—a pseudo-problem.

What made Grünbaum such a fierce rejectionist? I could understand why someone might think the mystery of existence was, by its very nature, insoluble. But to laugh it off as a pseudo-problem seemed a bit too cavalier. Still, if Grünbaum turned out to be right, the whole quest to explain the existence of the world would be a colossal waste of effort, a fool’s errand. Why bother trying to solve a mystery when you can simply dissolve it?

So, not without trepidation, I wrote back to Grünbaum. Could we chat? He responded with characteristic brio, inviting me to come see him in Pittsburgh, where he has lived and taught for the last five decades. He’d be delighted to explain why the mystery of existence was a nonstarter, he said in his letter, even if it took a few days to convince me. When it came to his philosophical tutelage, I could “write my own ticket.”

I had never been to Pittsburgh, a city I knew only from the movie Flashdance. But I was eager to meet Grünbaum, and to see the Monongahela River. So I caught the first flight I could from New York and, a couple of hours later, checked into a chain hotel that conveniently stood in the shadow of the University of Pittsburgh’s soaring neo-Gothic Cathedral of Learning. My eager mentor Grünbaum was waiting for me in the lobby when I arrived, grinning amiably and looking like an octogenarian cross between Danny DeVito and Edward G. Robinson.