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.
I have an iron-clad alibi!
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.
Stormfield: …If there were such a thing as “absolutely nothing”, where would it be? …
Your response is flippant, Mung. Do you not have serious answers to Stormfield’s questions?
Your OP made it sound like you have some understanding of “nothingness”. Or is this not the case?
My response was appropriate. Asking If there were such a thing as “absolutely nothing”, where would it be? isn’t a serious question. It’s an incoherent question.
Nothingess is non-existence. Non-being.
Where would it BE? LoL!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
Yes, it is a meaningless string of characters (or tossed word salad).
Setting aside for a moment the probably inevitable “Argument from the Dictionary”**, where precisely did you gain your knowledge of nothing? Is it like space, but without the quantum goodness? If a being (let’s call it God) that somehow managed to be, despite there being nothing, created a single thing, would that thing be in a space? Could this god then create another thing in a different place? Would there be nothing between them?
Non-existence? Non-being? Of what?
It is evident to me that the word “nothing”, like the word “god”, is meaningless when used in the sense of the OP. It is an undefinable concept about which you definitionally possess no knowledge, used to mislead others who, like yourself, do not understand the difference between language and reality.
**While you’re over visiting the Websters, ask them about equivocation.
The gist of the OP is not that difficult: since we cannot conceive of non-being, we cannot conceive of being coming existence from non-being. If there were non-being, no being could arise from it. Hence ex nihil, nihil fit. This seems like a perfectly obvious point to me once you understand that non-being cannot be conceived of.
Kantian Naturalist,
If you can’t conceive of a thing, how can you then predict its characteristics?
Neil Rickert,
Actually I was talking about the concept the string of characters refers to. Which is just as much or as little word salad as the set of nothing.
Were you going to address why you consider a made up concept consisting of nothing, something?
You are calling the set of nothing a thing. Preposterous on many levels of thought I propose.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t consider the universe a ‘being’ in the first place, so I don’t see what such things, contingent or otherwise, have to do with its existence.
People swayed by this seem to grant an awful lot to the need for things-like-them. Whatever one may say about the interests of such beings, or their lack of concordance with the God of this or that religion, one seems to grant them for free the power of creating universes, for no sound reason other than to round off a syllogism. If beings are necessary, there is one, seems to be the thrust of it, though I grant I am not much of a philosopher.
I would also add ‘atemporal’ to the list of words people use without, I submit, genuinely conceiving that of which they speak. ‘Atemporal being’ seems particularly oxymoronic, and one less quality that this ‘being’ shares with any other.
I think you have that completely backwards. One grants that a universe needs to be created, unless one is willing to grant that something (and not just something, but something which holds great complexity and organization of matter) can exist for and from nothing.
Accepting the latter seems to many the much greater leap of unfounded faith.
Unless you consider that the universe never began to exist and instead it may always have existed, perhaps cycling through near misses rather than “poofing” from a singularity.
To you, you mean. Seems to me you either wonder about the origins of the Universe and do what you can to test hypotheses, stop wondering and end all enquiry by inventing an explanation such as some deity, or just accept we’ll probably never know and reassure oneself that knowing the origins of the Universe has no effect on how we live our lives.
phoodoo,
I grant that the universe probably came from somewhere. The ‘buck-stops-here’ idea that it came from a ‘being’ which did not come from somewhere is completely unsatisfactory as a resolution of the ‘but-where’ issue.
Ah, but if you cast it as “belief” rather then “rationality” then it makes perfect sense if you are the sort of person that is happy there is a answer rather than being concerned with the quality of that answer. We see it all the time with ID where as long as there is someone saying things that sound vaguely sciency then that means ID is scientific.
It’s like they’ve demonstrated that Santa does not exist by showing that the Tooth Fairy can do Santa’s work.
Alan Fox,
I find that very shallow frankly.
You have so much in front of your eyes, so much organization, so much intertwined forces, so much structure and form, so much that is the opposite of chaos and meaninglessness; and for one to say, oh well, who knows, doesn’t much matter, or oh well, it just is, no reason….to me its almost incomprehensible to think like that. How much more evidence would one need??
Here here, let me show it to you. Well, that is exactly what you are getting everyday that you exist, it is being shown to you as clear as the day. And yet some say, “I don’t see nothing.” Unbelievable.
Or else, just as likely, utter, determined denial.
And since most people (virtually all), since the beginning of man, have not thought with the same unfazed, unimpressed shrugging dismissal of the obvious design of the world, you don’t have the luxury of claiming yours is a natural position to take. Most thinking people have always disagreed with you.
In this example the universe is created from the whole “universe cycling process.”
The question then becomes “where did the universe cycling process come from?”
peace
The answer seems to be, “Ah, who knows, can’t be bothered…got any more Doritos?”
Always existed means just that!
Side-stepping ‘the obvious’ informed Newton, Planck and Einstein.
I actually don’t find design an obvious thing in this world. Saying ‘well you’re blind to it’ may be true, but still I don’t.
fmm
Ironic how that question never arises for your deity due to its special properties of being exempt from such logic.
If your deity does not need to start to exist then the same can be said of the universe.
Whilst I do have a bit of a reputation for trying to find the easy way to do any job, I’m hugely offended that you could suggest I might eat “Doritos”. I guess they’ll be forced down our throats now Trump has free rein. “Eat our Doritos or we stop buying your wine!” but so far in my 66 years I’ve managed to avoid them. I’ve never seen them on sale here. Admittedly, I’ve never looked.
What are “Doritos” BTW?
Once again I note that they never want to address fairly the brute fact that the sorts of design we see in software we don’t see in biology.
I don’t know about Planck, but you certainly don’t think Einstein and Newton were atheists do you?
Well computer scientists are trying, give them a little more time.
Allan Miller,
“Opposite to the first is Atheism in profession & Idolatry in practise. Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so trulyshaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to beleive that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.”
Isaac Newton,
‘A short Schem of the true Religion’
Boy was that Newton a dummy.
Just like when one asks where did God come from? Ah who knows, he just IS.
No he was no dummy, he also wasn’t right about everything he said. And he lived over a century before Darwin.
Sure.
Will you take a look at the post I made back here at some point?
You could but you’d be wrong and you’d still not have managed to make anyone take you seriously.
.. of everything.
I’m with Mung here. I don’t think we have to skirt around trying to redefine nothing. Nothing has a standard definition in philosophy. It is the total absense of any and all properties, entities and potentials. Nothing is no-thing. Not anything. Not any thing.
If you can imagine something, or a concept, or a relation, or a set or whatever the fuck, then nothing is not that which you are imagining. An empty space? Not nothing. A quantum field? Not nothing. A singularity? Not nothing. An empty set? Not nothing.
Nothing is, again, the absence of any and all properties, entities and potentials. Nothing is the absence of a quantum field, the absence of empty space, the absence of time, the absence of energy, the absence of concepts, sets (both empty and not), singularities. All of it.
In a silly semantical way, this seems to solve the problem. Since, by definition, nothing can’t have a property, it can’t exist. But then, maybe there’s something wrong with our definition, and “nothing” actually can exist in the sense that, rather than something (the world, us, God, whatever), we can concieve of it’s absence, and such a state of affairs what we refer to with the word “nothing”.
So if I get this right, since everything in our universe is contingent, then the universe as a whole is too. And since time and space and matter are contingent, the explanation for it all must be timeless, immaterial, and transcendent. But that seems just as inconceivable as “nothingness”. In fact those could very well be attributes of that “nothingness”. So just slap omnipotence and all of a sudden you have a necessary being that looks very much like nothingness, but can somehow explain all there is.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% with KN that coming up with this argument is a huge achievement and the fact that we’re still discussing it after so much time testifies for it’s impact, but I don’t think there’s much more to it than special pleading
So it’s argument from ignorance all the way down?
What are the characteristics of nothingness? How would we know it if we saw it? Why can’t I put things that do not exist into my pocket?
Isn’t it obvious that these are nonsensical questions?
I don’t think that the argument from contingency (as it is usually called) actually works as an argument that God exists. It’s one thing to show that there must be a necessary being; it’s quite another to show that the necessary being has any properties we commonly ascribe to God.
I don’t see how the argument from contingency could tell us whether the necessary being is God or the multiverse — let alone tell us whether the necessary being is more like Yahweh or Vishnu.
There’s probably an argument to be made here that, with respect to predication, the necessary being and non-being are indiscernible — except that one is and one is not.
Everything here depends on whether we are justified in ascribing to ourselves a capacity to make judgments about the being or non-being of something that supposedly transcends the entirety of the whole contingent universe.
If one is a Kantian or a Darwinian (or both!) one might be very suspicious of the thought that our cognitive capacities involve the ability to make any such judgments, one way or the other.
Well, my point was that such a necessary being looks a lot like nothingness. All those attributes: timeless, immaterial, transcendent, unchanged, are negatives: the opposite of being as we know it
Sorry, missed this part. Exactly my point
be: to have an objective existence : have reality or actuality
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
being: the quality or state of having existence
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/being
Now, you’re certainly under no obligation to agree with my source, but do you still have an objection to saying the Universe meets the definition of “being”?
It is something that exists. It is a being. Like I wrote above, this doesn’t mean it has a personality. Like KN wrote, if there is a necessary existent (being) it doesn’t follow that it has all the attributes of God.
wut?
Yes. I think a lot of people have trouble making that distinction, so they reject the logic of the need for a necessary existent (being) because they think “it” can only be God.
Or perhaps it smacks too much of foundationalism.
What is the danger, to atheism, materialism, physicalism, naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, Darwinism or any of the many others -isms which seem to be popular here, to admitting the need for a necessary “being”?
The alternative is something from nothing, which is absurd.
Mung,
Sorry, I misread you too above.
But anyway, I still don’t see the logic here, that there must be a necessary being “outside” of the universe
You and I seem to be on the same page regarding no-thing-ness.
As far as a self-creating Universe, I don’t see how that would work. It would need materials and processes. It would not exist so that it could create itself. So it wouldn’t be self-creating at all.
It seems to me you need something capable of creating a universe. Then you need something capable of creating something capable of creating a universe. etc.
Theists call this “being” capable of creating a Universe, “God.” They recognize the absurdity of an endless stream of God-creators. Theism is quite parsimonious. 🙂
Yes. The Universe just is the collection of all the contingent things from which it is constituted. So the Universe is contingent.
OK, but what if something was eternal in the past and at some point that something caused the universe, while disappearing and leaving no trace? Would that something be the necessary being, considering it stopped existing? In that scenario, time is eternal, but time itself can’t cause anything and can’t explain the universe.
Or another possibility, an infinite regress of causation events leading to the universe coming to exist.
In both cases all things are contingent except for time, but at least one other thing or cause exists at all times.
How is a necessary being needed to explain those hypothetical scenarios?
And you think that’s a sound argument? (I mean, first it would have to be valid. We haven’t even got THAT going yet.)
Also, I didn’t mean to offend you, but it’s one thing to say “Well, Aquinas held that there is a decent argument that concludes that there is a necessary being” and another to say “I guess we can say there is a necessary being.” If you meant to say that some scholastic philosophers have suggested that, well, sure. but I’d point out that’s not what you wrote. I don’t think you should blame me for assuming you meant what you wrote, rather than some other thing you didn’t write.
phoodoo,
Whether or not they were religious has no bearing on the matter. In some realm, they refused to just go along with received wisdom, even if in other areas they didn’t.
If you think a present-day Newton would still write nonsense like that, you don’t know him very well.
Mung,
A substantial difference is made by the presence, actual or implied, of an article – the difference between ‘being’ as a verb and ‘being’ as a noun. There is a major difference between describing the universe as ‘a being’ and describing it as ‘being’. Clearly, when people talk of ‘a necessary being’, they aren’t talking about ‘a necessary state of existence’. (There may be an issue with the translation from the Greek; I’m talking about English speakers here).
Erik,
You seem to be defining ‘nothing’ as ‘that from which ‘something’ cannot flow’. I could hardly disagree, if that is your preference.
I don’t think you’re right about this, Allan. Either an argument for “necessary being” or an argument for “a necessary being” would be equally welcome to the theist, I believe. Conversion isn’t terribly difficult.
Wow. Didn’t really mean to sound like keiths there….. 🙁
walto,
Not sure I buy that, but I guess I’d let the theist make that call.