Why Is There Something?

Why is there something rather than nothing? is usually posed as a philosophical question, the ontological question. Kurt Wise (Faith, Form, and Time) poses it as a scientific question. 

According to current models of the history of the cosmos, “organisms have been in existence hundreds of thousands of times longer than suggested by young-age creationism. They claim that hundreds of thousands of times more mutations have occurred in the history of life than is suggested by young-age creationism. But in these long-age models, mutations have been accumulating for so many years that unless some mechanism for cleaning out mutations exists, all organisms would have died out long ago from catastrophic errors in their DNA. No such mechanism has been discovered. It is also difficult to conceive of a way to design a system that could prevent such failure in the course of billions of years of earth history. Yet organisms do not seem to be going extinct because of high mutational loads. This suggests that organisms possess the low mutational loads expected in the young-age creation theory rather than the much higher genetic loads expected in alternate models of earth history” (129).

Wise’s argument doesn’t prove young-earth creationism, and he doesn’t say it does. It may only indicate that there is some natural (or supernatural) “cleaning” mechanism that has not yet been identified. But it does point up a question that old-earth models have some trouble addressing.