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he is correct – although he means to be disparaging – when he states that «The metaphysical ‘rule,’... that ‘out of nothing nothing comes,’ has no foundation in science» (174). Quite so. But instead of recognizing here the limits of scientific inquiry and the starting point for a different kind of rational reflection, in his scientism Krauss tries to force an empirical, scientific answer on a question that cannot in principle have one. Shortly after drawing as near as he comes to grasping the difference between a physical and a metaphysical question, he absurdly suggests that a conceptualization of multiverses in which «the laws of nature are themselves stochastic and random» could circumvent the ontological contingency of those stochastic, random laws (176). Unsurprisingly, given this fundamental incomprehension, everywhere in his book «nothing» or «nothingness» turns out to refer to some primordially basic, already existing, natural condition or quality of the very early universe (or occasionally, its post-entropic, presumptive end-state billions of years hence). Nowhere in his exposition does nothing or nothingness mean ontological non-existence. Hence, depending on what Krauss is discussing, nothing or nothingness refers variously to «empty space» (58, 149, 152), «almost nothing» (148), «gravity» (148), «non-zero energy» (150), «quantum fluctuations» (151), «underlying laws of nature» (151), «gravity and quantum mechanics» (151), «the final post-entropic state of the universe» (157), «[q]uantum processes associated with elementary particles in the primordial heat bath» (158), «quantum mechanics and general relativity» (161), or «quantum gravity» (169). Krauss concedes that «it would be disingenuous to suggest that empty space endowed with energy, which drives inflation [of the universe after the Big Bang], is really nothing. In this picture one must assume that space exists and can store energy, and one uses the laws of physics like general relativity to calculate the consequences» (153). Exactly. This is extremely interesting and, if true, takes its place alongside the other astonishing findings that cosmologists and particle physicists have contributed to our knowledge. It also has absolutely nothing to do with ontological nothingness.

      To move from Krauss’s book to David Bentley Hart’s Experience of God is to move from someone confused about the limitations of his own discipline, and who does not understand the difference between empirical and conceptual questions, to someone lucidly aware of this difference, deeply learned about the histories of Western and Eastern philosophy and religious traditions, as well as the history of science, and knowledgeable about modern physics and its relationship to metaphysical questions. Hart’s wide-ranging book addresses commonalities in the understanding of God, and especially divine transcendence, across multiple, philosophically sophisticated religious traditions, including issues pertaining to metaphysical naturalism and ontological contingency. Hart sees with articulate clarity that the sheer facticity of the existence of all realities that do not explain their own existence – which is to say, everything in the universe that we know of or can encounter, in any academic discipline, by means of whatever methods, and including the universe considered as a whole – implies that these realities must, as a matter of both metaphysical and logical necessity, owe not simply their particular coming-to-be but also the continuing fact of their existence to something that is not itself another contingent reality in need of precisely the same type of explanation for its coming-to-be and continuing existence. This logically and metaphysically necessary, non-contingent, supra-natural reality is what all of the world’s religious traditions have understood by God; more on this below. Note that this argument is neither a form of the traditional ontological argument for God’s necessary existence associated with St. Anselm, in which a perfect being must exist because perfection entails existence; nor is it in any sense a form of the traditional argument from design, of the sort frequently associated today with the proponents of so-called Intelligent-Design arguments for God’s existence. It is more closely related to some versions of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, including the third of Aquinas’s viae.

Yet quite apart from any considerations of faith or religious belief, the ontological contingency of all things that exist, have ever existed, or will ever exist, and the conclusion that there must therefore be some non-contingent reality that explains their existence and is metaphysically distinct from all of them, is a strictly rational inference. In other words, recognition of the inadequacy of metaphysical, materialist naturalism is not a «matter of faith» or based on a «religious objection,» which is important insofar as this is sometimes implied, even by theologians.¹⁷ Rather, this unavoidable, rational inference about a necessary, transcendent source and sustaining ground of being does not ineluctably entail faith in God as understood, much more expansively and elaborately, in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, for example. The inference is philosophically very strong, but prima facie, at least, religiously rather weak. That said, it is not unimportant that these traditions have for millennia understood that the God of faith possesses logically singular attributes that are shared with attributes of the rationally inferred ground of all contingent beings. Indeed, we meet here precisely the metaphysical, logical, and religious distinction between God and creation that both rational reflection and multiple faith traditions share.

      What Hart sees that Krauss does not is that even a complete empirical explanation of the universe extending back to and including the Big Bang would not and could never be an account of either why or how there is something, anything at all, rather than nothing. Physics could never, even in principle, function as first philosophy; nor could all of the sciences, taken together and including even all possible discoveries at every scale from the subatomic to the cosmological (including all possible multiverses, if such exist), in principle explain the existence of what it is that they study. In Hart’s words,

Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature – the physical – is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the stream of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, «hyperphysical,» or shifting into Latin, super naturam. This means not only that at some point nature requires or admits of a supernatural explanation (which it does), but also that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural in the first place.¹⁸

      In other words, «there simply cannot be a natural explanation of existence as such; it is an absolute logical impossibility» (44). Efforts such as Krauss’s imply that the closer we get temporally to the Big Bang in our physical explanation about the universe, or the simpler are the physical states and natural laws out of which the universe developed, the closer the natural sciences get to «explaining everything.» But such attempts overlook the total irrelevance of their findings for the question of ontological contingency: «no purely physical cosmology has any bearing whatsoever upon the question of existence... and so it is immaterial here how small, simple, vacuous, or impalpably indeterminate a physical state or event is: it is still infinitely removed from non-being and infinitely incapable of having created itself out of nothing» (97). Again, it is extremely interesting and indeed dumbfounding that the cosmically elaborated universe in which we live today seems to have developed as it has from such extremely few initial natural conditions and states, and anyone who cares about knowledge ought to be grateful for the remarkable experimental and theoretical work physicists have done to disclose the mind-blowing character of our universe, intellectual labor that remains ongoing. But reducing everything to its most basic, original conditions and constituents at the moment of the Big Bang, and thinking that thereby one has arrived at a sort of ontological «ground zero» of nothingness, simply broadcasts, with an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, one’s incomprehension of what the contingency of existence means. «In fact,» Hart writes, «one will be starting no nearer to nonbeing than if one were to begin with an infinitely realized multiverse: the difference from non-being remains infinite in either case» (98). To see this is to understand the point at issue.

      A corollary of Hart’s argument is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is a truth of reason. It is not simply something that religious believers happen to affirm based on faith, as is sometimes implied, but also, and more basically, a rational inference about the impossibility of an infinite regress of contingently dependent beings, given the

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