Nothing From Nothing

Is there anything that everyone here can agree on?

There is a saying: ex nihil, nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing [be]comes.

Is this one of those obvious truths that folks like to deny the existence of, or do folks here believe that from utter nothingness sprang forth the world and all that is in it?

If you reject the idea that something could begin to exist out of utter nothingness, how do you explain that anything at all exists? Or do you just accept existence as a brute fact that requires no explanation.

244 thoughts on “Nothing From Nothing

  1. Mung,

    Why no explicit reference to the Principle of Sufficient Reason this go around?

    In science, physical reality is a brute fact. Physicists seek a minimal, and in some ill-defined sense “satisfying,” set of brute facts from which all other facts follow.

    The bullshit about scientific explanations being “incomplete” is just an attempt to smuggle non-science into science.

    [edited to clarify]

  2. Tom English: Why no explicit reference to the Principle of Sufficient Reason this go around?

    I’m quite willing to accept that there are people who reject the principle.

    Still, I’m wondering, for those who think God would need a mechanism to create the world, what mechanism they offer for the coming into existence of the world from nothing. Or does that not require any mechanism.

    Of course, more fundamentally, I’m wondering who here believes that it’s not absurd to think that utter nothingness can somehow some way produce anything at all and what they call such an event, if not “magic” or “miracle.”

    I think the “brute fact” people are probably the more honest. But what brute fact (or facts) are they falling back on?

    I simply disagree with your claim about physicists.

  3. Tom English: In science, physical reality is a brute fact.

    I don’t know what you mean when you say that. If it’s all just a brute fact, why look any deeper than the atom?

    : Physicists seek a minimal, and in some ill-defined sense “satisfying,” set of brute facts from which all other facts follow.

    Do you think physicists are satisfied that they know the mass of the electron, but do not know why the electron has the mass it has, nor why all electrons have the same mass? Do they just accept that as a brute fact and stop looking?

    The only way to know some constants is to take measurements. They are not (to date) derivable from anything else. Satisfying? Accept it as a brute fact and stop looking for reasons or explanations? Hmm….

    Makes me wonder at what “a science stopper” really means.

  4. Mung: Makes me wonder at what “a science stopper” really means.

    I think you know perfectly well the difference between physics and metaphysics. It’s just that you have little to say about the former, and much to say about the latter.

  5. I believe Tom has said nothing, and it sprang from nothing.

    So nothing can come from nothing, at least.

  6. Well, Tom seems to be saying that physics cannot tell us whether nothingness is capable of producing something, or if it can, how it can do so. Which is fine with me.

    But that seems to be a metaphysical claim.

    Tom could also be seen to be saying that in physics, it’s taken as a brute fact that all physical entities proceed from other physical entities, and thus science assumes the principle ex nihil, nihil fit. Which is fine with me.

    But that also seems to be a metaphysical assumption.

    I’d still like to know what brute facts the physicists are satisfied with and which beyond which they are satisfied that they need look no further.

  7. The principal claim of “intelligent design” is that intelligence creates physical information ex nihilo. So it is hardly a shock that ID proponents should object to science beginning in media res.

  8. Tom English: The principal claim of “intelligent design” is that intelligence creates physical information ex nihilo. So it is hardly a shock that ID proponents should object to science beginning in media res.

    As much as I’d like to find something we could all agree on, I disagree with both your statements.

    The claim that information is physical is not a claim of physics, but a metaphysical claim. And “information is physical” is not a brute fact, nor does it follow from any physical theory. Physics does not even tell us what information is.

    And there is no such thing as physical information. So it is not a fact that the principal claim of “intelligent design” is that intelligence creates physical information ex nihilo. The medium is not the message.

  9. Mung: Well, Tom seems to be saying that physics cannot tell us whether nothingness is capable of producing something, or if it can, how it can do so. Which is fine with me

    Why would you think the [nothing] is required to produce something? Nothing has no potentials or properties, it can’t do anything. It is not even [a thing] at all. It is the complete absense of any and all properties. Not anything, not-any-thing.

    If the world really began to exist (which I don’t believe), I don’t believe [Nothing] would have had to “do something” to facilitate(cause, bring about, manifest, whatever word you can think of) such an event. [Nothing] can’t do anything.

    That would seem to imply it is [the world itself] that must be the cause of the world coming to exist, rather than [nothing] having the property of making things come into existence. Assuming, of course, that things coming into existence ex nihilo even require a cause. Do things coming into existence ex nihilo require a cause?

    Can some things self-create? I don’t know, but perhaps that’s not required (if, in fact, the world did not ever not exist).

  10. If the principle is true, all you can draw from that is that “nothing” can’t exist. It’s an impossible state. Yawn

  11. Define nothing. Yawn x2

    Or do you just accept existence as a brute fact that requires no explanation.

    Your ‘solution’ appears to be to accept a deity whose existence is a brute fact that requires no explanation. So you are in exactly the same boat as those you think you are aiming this OP at, except we’re having a bit of a chuckle at your supposed cleverness at “solving” this “problem”.

  12. Twenty-five years of ID, counting from the publication of Darwin on Trial, and not so much as a stable definition of a model. “Specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence.” Oopsies. The Law of Conservation of Information, aka the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, isn’t about specified complexity after all — no matter which of the three definitions you choose (I use the term “definition” loosely in the third case). LCI is about active information. Not active information as first defined by Dembski and Marks. Not active information as first redefined by Dembski and Marks. Not active information as re-redefined by Dembski, Ewert, and Marks. No, active information as re-re-redefined by George Montanez. I’m sure he’s got it right this time. After all, he’s (silently) responded to a number of criticisms that D. Eben, Joe Felsenstein, and I have raised over the years. He absolutely must have gotten it right this time.

    Dembski did not bother to mention, in his swan song at the University of Chicago, that his three Big References defined active information three different ways. Mung loves the word poseur, but seems not to have learned where best to apply it.

    I have put a great deal of work into studying the actual output of the ID movement. I would not have predicted, ten years ago, that ID would turn out to be the miserable, stinking pile of squat that it has. Excuse me for having lost patience with the ID faithful who want to turn everything into a defect of my worldview. Want to have a serious conversation with me about ID? Then bother yourself to fucking learn ID theory. I’ll go to lengths to help you learn it. But I am not going to be told that my failure to see the brilliance of “intelligent design” is due to philosophical error.

  13. Particles can pop into existence from nothing, according to quantum theory. That’s a surprise, ‘up here’ at our scale. Spacetime has a curious curvature, and there is a strange relationship between mass, energy, time and space. That’s a surprise, ‘down here’ at our scale. Point being, our exporting of the regularities we observe at the scale we inhabit to other scales is not reliable. ex nihilo is less of a stretch, to me, than some ‘necessary being’*** that has always existed. Why not ‘necessary physics’?

    *** A being strangely constrained – it somehow can’t make a universe capable of sustaining life when electrons have the mass of a bowling ball. Or can it? Depends on what kind of a fine-tuner one is. Does it have a narrow set of ‘fine-tuned’ parameters to work with, which it cannot step outside? What a stroke of luck there was one set of parameters that worked, or we’d be stuffed.

  14. Allan Miller: Particles can pop into existence from nothing, according to quantum theory.

    Really? Isn’t it more like that particles do “quantum leaps” i.e. vanish someplace to pop up elsewhere?

  15. Erik,

    So, quantum field is “nothing”?

    It’s ’empty space’. But then, space might not be ‘nothing’. It depends on whether it can exist when there really is nothing. Does space require content to make it real?

  16. Allan Miller:
    Erik,

    It’s ’empty space’. But then, space might not be ‘nothing’. It depends on whether it can exist when there really is nothing. Does space require content to make it real?

    Space is a relation between objects. Relations require context or background. None of these is nothing.

  17. Erik,

    Space is a relation between objects. Relations require context or background. None of these is nothing.

    So space stops being nothing when there is something in it? Or is space never nothing?

  18. Tom English:
    Twenty-five years of ID, counting from the publication of Darwin on Trial, and not so much as a stable definition of a model. “Specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence.” Oopsies. The Law of Conservation of Information, aka the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, isn’t about specified complexity after all — no matter which of the three definitions you choose (I use the term “definition” loosely in the third case). LCI is about active information. Not active information as first defined by Dembski and Marks. Not active information as first redefined by Dembski and Marks. Not active information as re-redefined by Dembski, Ewert, and Marks. No, active information as re-re-redefined by George Montanez. I’m sure he’s got it right this time. After all, he’s (silently) responded to a number of criticisms that D. Eben, Joe Felsenstein, and I have raised over the years. He absolutely must have gotten it right this time.

    Dembski did not bother to mention, in his swan song at the University of Chicago, that his three Big References defined active information three different ways. Mung loves the word poseur, but seems not to have learned where best to apply it.

    I have put a great deal of work into studying the actual output of the ID movement. I would not have predicted, ten years ago, that ID would turn out to be the miserable, stinking pile of squat that it has. Excuse me for having lost patience with the ID faithful who want to turn everything into a defect of my worldview. Want to have a serious conversation with me about ID? Then bother yourself to fucking learn ID theory. I’ll go to lengths to help you learn it. But I am not going to be told that my failure to see the brilliance of “intelligent design” is due to philosophical error.

    BRAVO!

  19. Rumraket,

    BRAVO. is that the theory of evolution.

    How many years has it taken them to come up with that? 150 plus years?

    At least Tom admits there is a theory of intelligent design. Its more than your side.

  20. phoodoo,

    There is in fact no theory of evolution. There are also loads, and we can’t choose among them. Two points well worth making. Again. Bravo!

  21. phoodoo:
    Rumraket,

    BRAVO.is that the theory of evolution.

    How many years has it taken them to come up with that?150 plus years?

    At least Tom admits there is a theory of intelligent design. Its more than your side.

    This is pretty much the entire output of phoodoo. Trolling, mockery and caricatures.

  22. Allan Miller:
    phoodoo,

    There is in fact no theory of evolution. There are also loads, and we can’t choose among them. Two points well worth making. Again. Bravo!

    And the fact that some evolutionary (whatever) biologists are calling for an Extended Synthesis proves that the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is wrong. The word extended got in there by accident. Or it doesn’t mean what it means in plain language. Or… whatever. Anyhow, they’re saying bad things about Darwinism at a conference hosted by the Royal Society — THE ROYAL SOCIETY, I say — and activists in the ID movement have been saying bad things about Darwinism a lot longer than they have. So ID has always been right about Darwinism, and some of the evolutionary (whatever) biologists are starting to catch on, even though they’re still saying bad things about ID.

  23. I’m perfectly happy with “ex nihil, nihil fit,” if “nihil is understood in the Parmenidean sense as “non-being”. But quantum vacuums or fluctuations etc are not “non-being” in the strictly metaphysical sense. (This was the focus of David Albert’s criticism of Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing.)

    But I think it is one thing to admit, as a general principle, that being cannot come into existence from non-being, and thereby conclude that there must be some necessary being that somehow explains the existence of the universe qua contingent being, and quite another to say that we have the ability to attribute any properties to that necessary being.

    We can say that there must be a necessary being, but I see no way that we can say anything about what that necessary being is like, what properties it has, etc.

  24. Allan Miller,

    You seem to struggle with the concept that if you have multiple (seemingly endless) theories about what is evolution, then there is no theory of evolution.

    There are theories though, granted, just as there are theories about alien abduction stories, and there are theories about what dark matter is. But there is no theory of dark matter.

  25. Rumraket: The evolutionary theory first proposed by Darwin has been extensively modified during those 150 years

    Obliterated would be another word, champ.

  26. phoodoo: There are theories though, granted, just as there are theories about alien abduction stories, and there are theories about what dark matter is. But there is no theory of dark matter.

    What is the difference between a theory about what dark matter is and a theory of dark matter?

  27. Every time there’s something somebody doesn’t understand–KA-BLAM! Jesus of Nazareth!

    It’s like a perpetual Christmas story. Always the same happy ending!

  28. Invoking absolute nothingness (ie. no quantum stuff) is little more than an emotional appeal to primate intuitions about the universe, and if there is one thing that physics has demonstrated in the last hundred years, it is that reality does not follow our intuitions.

    If there were such a thing as “absolutely nothing”, where would it be? Would there be more than one place in it? Would it be everywhere, or could there be nothing in one place and something in another? How would a person distinguish one kind of nothing from another? Those who invoke the concept of absolutely nothing offer no evidence that such a state is even possible.

    It seems to me that the problem is that the word “nothing” maps an ill defined concept, and has no real meaning. I think that most people using the word as a gotcha in a cosmological argument are, intentionally or not, equivocating around different definitions. I do not get the sense that they have spent much time at all trying to demonstrate that the concept is even coherent.

  29. Stormfield:
    Invoking absolute nothingness (ie. no quantum stuff) is little more than an emotional appeal to primate intuitions about the universe, and if there is one thing that physics has demonstrated in the last hundred years, it is that reality does not follow our intuitions.

    If there were such a thing as “absolutely nothing”, where would it be? Would there be more than one place in it? Would it be everywhere, or could there be nothing in one place and something in another? How would a person distinguish one kind of nothing from another? Those who invoke the concept of absolutelynothing offer no evidence that such a state is even possible.

    It seems to me that the problem is that the word “nothing” maps an ill defined concept, and has no real meaning. I think that most people using the word as a gotcha in a cosmological argument are, intentionally or not, equivocating around different definitions. I do not get the sense that they have spent much time at all trying to demonstrate that the concept is even coherent.

    Indeed.

    For some reason, we talk as if having nothing is the more-probable state, while having something is the less-probable state. This could be the exact opposite of reality.

    This seems to be an example of how language and culture is biasing our thinking.

  30. Kantian Naturalist: This was the focus of David Albert’s criticism of Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing.

    That’s an excellent review. But I have to say that in most of the book, Krauss wrote of physics as a physicist, and seemed to do a good job of it. Like most physicists who rail against philosophy, he’s an execrable philosopher. As for the afterword, I wondered if Dawkins had actually read the book.

  31. I have added “nothing” to my list of concepts that are ill-defined and only serve to confuse.

    “magic”
    “supernatural”
    “free will”
    “fully formed” (meaningless without some specification to compare with)
    “objective morality”
    “god”
    “miracle”
    “nothing”

  32. Regretfully, I’ve moved a rule-breaking comment to guano (plus another couple that quoted the offending part). I fully understand the provocation. Noyau may help with the frustration. Moderation Issues is there if anyone would like to suggest amending the rules.

  33. The important epistemological fact is that we have something, we have many things, and about all that we can do with any competence is to try to explain how one thing gives rise to another thing. We don’t seem to have any ability to deal with “nothing at all,” but can only push back to a false vacuum that seems to be something after all.

    Anyhow, unless and until “God” can be shown not to be nothing (except fiction), it certainly doesn’t improve anything by calling your nothing “God” and saying that it is omnipotent and omniscient.

    Glen Davidson

  34. Just to stay on topic.

    If a mathematician starts with nothing, he can use that to create the empty set. And then, he can create the set whose only member is the empty set. From those beginnings, he can actually develop all of arithmetic.

    Who says you cannot get something from nothing?

  35. Kantian Naturalist: We can say that there must be a necessary being,

    A necessary being must exist forever, if I got it right. But it seems to me that the only thing that follows from “ex nihilo nihil fit” is that “something” must have always existed, not that one particular being must have always existed and keep on existing forever. Am I missing something?

  36. dazz: A necessary being must exist forever, if I got it right. But it seems to me that the only thing that follows from “ex nihilo nihil fit” is that “something” must have always existed, not that one particular being must have always existed and keep on existing forever. Am I missing something?

    Usually, the necessary being is understood as changeless, and hence not undergoing any temporal change. It’s not that exists “forever” but that its existence is a-temporal. (There’s a difference between existing for an infinite amount of time and existing outside of time. The former is called “sempiternity”, to be distinguished from “eternity” in the strictly atemporal sense.)

    If there is a necessary being, then there is at least one of them. But why would there be more than one? Would it be that there was one necessary being at one point in time and then another another one at another point in time?

    That doesn’t seem to make any sense. For one thing, the necessary being is non-temporal (just as it is non-spatial).

    If this universe with its laws of physics is contingent (as pretty much all physicists and philosophers of physics agree), then the necessary being cannot have any of the physical properties of this universe or any part of it, nor can it conform to the laws of this universe.

    That said, I myself don’t see how anything can be predicated, or non-metaphorically asserted, about the necessary being.

    A friend of mine who works at the intersection of philosophy of religion and philosophy of physics is writing a paper about why the multiverse is a more reasonable hypothesis than God. I’m dubious of that claim but I look forward to seeing what my friend comes up with.

  37. Mung, to be nice, I think you would benefit from learning what our philosophers and scientists have been thinking about for the last 300 years.

  38. “Usually, the necessary being is understood as changeless, and hence not undergoing any temporal change”

    Who makes up that gibberish? Do you feel smart saying it?

  39. Kantian Naturalist: We can say that there must be a necessary being

    Sure. We can say anything we’d like. But I’d like to see a good (i.e., non-question-begging) argument for it being true.

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