How can something come from nothing?

[One_point]

I have spent days trying to talk someone into believing that nothing is nothing and can therefore do nothing. Doing something would mean it was THERE. It exists! Therefore it cannot be nothing. Nothing is non-existence or non-being. Something that does not exist cannot do anything.

I have always assumed somethings are so basic, they are self-evident. Yet my friend insists that this is an assumption, something someone imagined. HOW…he asks me…do I know that non-existence cannot do anything? My question is, if you believe that NON_EXISTENCE can do things, why on earth do you struggle with the idea that God exists? A least the concept of God has something doing something while it exists?

If this is how atheism reasoning is, then to me it seems like a fundamental denial of reason. ANTHING IS POSSIBLE. That is what it boils down to. After all. What could be so far fetched as having non-existence doing things?

 

[schaeffer]

Given what I know of the Universe (which I am pretty sure is diddly squat) the idea that it follows any sort of human logic seems ridiculous, and to apply some idea of logic as to how it has to be, or how it has to have originated is likewise ridiculous and pretty presumptuous.

The idea that “I can’t understand how the Universe came to be…therefore God”…still explains exactly nothing other than a human mind wanting to know what it probably cannot know or ever understand.

I am not denying the existence of God, but the idea that someone else is more comfortable with the idea of one, or that it’s easier for them to explain what cannot be explained if they assign it to some being, isn’t a compelling argument.

I’ve spoken to many thousands of people about their religious and spiritual beliefs and in the end most of them do not believe out of logic, they believe because of personal experience. And most who don’t believe, dont’ believe because they’ve never had a compelling personal experience.

I don’t think my brain can truly conceive nothing, or whether or not what I would call nothing, is nothing…or simply something that as a human I do not have the capacity to detect. I know there is much I do not know. But I cannot know the nature of what I do not know.

I have no reason to believe that my mortal and finite human self has been given the intellectual ability or physical ability to detect or know all there is of the Universe or beyond.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

I have spent days trying to talk someone into believing that nothing is nothing and can therefore do nothing. Doing something would mean it was THERE. It exists! Therefore it cannot be nothing. Nothing is non-existence or non-being. Something that does not exist cannot do anything.

I have always assumed somethings are so basic, they are self-evident. Yet my friend insists that this is an assumption, something someone imagined. HOW…he asks me…do I know that non-existence cannot do anything? My question is, if you believe that NON_EXISTENCE can do things, why on earth do you struggle with the idea that God exists? A least the concept of God has something doing something while it exists?

If this is how atheism reasoning is, then to me it seems like a fundamental denial of reason. ANTHING IS POSSIBLE. That is what it boils down to. After all. What could be so far fetched as having non-existence doing things?

Bingo! Atheism is unintelligible, that is your answer. You are wasting your time arguing with your friend. He cannot accept the obvious without admitting his position is unintelligible.

God Bless
Linus2nd

 

[Ignatius]

I have spent days trying to talk someone into believing that nothing is nothing and can therefore do nothing. Doing something would mean it was THERE. It exists! Therefore it cannot be nothing. Nothing is non-existence or non-being. Something that does not exist cannot do anything.

I have always assumed somethings are so basic, they are self-evident. Yet my friend insists that this is an assumption, something someone imagined. HOW…he asks me…do I know that non-existence cannot do anything? My question is, if you believe that NON_EXISTENCE can do things, why on earth do you struggle with the idea that God exists? A least the concept of God has something doing something while it exists?

If this is how atheism reasoning is, then to me it seems like a fundamental denial of reason.

You are quite correct. That atheistic belief runs counter to the scientific method and has no basis in science or logic.
There is simply no scientific evidence of something coming from nothing. Everything that exists in the material universe can be scientifically shown to have a cause.

 

[schaeffer]

You are quite correct. That atheistic belief runs counter to the scientific method and has no basis in science or logic.
There is simply no scientific evidence of something coming from nothing. Everything that exists in the material universe can be scientifically shown to have a cause.

Yet so far no scientific evidence has shown that cause to be supernatural. Yet believers don’t maintain that their position lacks logic.

so, yes, they are both belief systems. Both which run counter to science as it is currently known.

 

[Overture]

Your friend is still considering “nothing” to be “something.” I know it’s very hard to actually conceptualize “nothing,” but your friend is still considering “nothing” to be like, a void where nothing simply is. However, that’s not the case with the philosophical concept of “nothing.”

“Nothing” cannot have qualities. It necessarily cannot have properties, since it is inherently no thing. This doesn’t mean it’s a void where something could one day be. It is simply nonexistence. As in there is no thing. It cannot have potential for “something,” it cannot be waiting in a stage of reflex, it cannot have “once been” and now is devoid of something.

It comes down the basic philosophical question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

If your friend insists that “nothing” has any qualities whatsoever, then he is describing a quality that is inherent to God. If your friend insists that the universe simply tends towards order because that is its nature, he is describing a quality that God granted it, because to insist that anything inherently has an essence or quality in and of itself is honestly nonsense. At that point (and with a lot of what he’s saying, honestly) he’s arguing for some form of pantheism. We simply say that God transcends creation, rather than is creation. He reveres the laws of nature as God. We revere the God that gave nature those laws.

I think a lot of it comes down to what must be his conceptualization of “God.” He likely views God as a anthropomorphic mythological figure who exists as a being within creation. If he was able to wrap his head around the transcendental and ineffable nature of our God, I think a lot of lightbulbs would go off here.

Every day, on a purely logical basis, it becomes more bewildering to me how anyone argues sincerely for the non-existence of God.

 

[schaeffer]

I think a lot of it comes down to what must be his conceptualization of “God.” He likely views God as a anthropomorphic mythological figure who exists as a being within creation. If he was able to wrap his head around the transcendental and ineffable nature of our God, I think a lot of lightbulbs would go off here.
.

Do theists accept the belief in trancendental and ineffable nature as a belief in God?

I thought in order to be considered a theist, one had to understand God as a being?

 

[Flagstone]

Maybe there has always been something. Physicists and philosophers don’t necessarily agree what “nothing” means. I don’t know much about physics but apparently commonsense isn’t really useful.

 

[Overture]

Do theists accept the belief in trancendental and ineffable nature as a belief in God?

I thought in order to be considered a theist, one had to understand God as a being?

I think Fr. Robert Barron does a lot of service to this issue. God is not simply one item among many in creation. He is not the highest “thing” there is. He is both immanent and transcendental. YHWH has more in common with the Hindu concept of Brahman than He does with Zeus, I’d say.

Virtually every logical argument for the existence of God has, at its very core, the concept that God must have as His very essence Being Itself. Nothing else exists simply because it is its essence to exist. Every thing must appeal to some extrinsic cause as to why it exists. This, unless you want to go down the winding path of infinite regression, leads you to a simple conclusion: there must be a first cause, whose very nature it is To Be. He is not a “being.” He is the very foundational premise of “Being” and “Existence,” who is logically necessary to prove that anything exists at all.

So I agree with you too, Flagstone. Except you don’t have to appeal to physical matter as “always having been,” since it must necessarily be created and have an extrinsic cause. Rather, appeal to the logical entity whose very nature is To Exist-- something unfathomably simple, yet entirely necessary, as the contingent foundation of everything we know.

 

[One_point]

I have explained all I can about nothing that I don’t see what more can be said. I have explained that if “nothing” has properties or behavior of ANY sort, then we are not any more speaking of nothing. I have told him it is not emptiness or a vacuum. It is simply “not being there” simple!—To put it in layman language. Not existing at all. Not time, not space or matter or anything. He claimed that just because something “sounds” logical, it doesn’t mean it is the truth. And that whatever “cause” there may be, if he admits it, it must be a physical cause. I have thrown in my towel after more than a week.

What I have concluded following this person’s logic, if it can be called that all, is that logic or reason is not in itself a good basis for ANY belief. It must be confirmed by “evidence”". Which means unless we capture data showing that something is untrue, simply demonstrating the illogic of that proposition with arguments does not mean that it did not happen or cannot happen : Here I was thinking atheists are essentially faithless people! Excuse me but saying “Just because it is illogical does not mean it is not true” That is one SERIOUS act of faith if I ever in my life met one. I admitted to my friend that theism DOES rest on one assumption–that reality is logical. If you don’t presume that, you can’t even say that Santa clause and elves and dwarves and trolls and the tooth fairy are not real! And if logic alone is not enough, then you cant even claim that circular arguments are false. Because HOW do you know that a circular reality isn’t true??

What a bizzare conversation where an atheist is arguing for all sorts of possibilities against logic.

 

[schaeffer]

Virtually every logical argument for the existence of God has, at its very core, the concept that God must have as His very essence Being Itself. Nothing else exists simply because it is its essence to exist. Every thing must appeal to some extrinsic cause as to why it exists. This, unless you want to go down the winding path of infinite regression, leads you to a simple conclusion: there must be a first cause, whose very nature it is To Be. He is not a “being.” He is the very foundational premise of “Being” and “Existence,” who is logically necessary to prove that anything exists at all.

So I agree with you too, Flagstone. Except you don’t have to appeal to physical matter as “always having been,” since it must necessarily be created and have an extrinsic cause. Rather, appeal to the logical entity whose very nature is To Exist-- something unfathomably simple, yet entirely necessary, as the contingent foundation of everything we know.

I am with you on the first cause who’s nature is “To Be”…you lose me when you start using “He”, because that implies “a being”.

Saying any of this is logical is fine and well, because we are “beings” and we use a mode of thinking to come to conclusions to help us on our way.

You use the term “entity”. Why would it, must it, should it be a being, entity, or “He”.

I think that is often the great divide.

Maybe physical matter always has existed. The idea that something must have created it…why? Why is it logical? We have never seen or been able to determine there has ever been a time when physical matter (or the energy that manifest as what we call physical matter ) did not exist.

The only “creation” we are aware of is the manipulation of energy and/or physical matter that is already there. So why is it necessary or logical to say “well SOMETHING must have created it”

The claim that that is somehow more logical than the assumption that it always existed?

Something is at work, certainly…but when one says that logically we must jump to it being an entity, being, He…etc…seems anything but logical.

Again, going back to the fact that we are limited, mortal, finite beings…the idea that we can wrap our heads around that we may not be able to conceive let alone detect and define is more logical to me than deciding it’s out there and somehow it MUST be like us.

 

[One_point]

schaeffer, what do you understand as “being”? you confuse me when you say the first cause has as its essence “to be” but that it not being…

I don’t think theism says God is like us. It says because physical reality began, with time, space, matter, energy, then God is other than these things because he caused them to be. Whatever it is, this cause is spaceless timeless immaterial, because it created time space, matter and so one, because it is independent from these things. that is what transcendence is.

As to a beginning, is it not true the BVG theorem has shown any expanding universe must have an absolute beginning?

 

[Overture]

I am with you on the first cause who’s nature is “To Be”…you lose me when you start using “He”, because that implies “a being”.

We are of the Earth, and so we speak in an Earthly way. We use metaphors, analogies, figurative language to describe something that is ultimately inconceivable. When I say, “He,” I’m not saying that there is a physical human male up in the sky who created everything. When I try to tie up what I’m saying by using the word “entity,” I don’t mean that God is a physical entity. You’re not seeing the forest for the trees here. Minor details are less important than the concepts that our language is trying to convey.

We can observe that our universe is in a constant change of change and flux through time. After the Big Bang, many aspects of our universe came into existence. Time is an arrow, moving for us as a linear chain of cause-and-effect. To say that, “The physical state of the universe before the Big Bang was the way it always was, and it was like that for Eternity,” is not entirely logical, I don’t think, largely because something had to initially shove these ordered cycles and movements into its current momentum.

You can believe that the physical universe is in a constant chain of death and rebirth through Big Bangs and Big Contractions, or what have you. It still begs the fundamental question that Aquinas asked when he observed the planets moving in the sky. “What pushed those planets into movement? Well, we know now that gravity and acceleration cause the revolution of the planets. What originated this acceleration? Well, most believe it was the Big Bang that hurled motion into a simultaneously-created physical universe. What thrust the Big Bang into movement-- since if there existed a period of eternal calm before the Big Bang, what was the final straw that tipped the Big Bang to happen a definitive period of time ago?” And so forth and so forth. This is the thought process behind the “Unmoved Mover.” There must have, necessarily, been an initial shove in the process of material creation, even granting everything you’re positing about its nature. Essentially: if we see anything moving at all, it is the result of something causing it to move (exerting force upon it). We observe movement in the physical world, and that it was birthed through movement, and that its birth’s cause must have necessarily been caused by an exertion of force. Therefore, even if at the beginning of creation, a tiny ball dropped that, in the smallest way imaginable, pushed physical matter into movement, then had to have been done by a metaphysical force (since an inert force cannot exert force upon itself). This is what we call God.

How could a state of existence (materialism and physicalism) be eternal if it is also in a state of perpetual movement? The qualities that the physical realm exhibit points towards creation, not that physical creation itself is eternal.

 

[schaeffer]

How could a state of existence (materialism and physicalism) be eternal if it is also in a state of perpetual movement? The qualities that the physical realm exhibit points towards creation, not that physical creation itself is eternal.

Think of a mobius strip, or a torus with things constantly and eternally moving over the surface of it.

We’ve never known anything to NOT be in motion, so again, why must there be something beyond everything that makes it move. If the nature of everything is to be in motion… in relationship to everything else…then there need not be something that set it into motion. Motion is it’s state of being.

I am fine if people want to call “the manner in which things operate” God…but I’ve met very few people who don’t jump to words that you are using like “a Being” (not the STATE of being, but an actual “Being”) or He, etc etc

People fall wildly in love with their metaphors, especially when speaking of things so large and beyond words. Metaphors can be comforting, but they can be misleading if we forget they are referring to something else, they are NOT the something that they refer to.

If people are willing to accept that God might not BE a being, with a human like intelligence etc etc…then I’m on board. I believe there is an order that is inherent and unchangeable.

What I think is illogical is calling that ‘something ineffable’ by the term “God” and then assigning agendas to it that have no logical connection to that “something ineffable” that is behind everything.

I get the concept of God. What I am unwilling to do is sign on to a particular metaphor for that concept.I am unwilling to define it and by doing so exclude it’s nature of infinity and being ineffable.

The word “God” has become the property of people who use the term to define a specific “being”, and I am ok with that. If it means I am an atheist to reject that understanding of the term,then I am an atheist.

It is not illogical to reject what I believe to be an incomplete and false definition for something of this importance.

 

[buffalo]

It is so bad they are redefining nothing to mean something. :banghead:

 

[schaeffer]

schaeffer, what do you understand as “being”? you confuse me when you say the first cause has as its essence “to be” but that it not being…

I don’t think theism says God is like us. It says because physical reality began, with time, space, matter, energy, then God is other than these things because he caused them to be. Whatever it is, this cause is spaceless timeless immaterial, because it created time space, matter and so one, because it is independent from these things. that is what transcendence is.

As to a beginning, is it not true the BVG theorem has shown any expanding universe must have an absolute beginning?

You may be right about what theism says about God, but I’ve met very few theists who accept the concept of transcendence as being equivalent to what they call God.

If one agrees that there is something that caused things to be, is that sufficient to be accepted as a theist?

 

[Overture]

We’ve never known anything to NOT be in motion, so again, why must there be something beyond everything that makes it move. If the nature of everything is to be in motion… in relationship to everything else…then there need not be something that set it into motion. Motion is it’s state of being.

What granted it that nature? You’re describing physical phenomena. I think we’re not on the same page of considering meta-analysis of the state of existence. If you’re implying that the physical universe exists without any external cause, that it has always existed and will always exist, and has within its inherent, unchanging nature the qualities you’re describing, then that is pantheism. Which is a theism. I don’t agree with it personally because I think it flies in the face of logical deduction and common sense, but it is still a conception of God.

It still begs the fundamental question, if “things” have always existed in a state of motion and will always exist in a perpetual state of motion: “Why do things exist rather than not exist?” If you say that it is in their inherent nature to exist, then you’re already appealing to a metaphysical cause (God) of physicality (things).

Are you denying that anything beyond physical reality is even possible, and that the physical universe is a self-sufficient entity in and of itself?

I am fine if people want to call “the manner in which things operate” God…but I’ve met very few people who don’t jump to words that you are using like “a Being” (not the STATE of being, but an actual “Being”) or He, etc etc
…
If people are willing to accept that God might not BE a being, with a human like intelligence etc etc…then I’m on board. I believe there is an order that is inherent and unchangeable.
…
I get the concept of God. What I am unwilling to do is sign on to a particular metaphor for that concept.I am unwilling to define it and by doing so exclude it’s nature of infinity and being ineffable.

Who is doing this? The Catholic Church in particular takes a very Neo-Platonist attitude about the nature of God, what God is and is not, etc. I went through great pains to explain that God Itself is not a being, but Is Being Itself. I explained why metaphors are used, that God is both immanent and transcendent, and to not get hung up on conceptualizing God as a “Thing.” God is not a thing. “Things,” by their very nature, are impermanent and ceaselessly changing. That is not God. When you say, “I don’t want to sign on to a metaphor for that concept,” you’re actively refusing to participate in a philosophical practice of looking at something through a mirror. It is an essential part of deduction and inference. When God is referred to as “He,” is it too much to assume that people know and understand that God is not a physical human being in the sky, consisting of matter, with a human intelligence? God is not human, and therefore cannot have a human intelligence. In order to be the cause and initiator of all existence, and be the foundation of every thing, God cannot have the intelligence of a human.

The word “God” has become the property of people who use the term to define a specific “being”, and I am ok with that. If it means I am an atheist to reject that understanding of the term,then I am an atheist.

It is not illogical to reject what I believe to be an incomplete and false definition for something of this importance.

God is not some being within creation, so no problems there. I’m not sure where you’re coming up with this stuff about God being the property of any intellectual strain of philosophy. If you say that, “God is not a being,” then we have agreed from the very start. If you think that me referring to God as a “He” means that I believe God is a human male within the scope of creation, then there is a misunderstanding. I don’t think anyone on this forum would say that God is made of matter and does not necessarily transcend what He has created.

You may be right about what theism says about God, but I’ve met very few theists who accept the concept of transcendence as being equivalent to what they call God.

If one agrees that there is something that caused things to be, is that sufficient to be accepted as a theist?

Where are you getting your definition of “theism”? There are many different types of theism.

Deism, Pantheism, Panentheism, Polytheism, Monotheism, Autotheism, Monism, Etc.

And the list goes on, especially if the subcategorize those loose terms. If you’re referring to monotheism, and specifically the conception of God that is sometimes depicted by (or interpreted from) certain theists, then that is something else altogether and does not incorporate or consider the deep philosophical traditions of the Catholic Church and its understanding of what we mean by the word “God”.

 

[schaeffer]

I think you and I are mostly on the same page.

I am a pantheist.

I cannot know whether or not there is something beyond the Universe as I know it, that was the cause, I do not deny that possibility.

I have not experienced any evidence that there is. People say that logically there must be. That I disagree with. The Universe does not behave according to what human logic would predict it would. It’s beyond us, it has it’s own order, and if we have learned anything about it, it is that it behaves in ways we could not predict.

I’ve never seen anything be brought into existence, matter and energy may be manipulated from one form into another, but that is different from some ultimate something beyond the Universe creating the Universe out of nothing. I have no reason to believe that there must at one time have been nothing, and then something brought something else into existence. Based on what I’ve seen and know of the Universe, that is not the way it works, and that is not logical to assume at some point it had to be other than it is.

Hence, I experience the Universe as the Ultimate Reality. I am a pantheist.

Most pantheists, do not consider or experience the Universe as “God”. We don’t use that term, we can’t and don’t plug “Universe” into the place the “God” holds in other faiths. The reason we don’t is because, at least in my culture, “God” is a specific metaphor (or to some NOT a metaphor but absolute reality) that refers to some sort of transcendent “being”.

And humans DO often get wrapped up in metaphors rather than what the metaphor points to.

Nearly every monotheist I have talked to considers me an atheist because I do not believe in a personal being that is “God”.

You don’t fall into that category so as I said, you and I appear to be on the same page, at least as far as not holding that “God” MUST be some sort of personal being.

I dont’ use the term “God” because if I do, in my culture, people get the wrong idea and then accuse me of trying to pull one over on them. So I am very careful, perhaps anally so, in making the distinction.

I’ve had many people argue with me that we MUST use terms like “He” to discuss these things.

I think that is false. We can speak of the Sun as the Sun, rather than He, and the earth as the earth rather than She. And we can speak of the Ultimate Reality as the Ultimate Reality, or as many believe, the Unmoved Mover, or The Order of Things…etc etc, without using confusing words that tend to be understood as referring to a person or entity.

When I speak of the Universe, or Ultimate Reality, no one gets confused as to whether or not I am speaking of a personal being, it is clear that I am not.

The word God, in my culture is not a neutral word used to speak of transcendence or the Source etc, so to use it, in my culture, would not portray what my actual beliefs are.

 

[schaeffer]

Who is doing this? The Catholic Church in particular takes a very Neo-Platonist attitude about the nature of God, what God is and is not, etc. I went through great pains to explain that God Itself is not a being, but Is Being Itself. I explained why metaphors are used, that God is both immanent and transcendent, and to not get hung up on conceptualizing God as a “Thing.” God is not a thing. “Things,” by their very nature, are impermanent and ceaselessly changing. That is not God. When you say, “I don’t want to sign on to a metaphor for that concept,” you’re actively refusing to participate in a philosophical practice of looking at something through a mirror. It is an essential part of deduction and inference.

When God is referred to as “He,” is it too much to assume that people know and understand that God is not a physical human being in the sky, consisting of matter, with a human intelligence? God is not human, and therefore cannot have a human intelligence. In order to be the cause and initiator of all existence, and be the foundation of every thing, God cannot have the intelligence of a human.

God is not some being within creation, so no problems there. I’m not sure where you’re coming up with this stuff about God being the property of any intellectual strain of philosophy. If you say that, “God is not a being,” then we have agreed from the very start. If you think that me referring to God as a “He” means that I believe God is a human male within the scope of creation, then there is a misunderstanding. I don’t think anyone on this forum would say that God is made of matter and does not necessarily transcend what He has created.

Are you serious here? The Trinity. God is constantly and consistently referred to as HE, as being, and if Jesus is what Jesus is understood to be…then how can you write the above with a straight face and claim that Catholicism holds some non personal understanding of God?

He, made man in “our” image…God and Jesus together at creation.

The Bible and the Church refer to God using endless streams of human qualities. In the Bible, God HIMself refers to having all manner of human qualities…jealous, angry, loving, forgiving, etc etc.

And if Jesus was indeed flesh and blood after resurrection, and ascended to heaven and is fully God and fully man, yet you claim God is not a person with a physical body…it is your own theology and scripture you are denying. Not any unwillingness on my part to discuss things.

That is not the Ultimate Reality I know and experience. Yet it IS the Ultimate Reality Catholics are willing to die for.

I claimed non of those qualities or traits for “God” or God, the Church does.

 

[One_point]

Are you serious here? The Trinity. God is constantly and consistently referred to as HE, as being, and if Jesus is what Jesus is understood to be…then how can you write the above with a straight face and claim that Catholicism holds some non personal understanding of God?

He, made man in “our” image…God and Jesus together at creation.

The Bible and the Church refer to God using endless streams of human qualities. In the Bible, God HIMself refers to having all manner of human qualities…jealous, angry, loving, forgiving, etc etc.

And if Jesus was indeed flesh and blood after resurrection, and ascended to heaven and is fully God and fully man, yet you claim God is not a person with a physical body…it is your own theology and scripture you are denying. Not any unwillingness on my part to discuss things.

That is not the Ultimate Reality I know and experience. Yet it IS the Ultimate Reality Catholics are willing to die for.

I claimed non of those qualities or traits for “God” or God, the Church does.

Schaefer, are you asking what catholics believe ?

Personal is not the same thing as human. Humans are persons but that doesn’t mean whenever you speak of a person you speak of a human. You appear to think if catholics believe in a personal God that they believe in a God that is a human being of sorts. That is so far off what catholics believe, I don’t even know where to begin. Yes, God is personal and relational within himself. God is also immaterial, timeless limitless and unchanging. In himself. In relation to us creation, he is transcendent. But immanent.

Jesus’ incarnation is not God’s eternal existence. Its something God did. And his divinity did not become human or phsycal nature. It remained immaterial. but his person took up a human nature. Eternally, God remains completely immaterial in his nature eventhough the divine person remains incarnated in human nature in Jesus.