(Post #111)
I had this conversation with my late husband some time ago… He had sometining written in his bible about the word, ‘nothing’ So I asked him, “What is nothing?”
I believe there was always someting because God was there. On the other hand, many things were always in the mind of God.
This can be an endless discussion. ‘nothing’? what is ‘nothing?’
jean
The answer to your question is clear, at least in the metaphysical sense. Regarding this part of your statement, “…there was always something because God was there…” in the context of the belief that God created the universe, you were right. Here are my reasons for believing so.
The word “nothing” is an abstraction. There are many other useful abstractions. Examples: one, two, trillion, infinity, zero.
Abstractions can be very helpful when applied to the real world, so long as they are used mostly as adjectives and not mistaken for real things (not misused as nouns).
In the course of using abstractions to help us deal with reality, such as by using integers to count bananas or using mathematics to send rockets to the moon, the abstractions often get confused with the reality which they help us to understand.
Bottom line: infinity, trillion, hundred, one, zero, and nothing do not exist, any more than does reddish or mysterious.
The mind, itself not being a readily definable thing, has the ability to think well beyond the things and events which helped teach it to think. It can and does imagine things which do not exist, things (let’s add things and events) which might exist, and things and events which cannot exist.
Since our perceptions of reality are derived from constructs within the mind, it is no surprise that we often confuse the constructs derived from sensory data with those we simply invent. This is actually fair, since it is probable that some of the ideas we invent are actually better than sense-based observations. (e.g: Our senses make it evident that the sun, planets, and entire universe revolve around the earth— obvious, but wrong.)
Now and then humans become so attached to their inventions and abstractions that they cannot bear being mistaken, and therefore attribute miraculous or divine origin for their ideas. Pretend for a moment that ideas and abstractions are just things which human invented. For the same moment, put aside belief in the words and interpretations of any Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon or whatever, as well as belief in the notion that any human beings have been spoken to or inspired by the Creator of the Universe.
This is not an attempt to open the door to atheism, which I regard as the most absurd belief system ever invented by the human mind.
We exist and live in a universe which exists, which implies that something exists. We can imagine a state of being in which neither us nor the universe, nor anything else exists. Such a state might be called, “Absolute Nothing.” Our imagining a “nothing” or a state of being in which no definable things or entities exist does not make the “nothing” abstraction a reality. .
It’s cool that some old philosophers who’d never heard of thermodynamics, but needed to explain the origin of the universe to boost their credibility, declared that God made the universe out of nothing. It sounded good, meant nothing, and could not be refuted by the people of that day.
The problem is that those people accepted an implicit definition of Absolute Nothing which the biblical writers had not and could not define. They declared the universe to be created from nothing by God, who cannot be nothing. The existence of God denies the existence of any kind of Absolute Nothingness.
To put these arguments into perspective, imagine that Hebrews had declared that God made the universe out of glerf. Replace “nothing” with “glerf” in the previous two paragraphs. That won’t prove or mean anything— it will just put the discussion into a different perspective. We don’t know what glerf is. We don’t know what nothing is either.
Some have wormed their way around this complaint by declaring that God is a spirit and not part of either the universe or the nothing from which he made it. The same people declare that God can affect events within the physical universe. By the very meaning of physical, this means that God is Himself physical, and capable of sharing the same space/time/energy-exchange relationships with the stuff of the universe as you are.
But that statement does not define an “absolute nothing.”
I’ll bet that if the laws of physics were known back in biblical times, the Hebrews who wrote Genesis during the Babylonian Captivity only a few centuries B.C. would have declared that God made the world out of energy.
Since physics has determined that energy is not created or destroyed (which implies that it has always existed) this would have been a no-brainer choice. Lots of new age religious types have already adopted this fairly obvious conclusion.
The Church cannot adopt this idea because it adheres to the omnipotent God concept, which is inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
Your simple question points up the most fundamental question facing the Church today. As best I can determine, the Church is unaware of the existence of this question and the importance of its resolution. Until that changes, the “nothing” question will indeed be debated forever with the identical, confusing, results—
nothing.
