**The Necessary Reality Argument**

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AlNg said:
The opposite of nothing is something. I agree with that. However I don’t see where that implies that a source must absolutely and necessarily exist.

Also I don’t see the definition of the terms absolutely exist and necessarily exist.
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A thing is either dependent or necessary. Those are your only two options. A thing either exists necessarily because of its own nature or it exists because of the necessary nature of some other being…

If out of absolutely nothing comes nothing then there must be a being that necessarily exists because of its own nature. Otherwise nothing would exist… A, being cannot be neither necessary or dependent on another being for its existence, and neither can a being be dependent and not have a cause that necessarily exists .

That is incoherent.

I am justified in saying that there must be a necessary reality. It follows necessarily from premise 1.
 
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yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy no. That’s right i said no.

Please read premise 1 and 2 again and then read 3. I said absolute antithesis, meaning it is ultimate reality. But to be fair you probably didn’t know that and it is not at all obvious from what i wrote.
 
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Some interesting replies here, thank you all - that’s why I entered this discussion. I think IwantGod is perfectly correct that “out of absolutely nothing comes nothing”. If the laws of quantum physics predict that something can come out of nothing, then those laws - dictating that possibility, must have been in existence outside the emergence of that something from “nothing”. I do not say that the laws must have existed “before” reality, as the concept of time has no meaning here, but metaphorically, at least, they must have existed “before time began”.

And, of course, the laws of physics are unchanging and eternal.

But are they intelligent?

We must also ask whether ‘the laws of physics’ can be effective, and make things happen, rather than merely descriptive. The fact that the force of gravity depends on the masses involved and the square of the distance between them does not make things fall to the ground, it merely describes what happens. The same is true of the rest of maths and physics. On the other hand if a country passes law deciding which side of the road to drive on, then that (via the people who obey it) can change reality. We need a vocabulary for an ‘effective’ law rather than a merely ‘descriptive’ one. Perhaps there is such a vocabulary, but I don’t know it.

So I think IwantGod’s ‘something that absolutely and necessarily exists’ is an effective mathematics.

But is such a thing necessarily intelligent?

Finally, there are some posts which point out that this whole argument depends on the universe not having existed for ever. This is a perfectly valid point of view, and not contradicted by our current knowledge of the universe. I just don’t care for it myself!
 
Your first paragraph: it seems to me you are thinking of the laws of physics as things that cause events to happen, or determine how things will happen, and so must have existed “before” (as it were) any Big Bang. But actually the laws of physics aren’t like that. They are really simply descriptions of how things happen, rather than determiners. It’s just that, when they are right, they seem to us to act like determiners. As descriptions, there is no requirement for them to exist “before” the Big Bang.
 
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IWantGod said:
A thing either exists necessarily because of its own nature or it exists because of the necessary nature of some other being…
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I disagree. A thing can exist because of something else that does not have a necessary nature.
 
In an intermediary sense this can be said to be true in a sense, but a necessary being still has to exist, otherwise no unnecessary being can exist. it is irrelevant how many dependent beings you line up together because none of their natures exist because of their nature. Thus existence cannot be said to originate with them.

In other-words a thing is either dependent or necessary. You cannot have a being that just exists for no reason, neither existing because of its nature or because of the necessary nature of another being. Intermediary causes are irrelevant.
 
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AlNg said:
This seems to be a human projection. Why does that round rock exist? Oh, it is clear that it was made round so that we can sit on it.
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No, that’s not it at all. its just logic. Yes, one cannot just say an object has an existential purpose without sufficient reason, and if that is what i was arguing then you would be correct. But I am not talking about a thing having a purpose, i am talking about a thing having an ontological basis for its existence,. You wouldn’t say that the rock just exists, or that its existence has nothing to do with its nature or the nature of something else. That’s what i mean by saying a thing cannot exist for no reason. A thing existing for no reason is like a being coming out of absolutely nothing by itself, its absurd. There is no rational reason for it being there, there is no sufficient or efficient cause. Reason breaks down. Its like magic. Do you believe in Magic?

That’s why i said a thing either exists because of its nature or the nature of something else.
 
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I saw this chap on EWTN, Edward Feser explaining much of this. I just received his new book called “Five Proofs of the existence of God” from Ignatius Press. I haven’t read it all but I believe it might be useful in answering some of the questions posted here.
 
That’s not what he is talking about. Theories about the behavior of physical things have changed. He is saying that physical laws as they truly are in an objective sense could be unchanging and eternal. Now i would disagree with that, but i just wanted to point out to you that you are misunderstanding what people are saying.
 
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pocaracas said:
Because that is its correct name.

Spacetime - Wikipedia
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Here is a small quote. from the info you provided…

“In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualizing and understanding relativistic effects such as how different observers perceive where and when **events occur.”**

How does this description tie in with what you was saying about space-time? Because i don’t see how you could be talking about the same thing.
 
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PickyPicky, you seem only to have read the first sentence of my post. I agreed with you that in general the laws of physics are descriptive, but also considered the case that in order to have relevance here, they need to be operative as well. As such, they would behave more like laws of a country, which are not merely descriptive, but constrain its citizens to follow particular paths.

AlNg, as far as we know, the laws of physics have not changed at all. Our understanding of them certainly has, but the earth went round the sun long before the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe was rejected, and no doubt our current understanding will continue to be refined.

Where I am still to be convinced by IwantGod is whether any of this requires intelligence.
 
That is more of a mathematical description.
Try this one (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam)
"
Based on the uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, there is no reason that spacetime needs to be fundamentally smooth. Instead, in a quantum theory of gravity, spacetime would consist of many small, ever-changing regions in which space and time are not definite, but fluctuate in a foam-like manner.[3]

In quantum mechanics, and in particular in quantum field theory, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles which then annihilate back to energy without violating physical conservation laws. As time and space are being probed at smaller scales, the energy of such particles, called virtual particles, increases. Combining this observation with the fact that in Einstein’s theory of general relativity energy curves spacetime, one can imagine that at sufficiently small scales the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth spacetime seen at macroscopic scales, giving spacetime a “foamy” character.
"
 
Hugh_Farey said:
As such, they would behave more like laws of a country, which are not merely descriptive, but constrain its citizens to follow particular paths.
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That sounds incredibly Goal-directed like an intelligence ordering things to behave in a certain way. But given that you are only using this as an analogy i assume that you don’t really mean that physical laws are like that. So lets put that to the side for now.

What i really would like for you to explain is what the metaphysical nature of these laws are if they are not merely descriptions of physical behavior. Because when i think of physical laws, i think only of the physical natures they describe and how those natures behave; i don’t think of these laws as existing apart from those natures having their own ontological being.
But you seem to claim that this is possible and go as far as to say that these laws actually cause the physical reality of physical natures and i don’t understand how such a position can be held in any coherent manner.

If you were to say that physical laws are created by a non-physical intellect of sorts, then at least we would have an ontological foundation for those laws since they exist in the intellect; they would simply be the rules by which an intellect would want to regulate objects. and there is at least an efficient cause here. But to say that the laws of physics can just exist with no embodiment in physical reality is very much like saying abstract ideas can just exist without a mind.

Can you give some further explanation?

I
 
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Sorry, I did read all your post, but I wanted to restrict my reply. The laws of physics, being merely descriptive, are not unchanging — our descriptions change as our understanding changes. Being descriptive they cannot “precede” the Big Bang: something has to occur before they can describe it.

You say to be relevant here we need to consider whether there are “operative” laws. The thing is that objects behave the way they do because … they do. There is no requirement for this quality of objects to precede the existence of objects (if something comes from nothing).
 
PickyPicky said:
The thing is that objects behave the way they do because … they do. There is no requirement for this quality of objects to precede the existence of objects (if something comes from nothing).
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So then we are back to the first premise. You have to challenge the idea that from absolutely nothing comes nothing. You have to think that from a a complete absence of all reality an object can come to be by itself and consistently behave as it does for no reason.
 
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IWantGod said:
A thing either exists necessarily because of its own nature or it exists because of the necessary nature of some other being…
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Let me suggest a mild correction: A thing either exists necessarily because of its own nature or it exists because of some other being.
IWantGod said:
You cannot have a being that just exists for no reason, neither existing because of its nature or because of the necessary nature of another being.
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Let me suggest a mild correction: You cannot have a being that just exists for no reason, neither existing because of its nature or because of another being.
IWantGod said:
That’s why i said a thing either exists because of its nature or the nature of something else.
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Let me suggest a mild correction: a thing either exists because of its nature or [because of] something else.
 
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