http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/2019/05/why-is-there-something-rather-than.html
Three centuries back, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued, ‘The first question that should rightly be asked is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Martin Heidegger, in his book What is Metaphysics asked somewhat the same question: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’ Philosophers and thinkers have acknowledged this proclamation and agreed with Leibniz. This question invokes a deep inquiry which is perhaps among the fundamentals of human thought structure. While this question is among the first questions to be asked, I argue that it may not necessarily be ‘The First Question’ per se. Why not? The answer may appear to be absurd at the outset but, as Albert Einstein maintained ‘if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it’ so let us, nevertheless, inquire.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Simply because nothing means absence of something; and absence of something cannot be reified. Absence is not an entity, but an attribute: for example, the statement 'there are no apples in the wicker basket' does not mean that there are phantom/ghost apples in the wicker basket but that the absence of apples is one of the attributes of the wicker basket; and an attribute cannot be reified. This is a simple Aristotelian logic.
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