Why is there something rather than nothing?

[Silent3]

(Note: I used part of this post as a response in another thread, but wanted spin the topic off on its own.)

There are only three possible ways I can see to resolve the question "why is there something rather than nothing", and they are the same whether you're a theist or an atheist:

1) There is no beginning, no need for a moment of creation -- something has existed forever.
2) As a special boundary condition, perhaps a one-time event, something can arise from nothing.
3) The human mind simply can't (at least not yet) wrap itself around this kind of problem, probably can't even ask the right questions, never mind coming up with or understanding the answers.

As I see it, the main difference between atheists and theists when it comes to the question of origin is that theists merely insert an extra, non-necessary entity into the dilemma. Rather than supposing that the material universe might have existed forever without beginning, or spontaneously arisen from nothing, or deciding that the question of origin may be beyond human reach, theists propose a God which can exist forever, or a God which can spontaneously appear, or a God to be the subject of an imponderable question.

What I find alternately amusing and exasperating is when theists think they're really getting somewhere, that they're actually making some sort of progress in understanding, by saying "God did it!". These theists often think they've got a real poser of a question to stump those darn atheists when they ask something like, "Well, where did the Big Bang come from, you scientific smartypants, you!?"

One often gets the feeling from such theists that the only possible reasons that someone else doesn't immediately see God in the answer to such a question are intractable stubbornness, staggering stupidity, or evil. For these theists, "I don't know" isn't an acceptable answer, it's a deliberate evasion of an obvious-to-them, should-be-obvious-to-you God.

Suppose there was a good scientific answer for "Where did the Big Bang come from?"? One bit of wild scientific speculation I've heard is related to the idea of multi-dimensional "branes", with these "branes" floating around in some even higher-dimensional space, and when two branes make contact, a Big Bang occurs at the point of contact.

So let's suppose this idea could be proven true. Would that answer satisfy the theist? Of course not. The next question from the theist would naturally be, "So, Mr. Wizard, where did the branes comes from? Huh? Huh!?"

That new answers lead to new questions isn't the problem. That's expected, that's a good thing. But how it is that the same mind that automatically questions any scientific answer doesn't automatically do the same thing with a supernatural answer? What makes "God did it!" such a satisfying end point, so that questions like "Where did God come from?" or "How did God do it?" somehow don't count? Why is it okay to say "I don't know", or "we can't possibly understand" to these kinds of questions, but not to other questions?

[Mrs. Overall]

1. I think Roseanne Roseannadanna summed it up: "Well it just goes to show you-it's always something."

[GodlessBiker]

2. One could say that nothing is really something, so there always is something.

But that is a semantic game that does not get to the root of the problem.

Perhaps, at times, there is nothing. It is only when there is something that someone can ask the question and, because of that, we never hear the question: Why is there nothing rather than something?

For theists, the question can be, Why is there God rather than no God? It's a tough question. Would God even know the answer?

[Occam Bandage]

3. At the quantum level,

something can indeed arise from nothing. It happens all the time.

[GodlessBiker]

4. True. But that just pushes it back a level. "Something" would include physical laws that allow...

something to come out of nothing at the quantum level. So, in your example, the nothing you reference isn't really nothing, as it includes the laws which permit your example.

[Silent3]

11. To put what GodlessBiker said in different words...

...empty space is a something, the laws of quantum mechanics are a something, the stage upon which we can talk about these physical concepts playing out is a something.

[Occam Bandage]

13. To answer both of you,

"something" and "existence" are both concepts that, like the dimensions themselves including time, are all contained entirely within the universe. To talk about existence within that stage as being meaningful, we imply there is a meaningful comparison to things outside that stage. It is a bit like me saying "my hair is and was black on my body and after I was conceived and then born. It is meaningless to ask what color my hair was 1400 years ago, or to ask what color my hair is on a raindrop.

[Silent3]

14. To go back to the issue of the OP...

...you're either in Option 3, where the question itself is meaningless or improperly formed (I have accounted for that possibility), or you have to be able to talk about the universe itself as a "something", not just a container for other somethings. Even referring to various abstract concepts as "somethings" doesn't mean you can necessarily steer clear of the Option 3 quagmire, but you can at least discuss more before you get bogged down there.

Either way, the point of my OP still stands: tossing deities into the equation doesn't get you anywhere.

[Towlie]

5. Both exist. We live in "something" because if we lived in "nothing" then it would be "something".

It's the Anthropic Principle... or something.

[Marrah_G]

6. I have no issue with believing the big bang theory

My religion doesn't really have a creationist sort of belief.

[Silent3]

9. I'm not necessarily talking about biblical creationism.

There are many religious people, Christian and non-Christian, who are willing to accept the Big Bang, but who still feel that the Big Bang is not a sufficient answer, that believing in a God who creates or causes the Big Bang is somehow also needed.

[Marrah_G]

12. No one knows the details and facts of how it all started.

We have good theories and assumptions. But we don't know all the absolutes yet.

MY own personal beliefs are that dieties were not behind the creation of the earth but perhaps that the earth created them.

[Birthmark]

7. Who says that there *is* something?

It might look like something to us...but we're on the inside. From the outside, it might all add up to exactly nothing.

[Silent3]

10. Somethingness is a self-defining concept

Whether or not there's a perspective where "it all adds up to exactly nothing" is irrelevant. Summation is a something, perspectives are something, recognition of nothing is a something, being inside is something, being outside is something.

[Birthmark]

20. Interesting but incorrect, imo.

The kind of nothing under discussion has never been observed...never will be observed according to quantum physics. There is simply no evidence that such a state can, has, or will exist.

[Silent3]

21. Of course it's never been observed!

Do you think anything I'm saying is contingent on that!? If so, you aren't following the thread at all.

[rrneck]

8. No matter

where you go, there you are. Even though we can posit multiple dimensions, the possibility of a pre or post universe existence, or the possible causes and effects of anything before or after the existence of the universe as we are able to physically measure it, we will always be stuck in the point of view of the three dimensions of our own physicality. All of the tools we use to measure the phenomena in our micro and macro experience are just extensions of our bodies.

An art teacher years ago once told me that you can look at a hill, you can paint it, you can measure it with a laser, you can ask others about it, but the best way to actually know the hill is to walk on it.

Theism and religion offer us a community within the shared experience of the divine as we imagine it to be. Unfortunately, it also gets virgins thrown into volcanos. Science, while growing as a replacement for an understanding of things that we cannot possibly experience physically, sometimes gets us into trouble as well as the residents of Hiroshima unfortunately discovered.

Whether it be God or Heisenberg, divine creation or quantum mechanics; each extreme of human understanding whether we measure our beliefs of believe our measurements seem to offer the same thing. Both offer great promise or great despair depending on what we make of them.

[Evoman]

15. Damned if I know. I don't understand religious people.

[Beetwasher]

16. Existence Is.

There can never be "nothing".

"I" think, therefore "something" exists.

And, whatever that "something" is, it changes.

But there can never be and never was "nothing".

Existence is.

[ZombieHorde]

17. 0=2, but really, I don't know. nt

[struggle4progress]

18. Quite a number of excellent thinkers have shown themselves rather unimaginative

when considering such questions

On current knowledge, time and space have no absolute meaning, and the order of events in time depends on how one watches. One might therefore want to be cautious about inquiring into whatever came "before" the Big Bang, since near the Big Bang neither space nor time nor physics may resemble our own. Should the Big Bang turn out to be a coordinate rather than physical singularity, that one could somehow "look beyond," it might still happen that the space and time accessible to us were somehow "finite" without having any definite boundaries

The problem, of determining how the world "actually is" from how it "actually looks" to us, should be well-known: for a simple example, consider merely the visual world; it is very well-described at ordinary human scale by projective geometry, which unifies the theories of points and lines by introducing "points at infinity" and "lines at infinity" (which, despite their strange names, are no different than the other points and lines); but under this theory one can go always in the same direction, eventually returning to one's starting point as one's mirror image. The result seems ridiculous, but of course it will never be possible to test it experimentally, given the size of the known universe. There are other practical reasons to reject this visual geometry, but the replacements are not necessarily less problematic. Godel, for example, once took an interest in general relativity and was able to prove that the following situation was consistent with Einstein's theory: the universe might allow spacelike paths along which an observer could travel to his/her own past; note that here we are not talking about moving backwards in time by traveling faster than the speed of light, but (rather) something like ambling through space until we encountered yesterday. This suggests than in some universes compatible with the theory of relativity, the well-known paradoxes of time-travel could already appear with space-travel -- although (again) it is unlikely that we could have a practical experimental test of the possibility. Just as in the world of projective-geometry there can be no real distinction between an object and its mirror-image, in a Godel-world one's own present and past and future might somehow be confused

We are unlikely to eliminate intractable problems from our theories: the paradoxes of self-reference, discovered by the Greek logicians two millenia ago, were honed into useful and exact proof methods by Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and a host of other mathematicians -- but the paradoxes in some sense remain. Theories risk inconsistency unless their scope is limited: one can have theories, and one can have theories about theories (meta-theories) and also theories about theories about theories (meta-meta-theories) and so on in a never-ending hierarchy, but the paradoxes of self-reference become a danger if one tries to collapse the hierarchy. It is likely possible to provide ever better fragments of a material theory of consciousness, but a unified theory that would allow us to explain ourselves materially, well enough to explain our ability to understand the material world well enough to explain ourselves materially, is likely to engender the ancient paradoxes of self-reference. Science necessarily remains reductionist: this would not eliminate the possibility of endless scientific progress, but it would prevent "a final scientific theory of everything"

My other comment, of course, is that your observation, that "G-d did it!" is singularly unhelpful as an explanation, is not particularly interesting -- since I know plenty of religious people who generally find it as unhelpful as you do, and their religious views arise differently than you think. Your vision of religion as a mode of explanation is not a universal view: one might, for example, instead view the religious perspective as an existential choice, one of many choices we could make. One can simultaneously regard science as the preferred approach for answering questions which are properly addressed by rational methods, without believing that every question should be addressed by reason or by reason alone.

[Silent3]

22. There's nothing in what I wrote that casts religion as only...

...or primarily a "mode of explanation" for everyone. It is for many, however. You certainly must be aware that these "How did we get here?" kinds of questions are often used by SOME theists as if "God did it!" is the obvious and only possible answer.

Not by people as awesomely spiritually and religiously advanced as you, of course.

...without believing that every question should be addressed by reason or by reason alone.

Boojatta polls come to mind. :)

[struggle4progress]

24. I have never claimed to be "spiritually and religiously advanced," whether "awesomely" or otherwise

[Silent3]

25. You don't need to.

:evilgrin:

[pokerfan]

19. Bah! Everyone knows that it's turtles all the way down...

[Marrah_G]

23. Pew! Pew! Pew!

:rofl:

[Silent3]

26. Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66FAkLLDrZY

:)

[Deep13]

27. Nobody knows.

That is the real answer right now. Lack of knowledge does not mean god wins by default.