Five Questions — And the One Left Behind
Reflecting on my 2007 Boston University commencement address, the five questions that still matter today, and the missing one that inspired Before Being.
In May of 2007, I had the privilege of delivering the commencement address to the philosophy graduates of Boston University. Nearly twenty years have passed since that afternoon, yet I can still recall the mixture of excitement, solemnity, and hope in the room. At that moment, I chose not to give answers but to leave the graduates with questions — five questions that had shaped my own search for meaning.
Is there a God? What is our responsibility to the world? What does it mean to be a nation, an American, when possibility and probability collide? What is really important in life? Who am I, and who are we?
These were the questions I asked then, and they still matter today. But with the distance of years, I see more clearly what was missing. I had left out the deepest question of all — the question that would come to define my later work and my new book, Before Being.
That missing question is as stark as it is strange: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Is there a God?
When I posed this question in 2007, I had lived through the path from youthful existentialism to a more mature conviction that belief in God is not only possible but reasonable. Yet my belief has never been about dogma or ritual. It has been about the mystery at the root of existence, the sense that there is more than what appears.
Nearly two decades later, I see this question less as a dividing line between faiths and more as a common ground of humility. Whatever one’s tradition — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or none — the fact remains that we stand before the unfathomable. To me, God is not a matter of left or right, but of being itself. And if there is such a God, it is inconceivable that He would care more about labels than about the goodness of our lives.
This first question pointed beyond certainty and into mystery. The next asked how we should live in light of that mystery.
Responsibility
In that speech, I spoke of an avalanche — each of us like a snowflake, capable of pretending to be weightless but in truth part of a force that changes everything in its path. That metaphor feels even sharper today. In 2007, the challenges were war, poverty, disease, and climate change. They still are, but with new layers: widening inequality, disinformation, and political fracture.
To say “no snowflake feels responsible in an avalanche” is to remind us that responsibility is always easier to deny than to accept. Yet denial does not spare us the consequences. Nearly twenty years later, I still believe the great end of life is not knowledge but action. Our task is not to be passive observers but to shape the avalanche so it does not destroy, but clears the way for renewal.
Responsibility links the personal with the political. From there, I turned to a question about belonging to a nation, and how probability and possibility intersect in that identity.
Nation & Possibility
I asked then what it means to be a nation, and I drew a distinction between probability and possibility. Probability is what we inherit — the accidents of birth, circumstance, and history. Possibility is what we create — the lives we build, the futures we imagine. America, at its best, has been the place where possibility could outrun probability.
In 2007, I still felt that ideal alive, though frayed. Today, I confess, the fraying feels deeper. Our national values of freedom, democracy, equality, and opportunity have been strained to the point of distortion. Yet I cannot surrender the belief that possibility remains. To give up would be to accept probability alone, a narrowing of horizons that betrays the very idea of America.
The nation is not guaranteed, but the possibility is still there, waiting on our willingness to defend and renew it. Possibility, however, is not an abstraction. It lives in the choices we make about what matters most.
What Matters Most
When I asked this question, I spoke of family and community, of the ways in which our influence carries forward into the lives of others. I believed then — and still believe now — that at the end of life it is not the business deals, the money made, or the speed of one’s car that will occupy the mind. It is the people we loved, the goodness we gave or received, the beauty and wonder we encountered.
Nearly twenty years later, my conviction has only deepened. Financial security matters, but integrity matters more. Status fades, but relationships endure. To live as if family and community are peripheral is to travel into the future impoverished. What matters most is never abstract; it is the lived texture of belonging, care, and love. That is the only legacy that carries beyond our own span of years.
This question about what matters led naturally to the one that touches identity itself: who we are, and who we become together.
Who Am I, and Who Are We?
This was the most personal of my five questions, and perhaps the most universal. To ask who I am is to ask what it means to be human: a sentient, aware, conscious being with freedom and conscience. To ask who we are is to extend that awareness into solidarity, to recognize that what connects us outweighs what divides us.
In 2007, I called this the question of identity and unity. Today, it feels even more pressing. At a time when the temptation to reduce one another to factions, tribes, or parties is strong, remembering that we are bound together by shared consciousness is essential. We are, each of us, unrepeatable beings. We are also, all of us, part of a common story. To forget either truth is to lose sight of what it means to be human.
But even with these five questions, something fundamental remained unsaid — the question beneath them all.
The Missing Question
Looking back on that day nearly two decades ago, I realize that even as I asked those five questions, there was one more — the deepest, strangest, and most fundamental — that I left unspoken. It is the question that underlies all others: Why is there something rather than nothing?
At the time, I did not put it into words, though it had lived in me since I was a teenager walking alone one summer afternoon in 1963, struck by the awareness that I was aware. That sudden lightning bolt of consciousness set me on a lifelong search. Philosophy gave me a language. Science gave me methods. Medicine gave me purpose. Yet behind all of it remained the unanswered question of existence.
In 2007, I thought it was enough to leave the graduates with questions about God, responsibility, nation, meaning, and identity. But with the perspective of years, I see that those questions are branches growing from a deeper root. Before we ask who we are, we must ask why there is anything at all. Before we ask what matters most, we must ask how matter itself — being — came to be.
That realization became the foundation for my new book, Before Being. In it, I return to that missing question with all the seriousness it deserves. I define “absolute nothingness” as the total absence of law, structure, or potential, and I ask whether such a nothing could truly endure. Could being have emerged spontaneously, without cause or plan? Or was it chosen, given as an act of intention?
It is not an easy book, nor should it be. To confront the possibility of nothingness is to stand at the edge of thought. But it is also to encounter the wonder that there is something, and that we are here to ask about it.
America Then and Now
When I spoke in 2007, I still described America as a place where possibility was real. I believed that despite our flaws, the values of freedom, democracy, equality, and opportunity still carried weight. They were the vestiges of the America I grew up in — an America where the improbable could become possible, where the accident of birth did not have to dictate the outcome of a life.
That belief was never naïve. I knew then, as I know now, that our history is scarred by injustice, exclusion, and violence. But there was also a sense that the best of our national ideals could prevail — that the arc, however bent, still aimed toward openness and possibility.
Today, that confidence is harder to hold. The political climate in the United States has become fractured in ways that test the very fabric of democracy. Freedom is too often mistaken for license, equality reduced to slogans, opportunity hoarded rather than shared. What I once described as possibility is in danger of collapsing back into probability — where chance and circumstance dictate destiny, and the space for renewal narrows.
And yet, even now, I cannot let go of the conviction that the possibility remains. To surrender it would be to betray not only my own faith in America but the generations who believed enough to struggle for it. The nation, like an individual life, is defined not only by what it inherits but by what it chooses. If we are willing to choose possibility again, the future is still open.
Why Questions Endure
Nearly twenty years have passed since I asked those five questions. In that time, I have seen enough to know that answers are never final. What matters most is not the neatness of conclusions but the courage to keep asking. Questions are the compass points of a life. They orient us toward meaning even when certainty is impossible.
The five questions I posed in 2007 remain urgent. They touch on God, responsibility, the future of nations, the meaning of life, and the essence of our humanity. Each carries within it a challenge — not only to think but to act, to choose possibility over probability, care over indifference, integrity over expedience.
And then there is the question I missed: Why is there something rather than nothing? That question, explored in Before Being, is not an abstract puzzle but the foundation beneath all others. To ask it is to remember that existence itself is a miracle, unearned and fragile, and that our task is to live in light of that miracle.
When I look back on my commencement address, I think of the words of the Little Prince: “It is with the heart one sees clearly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The essential truths are not always visible in politics, markets, or headlines. They are visible in the questions we dare to carry, the responsibilities we accept, and the lives we touch.
The questions endure. And sometimes, new ones emerge.
📖 Explore Before Being here: Before Being
🎓 Read my 2007 commencement speech here: BU Philosophy
Which of these questions feels most urgent to you today?