When answering the question of why something exists one can certainly first appeal to the mechanism or cause for its existence. A painting exists because a brush applied paint to the canvas. By carefully observing how the paint is applied to the canvas we can learn quite a bit about technique and why the painting looks the way it does. Using radiation we can probe what lies underneath the paint to see rough sketches and changes to any underlying pigments. To some scientists, the mechanism of how the paint is applied to produce the finished product is the limit of what observations from science can tell us since science deals with laws and mechanism. But of course, there is much more to the story of a painting because there is an artist behind the brush strokes who created the painting with purpose, the real "reason."
When cosmologist Sean Carroll discusses "Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing" he claims, "The best we can ask is whether we can imagine laws of nature that fully account for how the universe behaves, even at the earliest moments."1 As pointed out in my previous post Carroll's search for the cause of the existence of our universe has certain constraints and presuppositions that will restrict any conclusions. These include (1) his answer will be limited to mechanisms and cannot include reasons, (2) he is incorrect in assuming that finding a mechanism eliminates the need for a creator (3) he makes the false assumption that laws and mechanisms have the causal ability to implement, (4) he constrains all answers to the natural realm thus eliminating any supernatural creator, a priori. Despite these problems, I find Carroll's writings to be thoughtful and insightful and worth reading and critiquing. I also find that his ultimate answer requires a transcendent creator despite his insistence that it does not.
