Peter van Inwagen (2001) has given a probabilistic answer to the fundamental question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’: There is something, because the probability of there being nothing is 0. Some philosophers have recently examined van Inwagen's argument and concluded that it does not really work. Three points are central in their criticism: (i) the premise which states that there is only one empty possible world is false, (ii) the premise which states that all possible worlds have the same probability is not plausible and (iii) the argument is not significant for the question it sets out to answer. In this paper, I shall show that (i) even if there are many empty worlds, this does not necessarily invalidate the argument in its general lines, (ii) the examples they offer to support the intuition that possible worlds may have different probabilities fail, and (iii) even if the conclusion of the argument does not really answer the question van Inwagen sets out to answer, it is still not an insignificant response to the question.

中文翻译：

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有而不是无

Peter van Inwagen (2001) 对“为什么有东西而不是没有？”这个基本问题给出了概率答案：有东西，因为没有东西的概率是 0。一些哲学家最近检查了 van Inwagen 的论点并得出结论它并没有真正起作用。他们批评的核心有三点：(i) 说只有一个空的可能世界的前提是错误的，(ii) 说所有可能世界都具有相同概率的前提是不合理的，以及 (iii) 论证对于它要回答的问题来说并不重要。在本文中，我将证明（i）即使有许多空世界，这并不一定会使论点的一般性无效，