Recently on The Canadian Catholic Show I debated the cosmological argument with theologian Robert Koons, under the title “Does the Contingency Argument Succeed?” Koons took the position he has formally articulated in two articles, “A New Look at the Cosmological Argument” in American Philosophical Quarterly 34.2 (April 1997: 193-211 ) and “Skepticism and the Principle of Sufficient Reason” (with Alexander Pruss) in Philosophical Studies 178 (2021: 1079–99). The basic idea being that there logically must be some ultimate explanation of what exists, and (we’re supposed to conclude) it can only be some disembodied supermind, hence God (see Stanford’s Arguments from Contingency for a typical overview). I took the position I have been shopping on my blog (and plan to formalize for journal submission in coming years) that all his own axioms already entail the observed universe without anything existing—much less a God: see The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists.

This was an informative and collegial debate and a rewarding opportunity to see what an expert could attempt to argue against my position, and where also we could agree on various principles. It was also usefully brief; we covered everything in under an hour, and took questions from the audience for just a few minutes more. Here I’ll summarize the best Koons could come up with against my position, and why it doesn’t logically succeed. Unfortunately, the original debate video disappeared for a while, but is back now. Canadian Catholic had been outed for what appears to be harassment and misconduct online (unrelated to his hosting of this debate) and nixed his entire internet presence for a while. It was unfortunate to see a productive debate almost lost this way. When I wrote the following I had to work from my memory and handwritten notes I made during the debate. You can also get most of Koons’ side from his two papers (cited above).

My Argumentum Ex Nihilo

For my complete syllogism and fuller explanations, see The Problem with Nothing. Here I’ll just colloquially summarize the salient points that Koons had to address.

First: It is logically necessarily the case that either there has always been something, or there was at one point absolutely nothing—in essence a “nothing-state.” In this debate I made clear we are discussing the hypothetical second case, the model in which at some time in the past absolutely nothing existed. Because that is a premise Koons operates from. I think the same questions and arguments apply to both cases, and we discussed that a little; because Koons agreed with the matching premise that even if there has always been something, this then shifts the ultimate causal question away from the temporal axis (the “when”) to the ontological axis (the “why”). In other words, even if there has been an infinite past series of causes, the question still remains why that series exists rather than some other, or none at all. And from there all the same arguments follow. But in our debate I set aside all possible models that involve something always having existed, so we could focus on the scenario we both agreed could obtain: that at some point in the past, nothing existed (except for God, in Koons’ model; whereas in my model, of course, not even that existed).

Second: The absence of anything means also the absence of all laws of physics, which would include all laws of causality in the normal sense; those by definition do not exist, when nothing exists. Unless you can show some law of causality or physics logically necessarily always exists, even when nothing exists, then those laws are necessarily contingent—by Koons’ own logic, so he could not escape this result, other than by abandoning his Principle of Sufficient Reason, which would tank his own argument from the get-go. It was his argument that either something logically necessarily exists, or it only contingently exists. If we grant that (and I do), and some law of physics is therefore contingent, it won’t exist when nothing exists. Something has to cause it to exist first.

Insofar as we define causality, however, not in terms of physical laws but solely in Koons’s own philosophical sense that any state of being that brings about a new and separate state of being constitutes a cause, then anything that “results” from a nothing-state can be said to have been caused by that nothing-state in this simpler sense. This does not require positing any contingent law of causality. It is simply a description of what happens: if “absolutely nothing” would by itself logically necessarily cause “something” to exist, then we have met Koons’s own Principle of Sufficient Reason. The result would be “new” (it didn’t exist when only nothing existed) and “separate” (the resulting something would be a distinct thing from the previous state of “nothing”). We’ll see shortly that this is both a contingent and logically necessary outcome, but it still meets Koons’ division of options.

The converse also happens, which is bad for Koons. If absolutely nothing exists, then it is logically necessarily the case that no laws or principles exist either that would mold, govern, or limit what then happens to that state of nothing. Which means the principle of ex nihilo nihil cannot be true. When absolutely nothing exists, then it cannot be true that “from nothing, only nothing comes.” So Koons cannot say, “Well, if absolutely nothing existed, then nothing existed to cause anything to happen, so nothing would stay nothing,” because “nothing” itself could cause something to exist. To claim, instead, that “only nothing comes from nothing” is to say a law of physics exists “controlling” what a “nothing” can do; but when nothing exists, neither do any such laws of physics.

Not only could Koons not prove the ex nihilo principle logically necessary (because no one ever has, despite thousands of years of trying), it does not look like it could be logically necessary. The reverse appears to be the case. The only arguments anyone ever poses against “something coming from nothing” are that this would be unusual or improbable or observed, but that means the outcome of nothing is a question of contingency, not necessity. In the words of physicists today, “Nothing is unstable.” This is because it lacks anything that would keep it stable, and thus hold it in a state of nothing. Thus nothing itself will logically necessarily have causal powers (albeit highly unpredictable ones); the exact opposite of the ex nihilo principle. As this cannot be logically disproved, it remains a viable causal model to consider and compare with any other—like God.

Third: In the absence of any laws determining what will happen, it is logically necessarily the case that what will happen can only be determined completely at random. This means every possible outcome must necessarily be equally likely to every other possible outcome. No single outcome can be more probable than any others, or less probable either, because nothing exists to make it so. This reifies the The Principle of Indifference, but this reification is a logically necessary outcome of the state of nothing as described: in the absence of all limits and controls, all logical possibilities are ontologically possible outcomes; and in the absence of anything rendering one outcome more likely than any other, every outcome must necessarily be equally probable. There is no way to avoid this consequence, because it follows with unassailable logical necessity. No contingency need be posited.

This will not be the case when something exists, as then something does exist to limit what will happen. So it cannot be objected that “we would observe this happening still today” because “today” we reside in a governed block of spacetime, the exact opposite of absolutely nothing. The spacetime in which we reside limits what can happen, according to its properties, and the resulting physical laws governing what happens to and within it. However, I noted in our debate that we needn’t even suppose this, although it is indeed true. Because Quantum Mechanics already explains why we don’t see, for example, “rabbits just popping into existence,” or what have you. That actually can happen on QM; but the required assembly (umtillion particles all coming together in a specified place and arrangement) is so vastly improbable we won’t see one instance of it in umtillion years. When we look at events so simple they could be observed spontaneously happening because their probability is high enough to happen in human observation timelines, we actually do observe it happening: it manifests as the universal virtual particle field. But even that is still limited by what our local spacetime can sustain and produce; so even this is not a consequence of “absolutely nothing.” On “absolutely nothing” there will be even fewer constraints on what can happen than the probabilities encompassed by QM.

Fourth: When there isn’t even a particular spacetime limiting what particles can randomly appear without any physical laws governing the matter, when absolutely nothing exists, then every possibility is equally likely. When anything can materialize, there are infinitely many possible things that can materialize. But also, when nothing makes any one possibility more likely than any other, every possible outcome is as likely as every other. And when we add up all the logically possible things that can happen, they are infinite in quantity. Whereas the one singular outcome—that nothing would continue to be nothing—is only one single thing that could happen. And it is logically necessarily the case that that one thing is no more or less likely than any other single thing that could happen. Nothing is just one single state of being; but “something” encompasses infinitely many different states of being. This makes the continuation of “nothing” extraordinarily unlikely.

In fact, it logically necessarily follows that the probability that nothing will remain nothing, that ex nihilo nihil, is infinity to one against. Its probability is therefore infinitesimal. Which is as near to zero as to basically be zero. That doesn’t mean it is logically impossible. It just means it is literally, necessarily, the least likely thing to happen. So when asking “Why is there something rather than nothing?” the answer becomes, “Because nothing continuing to be nothing is too improbable for anyone to expect.” Something simply is the most likely outcome of absolutely nothing. So it is not surprising that, if ever there was absolutely nothing, there would eventually be something instead of nothing. Nothing is simply too unstable to keep going—without something with infinite precision holding it together; in other words, infinitely precise fine-tuning. Whereas if you just let it go without any intelligent control, then a “nothing” will almost certainly collapse into something.

Fifth: The one possible outcome of nothing remaining nothing would correspond to a possible outcome of zero universes coming to exist. The alternative outcomes are that one universe comes to exist; or two; or three; and so on, across all infinite possible numbers of universes that could come to exist. If we select a number of universes that could come to exist at random, from among all possible numbers, it is easily shown that it is infinitely more likely that the number of universes that will come to exist is greater than any finite number you happen to select. Whether that means the number will actually be infinite or just absurdly large we don’t have to know. That involves mathematics that hasn’t been invented yet. What we can know, however, is that the number won’t be small. Or anything resembling small. That it will be small always has a probability infinitesimally close to zero.

Therefore, if there was ever a state of absolutely nothing, it is not only logically necessarily the case that something will immediately arise from it to a probability infinitely close to 100%, but it is also logically necessarily the case that a vast multiverse of randomly selected universes will immediately arise from it, again to a probability infinitely close to 100%. The probability that a universe relevantly enough like ours would be among those inevitably randomly-arising universes is also logically necessarily the case, once again to a probability infinitely close to 100%. Because you can pick any number of universes required for our universe (or any relevantly like it) to be statistically inevitable among them, and still the possible numbers of universes above that will be infinite while the possible numbers of universes below that will be finite, giving us approximate odds of infinity to one, so the probability always approaches 100% that there will be enough universes arising at random to make a universe like ours inevitable to observe—all on chance alone. Therefore we need no further explanation for the observation that a universe like ours exists. It follows with logical necessity from the condition of there once being absolutely nothing.

Sixth: If a state of absolutely nothing would thus likely result in something existing, and indeed even the observed something existing (which does indeed look like a random selection from among all possible somethings), then this would constitutes a “sufficient reason” for that observed effect to exist; no other thing further need be appealed to, to explain that effect coming about. We therefore don’t need to appeal to God or any other thing. A state of absolutely nothing already entails that we will make that observation, to such an arbitrarily high probability as to leave no reason to doubt it. And so, any explanation of existence that successfully proceeds from “there once was absolutely nothing” satisfies Koons’ Principle of Sufficient Reason. So there is no need to deny that principle. I have not seen any logical proof that that principle must always be true (none of Koons’s arguments in his “Skepticism” paper are convincing). But I have also not seen any reason to explore any hypothesis-space without it. It serves well enough to explain every observation.

I therefore can explain all of existence, just as we observe it, by positing the simplest possible cause: a state of absolutely nothing. We therefore need no god to explain existence. Compared to absolutely nothing, God is an enormously and arbitrarily complex entity. It is therefore the least likely explanation of existence. It is therefore comparatively not a credible explanation of anything; whereas an original nothing-state explains a great deal more of what we observe than any god-hypothesis ever has. Indeed, it leaves no observation unexplained, or even unlikely.

I am not the first to propose something like this. A similar argument has already appeared in a peer reviewed proposal in cosmological science by Maya Lincoln and Avi Wasser, “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo,” in Physics of the Dark Universe 2 (2013): 195–99. They don’t go into the same philosophical-analytical depth as I have so far done. But their theory is in important ways similar: when accounting for all possible things that “could” exist, and the fact that “nothing” entails infinite negating conditions (whatever is needed to “take away” a possible thing and keep it from existing), it can easily be shown that “nothing” is highly unstable; any random perturbation will result in it collapsing into a complex reality (and “nothing” lacks, by definition, anything that can prevent a random perturbation from occuring). They show how this is compatible with most other actual scientific theories of cosmic origin today, most of which are now indeed multiverse theories.

Koons’s Published Case

Robert Koons’s “Cosmological Argument” paper adopts certain premises that support my counter-argument. Its first four pages attempt to argue that everything must have a cause, a premise some could challenge (and his arguments are a bit desperate and more inconclusive than he lets on), but my point here is that we don’t have to challenge it. Because granting it leads us to the opposite conclusion anyway: there almost certainly was no god involved in the manifestation of existence. For example, he allows causes to be indeterministic; they merely just have to be separate from the effect and produce the effect in any sense. This means a nothing-state like I just described obeys the laws of causality by his own definition. Because it is separate from the effect, and produces the effect (that effect would not exist, but for the cause, whether that cause or any other). And it satisfies his Principle of Sufficient Reason that his “Skepticism” paper argues for as well. So although one could debate a lot of what he argues in that paper for that principle, we don’t have to deny that principle anyway.

One might ask whether “a god” would be among the things randomly arising from a nothing-state as I described. But (a) there is effectively zero probability that only one god would so arise, but in fact countlessly many, and (b) by far most universes that arise won’t have any such gods in them (as universes without gods will be vastly simpler accidents and thus realized far more frequently), and (c) none of those gods will have caused the universe containing them to exist. And so whether our universe has a god in it remains an empirical question. It cannot be decided by logical argument. And it won’t ever be Koons’s desired god. I suspect gods such as Koons wants to exist are logically impossible anyway. But even if they aren’t, they remain extraordinarily improbable. Indeed, too improbable to ever expect any intelligent species arising to ever observe or encounter any.

But back to Koons’s argument, he maintains that because contingent facts must have some cause that ultimately is not itself contingent, there must be some “ultimate” fact that is a logically necessary fact (something that has to exist, and thus requires no further explanation of its existence). In other words, the Ontological Whatsit I discussed before. And this is true even if there were a past eternal series of contingent causes, because then the ultimate explanation must reside at the ontological level: a reason why that contingent series exists rather than some other, or none at all. But both facts are fully explained by an ultimate basis of “absolutely nothing”:

  • In the temporal case, an absolute nothing is by its own inalienable nature too unstable to remain nothing. As I just demonstrated, odds favor it randomly collapsing into a vast accidental multiverse. And as this is a logically necessary consequence, it meets Koons’s requirements for an ultimate explanation. And since “absolutely nothing” is vastly simpler than any god, it satisfies Ockham’s Razor as well. It’s simply always a vastly more likely explanation of what we observe, particularly as what we observe does indeed look like the product of a random and indifferent process and not an intelligent one.
  • In the past-eternal case, the absolute lack of any ultimate explanation also by its own inalienable nature entails the observed outcome. Though there won’t have been a “time” in the past when nothing collapsed into a vast random multiverse, there will have to have been an existential, eternal, atemporal “decision” as to what would or would not exist; and if nothing existed to make that decision (and thus to limit or confine what it could or would or should be), then what we logically necessarily must expect is the selection to be completely random—the opposite of intelligent selection. But a completely random selection of what would exist, from among all possible things that could exist, produces the same outcome: a vast random multiverse.

We therefore don’t need God to satisfy Koons’s own requirements for an ultimate cause; and Koons’s God is too unnecessarily and excessively complex to even posit anyway. It could fly if there was no simpler ultimate cause that could explain observations; but it isn’t. Not by a longshot. Even simple cosmic initial conditions, many completely godless scenarios in cosmological science, are vastly simpler than his God, and thus already far more credible as any “logically necessary” brute fact, if you really need such a thing. But nothing is simpler than absolutely nothing. And the complete absence of anything deciding what will exist is naturally a far more obvious state of things. So the fact that it predicts everything we observe leaves us with no more likely explanation of it than that. No place left for gods.

The next two pages of Koons’s “Cosmological” paper attempt to argue that there must be some ultimate “First Cause” that itself cannot be contingent. One may again debate that. His arguments for it are not as strong as he represents. But again, we don’t even have to dispute this. The fact that by granting his own premise we get the opposite result (the universe was caused by absolutely nothing; not by any kind of god) is sufficient to nix his argument. So when we get to the next four pages, when Koons tries to argue only his specific notion of a God can satisfy this requirement of a First Cause, we can easily identify where he has gone wrong:

  • Koons says the First Cause must be “a necessary being,” but he never presents any evidence that his (or any) God is a necessary being. His argument is inductive, not deductive: that by process of elimination he can’t think of any other suitable candidate, “therefore” God must be the “necessary cause” we are looking for. But this reasoning can justify placing anything in that slot: maybe a simple primordial quantum state is the “necessary being” we are looking for; and so on. His argument simply doesn’t function here. Anything can satisfy the condition. So we are left asking which of all options requires the fewest brute assumptions, and best fits observations. An absolute nothing far exceeds God on both these measures. It is thus even more likely to be “the necessary being” Koons insists we are looking for.
  • Koons says his “God” satisfies what he says are the required conditions for a First Cause because it “is not a mere composite or aggregate object.” But so is an absolute nothing. So even though one can dispute this claim about God (God looks like a very complex composite to me), we don’t have to. The fact that “absolutely nothing” even better fits this condition already means positing a god is unnecessary. God has vast theoretical complexity in a way that “nothing” doesn’t. God also doesn’t fit observations; unlike “nothing,” which does.
  • Koons says “God has all of its basic attributes by necessity” and “all of the parts of God have all of their attributes by necessity,” though he never presents any evidence that this is the case—he just “declares” it. Which is invalid reasoning (same as we got from Edward Feser). But again we needn’t debate that. Because all the properties and consequent effects of an absolute nothing that I documented indisputably do follow necessarily; you cannot redefine “nothing” in any way that would exclude them, without positing “something” already existing to effect that change, which is not “nothing.” Therefore, defining a nothing that has no such properties or effects is logically impossible. So we have no need of God here, even if God’s parts and properties would be logically necessary somehow (if He existed).
  • Koons says God is a good candidate for the First Cause because he is “not essentially located in space or time.” This is actually false. A thing has to be essentially located in space and time even to exist; otherwise, by definition, it never exists and exists nowhere, which is literally what it means to not exist. But what I think he wants to say is that God does not have a specific location in spacetime (he exists everywhere at every time), which would be a contingent fact, and we need God to be a necessary fact. But a primordial or existential “nothing”-state satisfies this condition. It is no more “essentially located in space or time” than Koons’s God has to be. Insofar as there has to be a time when there was nothing, and nothing has to occupy a position different from or the same as any resulting something, it necessarily did. Just like Koons’s God.
  • And, Koons says, “God is not essentially a physical object, nor is it essentially constituted by physical objects.” One can dispute whether this is even required of a necessary being. But we don’t have to. Because an absolute nothing-state also is not “essentially a physical object” nor “essentially constituted by physical objects” any more than Koons’s God is. It therefore meets the condition. And therefore, again, we have no need of Koons’s God.

Koons also says “God has only immeasurable attributes” which is actually false by his own definition; his God has several properties in infinite quantity (and yet others in zero quantity), and any actual quantity is measurable, even if infinitely. His attempt to pull a logical proof of his claim has no valid structure. Infinite orange juice participates in being “more” than no orange juice or only some orange juice, so it participates in measurability, and therefore cannot be any more logically necessary than no juice or any other quantity of juice; so, too, any other thing, like knowledge or power. To the contrary, having an infinite amount of something is literally the least likely thing anything will have. It has maximum specified complexity. A random amount of a thing, by contrast, has minimum specified complexity.

Koons also says absolutely bonkers shit here like that “the only finite properties that God could have essentially are those that involve whole integers, such as existing as three persons” because “it doesn’t make sense to exist as 3.01 persons, so this attribute counts as immeasurable.” Um. No. Whole integers are just as measurable as fractions; and this directly contradicts his entire principle that the necessary cause of existence cannot have measurable properties. I can only conclude Koons went briefly insane here and didn’t really grasp or care what he is saying. It’s just a bunch of crazy on the page at this point, which should never have passed peer review, as no blatant self-contradiction ever should.

But the more important thing here is that there is no basis for insisting on this as a requirement anyway. If we are supposed to assume that the First Cause must have no arbitrary properties (like “being three persons” or having “infinite” knowledge), then we’d have to conclude only one thing can satisfy the condition: an absolute nothing-state. The only properties it has are what follow from absolutely nothing existing; and it has no other properties—no contingent “thing” exists begging an explanation why it exists. So, for example, we don’t have to explain why nothing has infinite potential, because that follows necessarily from it lacking all limits—because nothing exists, therefore not even limits can exist. Whereas we would have to explain why a First Cause has infinite knowledge, because that doesn’t follow necessarily from anything; it’s a weirdly specified and complex attribute, the presence not just of a lot of something, but a very precise something (all possible justified true beliefs; as opposed to all possible beliefs, which is an infinitely larger set of propositions to entertain; or some admixture of true and false beliefs; or some subset of any of the above).

Koons then burns several pages trying to connect his cosmological argument to a teleological argument (explaining why organization exists, by positing his First Cause is intelligent). But all the same observations can be explained by the complete absence of intelligent design: in a randomly selected multiverse, everything we observe is statistically inevitable. Indeed, it even fits expectation better, because it looks so random; we truly look like an indifferent accident in the universe, not the beings for which it was made. But even apart from that, the fact that the same observations are entailed by “absolutely nothing”—causing, by the absence of any limits to what it will produce, a random outcome—nixes everything Koons tries to argue here about the First Cause. It does not require being intelligent to explain anything. To the contrary, it’s being instead totally random already explains everything—and does it better.

Koons closes his paper with several pages trying to address what he thinks are obvious objections to what he has argued. But these all relate to objections to his premises. Since I am granting all his premises, and only getting a different result from them than he anticipated, we needn’t address them. Though you will want to read all of his arguments here if deconstructing his premises is something you want to do. My point is only that we have no need of doing that to refute his entire argument.

Only one objection that Koons addresses remains relevant: that a vast multiverse would explain observations as well or better than his cosmology would (pp. 207-09). But here he rests on only false statements about induction in a Boltzmann universe, and the facts of biogenesis, and the empirical and conceptual status of multiverse theory in cosmological science today, which falsehoods have already been refuted elsewhere (see The Boltzmann Brain Argument and Biogenesis and the Laws of Evidence and Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God; and against his teleological claims, see again Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). And they are irrelevant here anyway, because we have shown a virtually infinite randomized multiverse is effectively a guaranteed outcome of “absolutely nothing,” and the probability that we’d find some universe relevantly like ours, with some life relevantly like ours, always approaches 100% in such a condition—leaving nothing more to explain.

We likewise face no problem of induction here, either. Directly contrary to what Koons claims, Boltzmann situations always are vastly less frequent, and thus vastly less probable (because always requiring vastly more coincidence, and hence specified complexity), than the outputs of ongoing causal structures. Because there are vastly more of the latter to choose from; a point the Second Law of Thermodynamics is literally built out of. So it is never the case that, as Koons falsely says, “The objective probability that every generalization we have observed extends no farther than our observations is infinitely close to one.” To the contrary, it is infinitely close to zero. Measuring across all randomly selected universes, vastly more will exhibit causal order because of a simple underlying causal order than will exhibit it purely by chance accident. And any ratio of “vast to one” approaches zero, not one. This is why we can disregard all Cartesian Demon hypotheses: they are always automatically the least likely things to be happening; and Cartesian Demons operating completely at random, even more so. So random multiverse theories pose no epistemic problem for anyone.

We are left with the realization that an “absolute nothing” cosmological model meets all of Koons’s own premises and conditions, does so more ably than his God hypothesis, and fits observations better as well. It is also vastly simpler and more intuitively obvious. You can’t have any theory of origins or existential selection simpler than “absolutely nothing,” as subtracting anything more from that state would entail logical contradictions and thus anything simpler is logically impossible. And the fact that positing the simplest logically possible thing entails all observations, even in peculiar and unexpected details, renders it a far more obvious explanation to settle on. We have no need of anything else.

Koons’s Live Response

Koons struggled to rebut my argument. His first attempt was to try and argue that a nothing-state can never be actual, and only an actual thing can cause other things. But this doesn’t work as an objection. Obviously it is logically possible that there would be absolutely nothing—otherwise his cosmological argument automatically fails. Because if nothing is logically impossible, the existence of something—anything—becomes logically necessary. We then don’t need God to explain why something exists rather than nothing. By Koons’s own logic, the reason something exists rather than nothing would then be that “nothing” is logically impossible. So we don’t need God to explain anything (one might then switch to a teleological argument for God, but we are here discussing the cosmological argument; and that the teleological argument also fails is a different discussion).

But it’s also not true that a state of absolutely nothing is logically impossible. You can describe nothing-states that are logically contradictory and therefore logically impossible. But the entire point of my approach is to define a nothing-state that is as “nothing” as can logically possibly be. So we are only discussing the least that can logically exist, and what then logically necessarily follows from that. So in the required sense, such a nothing-state can have existed, and as such would be actual: the model is that there actually was absolutely nothing; and since that condition lacks, by definition, any rules or powers governing what can or will or won’t happen—except, of course, what is actually always logically necessary, because anything else is literally impossible and thus always has a probability of zero—this state of affairs entails a random multiverse outcome. The actual existence of the absolute nothing-state actually causes an actual outcome. So one cannot object to this by claiming such a state can never be actual; and being actual, you cannot claim it can have no causal powers. If a state of absolutely nothing logically entails causal powers, then that’s that. It cannot be gainsaid.

Koons also attempted his bogus Boltzmann argument, that induction would be impossible in an actual random multiverse, which I easily dispatched (per above). It’s bullshit. We moved on. Koons also attempted to argue that “absolutely nothing” must also lack all potential, so it can’t evolve into anything; but I easily refuted that as a logical impossibility: the absence of all actualities logically entails the presence of all potentials. It is logically impossible to have a state that lacks both all actual things and all potential things. Because potentials can only be limited by actual things; there has to be some rule, power, thing, or force preventing a possible outcome in order to remove a potential.

For example, I can potentially move in every direction but for the walls of my room preventing me and the structure of spacetime limiting the number of spatial directions I can move in to only three. But remove those walls and that structure, and those limits vanish as well. I then increase in potential directions I can move in. Not the other way around. Since you cannot have a state of no actual things and no potential things (that’s logically impossible), you can only have two reductive states to choose from: a state of no actual things, but therefore all potential things (the removal of all limits, entails the availability of all possibilities); or a state of no potential things, but therefore all actual things (all the things needed to prevent those potentials from being realizable). Which of those two states actually consists of “nothing”? Obviously only the former. The latter is the exact opposite of nothing; it consists of the existence of literally everything.

So that didn’t work.

Koons then resorted to trying to make mathematical arguments against my model, in which he either screwed up the analysis or confused the limits of human computational techniques with the actual nature of reality.

For example, Koons tried to object that my model entails things should just randomly appear all the time still; but that’s analytically false (as I already explained above). On the one hand, that is indeed what we observe (the simplest possible structures do randomly appear all the time, in the quantum virtual particle field); and on the other hand, the things he meant we should see actually can’t be often observed because the probability of their random assembly is too low. They might happen all the time; but so rarely, we ourselves can’t expect to encounter any. Observation thus exactly matches my model, not the other way around as Koons tried to insist. But on top of all that, his argument confused a state of absolutely nothing with a state of existing in an organized, propertied spacetime. Obviously those are different conditions. We have never observed an absolute nothing, so we can’t make claims about what we “have observed it to do.” We can only make claims about what it logically necessarily must do (if anything). Which is what I did. Whereas we can’t apply observations of the behavior of a something-state to the behavior of a nothing-state. So what we observe now, around here where we are, is not applicable to this discussion. It’s an analytical mistake.

A similar error subsumed his attempt to argue that because mathematicians can’t ramify an infinite probability space, that therefore the probability of a nothing-state remaining a nothing-state must remain 100%. This made no mathematical sense; but it also confused what “mathematicians can do” with what reality will do. Just because we don’t have the analytical tools to distinguish transfinite infinitesimal probabilities does not mean they don’t exist. The one is just a limitation of human reasoning tools, human languages, techniques and technologies of computation. Whereas reality is not bound by what humans can’t do. There was a time when humans couldn’t sum infinite micro-changes in velocity to produce a continuous acceleration-vector. Then people invented calculus. It is not as if before we invented calculus, continuous acceleration never existed, much less “couldn’t exist.” The limitations of humans to calculate and describe how reality works has no bearing on how reality itself works. Infinite micro-changes in velocity produced continuous acceleration-vectors for billions of years before humans figured out how to calculate it.

More important to the point, it is logically impossible that “the human inability to calculate infinitesimal probabilities” entails that an existentially random selection from among all possible numbers will always select the number 0. That makes literally no sense. Indeed, it is literal nonsense. Obviously, if a random number of universes, from 0 to every possible number, is ever ontologically realized, the number that will be selected will not be zero. Yes, humans cannot calculate its exact probability; but we can formally prove that it is logically necessarily the case that that probability will not be 1, but that in fact it must necessarily be some infinitesimal. Which means, one thing we can know is this: we can be logically certain its probability is absurdly near to 0; the exact opposite of its being 1. This can be shown for any finite number of universes: pick any number, and the probability a random selection from among all possible numbers will be that number or less will be “absurdly near to 0.” Yes, we can’t calculate the exact probability; but we can prove that it will be very close to 0—not close to 1.

Koons had a hard time grasping this point. I was not making any claim about what humans “can calculate,” like someone in the 4th century B.C. claiming humans can’t calculate infinite sums to determine accelerations; I was making a claim about what will actually happen, completely apart from even the existence of humans and their mathematical tools, like someone in the 1st century claiming objects do indeed accelerate, even though we don’t yet know how to work infinite sums to determine those accelerations precisely. The latter is a limitation in what humans can do. The former is a description of what reality nevertheless does. If it is the case that nothing determines how many universes there will be, then it is logically necessarily the case that that number will almost certainly not be zero. And “no universes,” i.e. nothing continuing forever to remain nothing, would correspond to that number being “0.” So if nothing exists to determine this (temporally or ontologically), then we can be reasonably assured the number of universes that will exist will be some number far greater than 0. There is no logically possible argument that can escape from this consequence. And that’s just that.

Koons referred to “the measure problem” here but that doesn’t relate to my argument. I am not making any claims about which properties of universes will be distributed in which ways (other than that they will be randomly distributed in some way, which Koons couldn’t dispute). To the contrary, all I am claiming is that the number of possible universes is itself infinite and each number is equally likely in the absence of anything causing one number to be more likely than another—and then deriving the logically necessary consequences of that fact. That’s it. There is no way to escape these consequences here. Koons can’t claim that we have to count non-integer numbers of universes; obviously a universe either exists or it doesn’t. You can’t have 3.01 universes any more than you can have, as even Koons himself cazily put it, 3.01 persons. Nor can Koons claim there is a highest possible number—although if he wants to try that, he is welcome to. I guarantee any number he picks, I’ll be able to present a number to him that’s higher. So that’s a doomed project. All that’s left is for Koons to try and insist the probability distribution won’t be equal across all possible numbers; but that would require positing that something exists to create that inequality. And we are talking about the absence of all such somethings.

That’s why all Koons had to argue from was something about the limits of human calculation techniques; that we humans don’t know how to distribute probabilities evenly across infinite sets. But that has nothing to do with how reality works. That’s just “us not having discovered the right calculus” for the task yet. It is not as if “I don’t know what the probability is” causes the universe to “decide” the probability of selecting 0 from all possible numbers is 100% (and therefore the probability of any other number being selected is zero). That’s claptrap. Obviously reality does not work that way. The most one could do is somehow try to prove some inequal probability distribution here is logically necessary. But good luck with that. Moreover, even if someone ever does that, it still might not evade the conclusion that an arbitrarily large number of universes being selected is more likely than zero universes being selected. And that’s all I need for my cosmological argument to succeed, and his thereby to fail.

To illustrate the point, consider one ad hoc idea. We can sum all logically possible “single universe” outcomes and find it will be infinite; then we can sum all logically possible “two universe” outcomes and find it will also be infinite; and so on all the way up through every count of universes. And since all infinities are commensurate in quantity, one can say (supposedly) that the probability of a “single universe” outcome is exactly the same as any “multiverse” outcome. This won’t get you “zero universes” (that selection would remain at a probability of infinity to one against), so you are abandoning ex nihilo nihil to get here—as rightly anyone should—but already that means your position is crumbling. But at least, you might say, it would get you to “there is only a 50% chance of a multiverse.”

Except that it doesn’t. Because this argument violates logic at a crucial juncture: it is applying the axiomatic arithmetic of finite sets to infinite sets. And that’s invalid. Yes, in the jargon of transfinite mathematics, every infinity is commensurate; but that does not have the same meaning, nor the same mathematical consequences, as two finite quantities being commensurate. Not understanding this is why people get all mixed up trying to build arguments off of the Hilbert’s Hotel paradox. Mathematicians have long since realized that paradox arises only from invalid logic, applying finite mathematical assumptions to transfinite quantities (see my discussions of this point in my debate with Wallace Marshall here, including supplemental resources here).

Logical coherence entails that it cannot be the case that “the probability of more than one universe” is 50% here, as that would entail, for example, that the probability of a “three universe” outcome is less than 50%, even though there are as many such outcomes to choose as “one universe” outcomes (or “four” and so on). Every outcome has to be equally probable. So, whatever that probability is (and it’s true that on present tools we can’t determine it precisely), the probability of a “one universe” outcome has to be the same as the probability of any other “count of universes” outcome (so, “one” is just as likely as “four” which is just as likely as “10 to the power of 100 to the power of 1000 to the power of 1,000,000” and every other possibility). We can certainly prove from this—without having to know what any of these probabilities exactly are—that the probability of any one number being selected will be smaller than that of any higher number being selected. So all numbers are infinitesimally likely; but any sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal segments of equal size will always be infinitely larger than any finite sum of those same segments. So it is logically necessarily the case that any random selection from among all possible numbers, when every number is equally likely, will probably be a number higher than any number you arbitrarily choose. We don’t need to know how much more probable to know that, nevertheless, it will be more probable.

This is why you can’t escape the consequences of a “no favor” model. When nothing exists to favor one outcome over another, there simply will effectively be infinitely many outcomes, or near enough as one ever need be. Period. Thus, if you try to argue our universe’s selection at random, based on some fine-tuning argument or other, has odds of only, let’s say, 1 in 10^100,000, such that there would have to be at least that many randomly selected universes for our universe to be a likely one to find among them by chance alone, you still can’t escape the consequences of the “no favor” model. Because there are infinitely many larger numbers of universes to have randomly lit upon, but only a finite number of smaller numbers. So the ratio, and hence the odds, of having more than 10^100,000 universes is as near to 100% as makes all odds. Just because we can’t calculate precisely how close to 100% it is doesn’t change that fact. Pick any number of universes you want to insist there have to be to defeat whatever fine-tuning argument you are posing, it will never matter: there will always be infinitely many larger numbers of universe to have randomly lit upon, and only a finite number lower; and therefore the odds that there will indeed be more universes than that will always be as near to 100% as makes all odds.

This actually is a reason why the “no favor” model, in which we posit “absolutely nothing” determined what would exist or come to exist, is actually much more appealing than the God hypothesis. It counter-intuitively predicts exactly the observations we make, and does that by positing the simplest possible reason there could ever be for anything: nothing at all. That nothing is so powerful, and so remarkably fits the observed effects, and without having to posit any other brute facts, is itself an argument for the model. Its epistemic qualities are on every measure stronger than any God hypothesis.

Conclusion

Positing “absolutely nothing” as a cosomological or ontological First Cause of existence works perfectly well, and is simpler and more in agreement with observed evidence than Koons’s God—even granting his every premise. His conclusion that he can thereby prove God exists is false. What he has sooner done with his own axioms is prove that no God exists. And Koons could produce no significant rebuttal to this conclusion.

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