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.
“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.”
I don’t think this argument succeeds and the reason is that it is playing with language. It is treating non-existence as if it is a thing and then saying: ‘But see.. it can’t cause anything because only existent things can cause something.”
But that entirely misrepresents Carrier’s argument. A more accurate way of putting Carrier’s point is as follows:
In the absence of the law of causation, something could have arisen without any efficient, material or formal cause (or, alternatively, no cause at all).
To say “nothing caused the universe” is simply to say “The universe had no cause.”
Notice that this avoids all this non-sense about reifying this “nothingness” and then claiming this black hole of nothingness cannot bring anything into existence because it has no powers.
Though in his own terminology, that itself would be a cause. In particular, an efficient cause (it is the state that brings about the ensuing state). At a stretch one could also say a formal cause (insofar as it is the absence of form that produces the effect); although one can semantically just call that the absence of a formal cause being the efficient cause.
There is no way to avoid this as you suggest. If it is the state of nothing limiting what shall exist that formally causes the effect (some existing things), then it is a causal entity. That is a cause, and it has an effect (and indeed, a predictable and delimitable effect; e.g. certain outcomes are not more likely than others; certain outcomes are impossible, e.g. every logical impossibility; and so on).
This is true even in the ontological axis. As I note, we debated the temporal model because we wanted to focus on that. But it also operates, he agreed, on the atemporal model, i.e. even if something has always existed to a past-eternal chain of causes, there must be some atemporal “existential” cause of (reason for) that chain to exist at all, or instead of some other.
There is no way to escape consequences with semantics. Changing your definitions of words doesn’t make the facts go away. So, narrowing one’s definition of cause such that semantically you can say “it is the absence of a cause that produced/explains the presence of our universe” just has you using the word “cause” to mean something else than we are; we are using it to mean “that which produces/explains an effect,” and in that definition a sentence like “it is the absence of a cause that produced/explains the presence of our universe” is logically contradictory and therefore meaningless. No argument can proceed from that.
The bottom line is: either nothing stays nothing, or it doesn’t; there is no logical necessity that it stay nothing; therefore, it doesn’t. That this has the effect of producing our universe, which it does, is therefore by definition “a power” that nothing has; indeed even a unique power, as only nothing can produce anything, and to an equal probability as anything else; and that thereby makes nothing a “cause” of what inevitably results from that state.
By contrast, though theists say a God has all powers, it isn’t true that “anything” can be an effect of God, as they imagine all kinds of rational and moral constraints on what God will cause to exist. Thus God is actually more causally limited than nothing. As is in fact every “something,” because as soon as you define its parameters, those parameters logically entail limitations on what its effects can be; ergo, removing all parameters, removes all such limitations. QED.
The false assumption then is that “nothing” lacks causal powers. There is no basis for declaring that to be the case; and in fact, on full analysis, that declaration can be demonstrated to be necessarily false.
Richard,
I know you are refining your theory, and I certainly think it’s more plausible than imagining an omni-god, but I’m just hoping you can clarify a few things.
1) It seems “absolute nothing” must have potential energy of some kind for it to evolve into something. But isn’t this potential energy itself “something”? Perhaps a quantum fluctuation in a simple physical dimension? Even Lawrence Krauss couldn’t get to the absolute nothing state you describe, and I’m wondering if any physicists start with an absolute nothing state for their models.
2) For a spaceless, timeless nothing state to “exist,” one must ask where could it exist, and for how long prior to collapsing into something? In other words, If a nothing state existed for absolutely no time in no dimension of space, and then it collapsed into “something” – wouldn’t the moment of the first something state be temporally indistinguishable from the nothing state that theoretically preceded it such that we would end up saying, “something has always existed,” anyway? How could you ever disprove the something state wasn’t the first state to have ever existed?
3) We have evidence of “something,” but we have no evidence of deities or absolute nothing-states. Is there anything that could ever scientifically bolster or falsify your nothing-state hypothesis? And, if you had to bet, would you put your money on a nothing state that started everything, or that we are part of an infinitely eternal something that has always existed?
Thank you for your splendid articles and consideration of my questions!
-Tom
These are very good questions and useful to get into here.
This would be an incorrect description. Potential energy is a specific description of a particular kind of model defined by certain existential parameters (laws of physics); in particular “a measurable and specific energy stored in an object” (e.g. Physics Classroom).
So that phrase only applies to material bodies and existing fields and substances (potential energy is not hypothetical, it is real, e.g. the potential energy stored in an object—or a system, i.e. a field interaction between two objects—increases its gravitational pull and resistance to inertial change).
We aren’t talking about those kinds of systems. There is no energy to measure in a nothing state, potential or otherwise. You would have to “change the definition” of “potential energy” to mean “any energy that could possibly result from a given state,” which sounds colloquially fine, but isn’t what physics means by the phrase. And we need to avoid equivocation fallacies. So we can’t switch between a colloquial and a scientific definition of that phrase in any line of reasoning.
In scientific terms, the concept of “potential energy” simply isn’t applicable here. Not least because the first law of thermodynamics, on which that concept depends, doesn’t exist either. We are thus here talking about completely alien physical system to the one we now reside in. Thus terms from our developed physics describing our universe won’t apply; nor will any physical laws (like the first and second laws of thermodynamics; or even the zeroth or third laws).
This gets into the different question of the actual physics. It could be the case that absolutely nothing will have an inescapable definition in quantum mechanics, such that it is logically impossible for anything less to exist. And then results follow (Stenger made an argument like this in Comprehensible Cosmos). But that has yet to be proved by anyone, so we can only speculate on that. It therefore won’t be usable as a premise.
My argument makes no assumptions regarding this. It is thus compatible with all such models. All my argument requires is that no constraints exist to limit what number of universes will exist. This is equally true on Krauss’s model. So we are getting the same results. Only I am requiring fewer unproven assumptions to get there (and indeed, using theists’ own definitions against them).
This is also true of the Lincoln and Wasser model, which is similar to mine; you may be interested to read that, IMO (see link in article). That is the only case I have found in the literature of physicists exploring an “absolutely” nothing cosmology; but it’s fairly mainstream to use ramified nothing states as starting points, e.g. Krauss; that just isn’t “absolutely” nothing in the sense theists maintain.
But that’s still a respectable approach. In other words, rather than posit “absolutely nothing,” to posit instead some minimal “brute fact” that explains all observations (and it is quite minimal indeed in nearly every model so far going in cosmology today; even past-eternal ones, like Penrose’s). This is, really, what theists are doing; only their “brute fact” (God) is not simple but extraordinarily complex and bizarre and doesn’t even make delimitable predictions that can be tested. Koons et al. try to avoid admitting this by claiming God is “a necessary being” and thus not a “brute fact” but that is handwaving; they never produce any valid proof of this declaration.
Koons argues that his contingency logic “entails” the first fact “must” be a logically necessary fact, but by that logic, so can any starting point be; thus all those far simpler “near nothing” state cosmologies, the ones actually peer reviewed in cosmology, are also thereby proved to be “logically necessary” facts. That any interchangeable thing will work refutes the conclusion, however. It can’t be logically necessary if it is physically replaceable. Koons tries to argue that the first fact can’t have physical attributes as these models maintain, but none of those arguments are sound. But we didn’t debate those. I took a different tack.
This may be important to remind readers of: that an absolute nothing can explain all observations is evidence for that model; but it does not thereby prove it is the correct explanation of observation. Scientists may well prove instead, e.g., that some primordial quantum vacuum both (a) cannot not exist (i.e. taking any features away produces a logical contradiction, such that an “absolute” nothing that lacks that content is also impossible) and (b) explains all observations (e.g. chaotic inflationary cosmology). This can’t be answered by philosophers. Science has to resolve this.
The same goes for past-eternal models, which are also still popular in the field. They need to explain why their proposed past-eternal system exists and not some other (or none at all); and their answers tend to be more or less the same (something about some minimal physical brute fact, and logical entailments therefrom, e.g. the Penrose model). Any of those could yet well be proved true.
So one doesn’t have to respond to cosmological arguments as I did here. One can as easily point out that cosmological science already has simpler brute fact models than theism does, and which also have a higher explanatory power (as they make specific, and peculiar, predictions actually observed). And any one of those (or something like them) may turn out to be the theist’s wished-for “logically necessary being” that caused all of existence. They actually have no sound argument against that, and consequently can’t get to “God” even by their own premises.
All I am doing is pointing out that we don’t have to do that, either. We can start from the theist’s own definition of absolutely nothing and show that it already results in all observations. There is therefore not even a logical need of a brute fact, God or otherwise. But that being true doesn’t mean there isn’t some possible brute fact that will turn out to be, actually, a logically necessary being. Only science can find that out. In the meantime, theists have no way to get to “God” on either tack.
I addressed this in my previous articles (linked in this article).
There are two possibilities: either it is true that to exist, “nothing” must have a minimal location (a single dimensionless point of spacetime would then be the least that could exist and “nothing” still exist); or it is not true.
If the latter, then your question is moot. So it doesn’t get us any different result than noted. Whereas if the former, then the most “nothing” nothing-state that is even logically possible is the existence of a single dimensionless point of spacetime, thus answering your question.
Otherwise, “nothing” is logically impossible, and therefore we have our explanation for why something exists rather than nothing. (Incidentally, I have built out a model of mindless spacetime as necessary being: see, e.g., Ontological Whatsit.)
The dimensionless starting point model is easiest to comprehend, and inevitably leads to some existential equivalent of an eternal inflation kind of multiverse outcome (per the line of reasoning I build out). One can say “but that isn’t absolutely nothing because there is at least sort of a thing there” but that doesn’t change anything, because anyone who wants to say that is stuck on the horns of a dilemma: they have to admit that the “absolutely nothing” they are talking about is logically impossible and therefore can never have existed; whereas if they try to spell out the most nothing any nothing can be, they end up with the supposed “something” they were complaining about. And thus they can’t escape the argument.
But the mootness of the question becomes more obvious in the existential model. If existence is past-eternal, there was no “nothing-state.” But one still must explain why there is something rather than nothing, and why this something rather than something else. Even the absence of an explanation entails an explanation, e.g. if you say “there just is no explanation” you are actually saying “it is that absence of an explanation that had this result.” So you can’t escape the necessity of explanation.
In the case of a past-eternal existence, the “nothing” (the absence of an explanation) does not have to “be” anywhere or anytime, because it is then simply a description of the absence of anything causing what exists. And then my argument proceeds by showing that this entails that “what exists” will have been existentially selected at random from among all possible things that could have existed instead; and “nothing” is just one possible thing to choose from among infinitely many alternatives; and therefore that “nothing” would exist is only infinitesimally likely; and therefore we should not be surprised that something exists instead, indeed the very something we observe.
On the one hand, this is as true of the God model (God cannot have existed before or outside of spacetime; those statements are self-contradictory and therefore literally meaningless), yet it is still possible conceptually to distinguish God from spacetime. This gets theists into the weeds of how God could decide to create time, and IMO, that is indeed a nonsensical concept, so their model does face a serious logical contradiction here.
On the other hand, a theist can simply bite the bullet and admit that, yes, God existed at a dimensionless point of spacetime that he didn’t create, because it was as logically necessary as his own existence and is indeed a necessary property of God (if God necessarily exists, then so does a place and time for him to exist; QED). This would at least make theism logical, though theism isn’t logical; it is obsessed with irrational dogmas instead.
By contrast, we have no prior commitments to any contradictory dogmas. So it is not a problem for us to say that “for nothing to exist, it must have existed somewhere and at some time; ergo so must time and space necessarily have existed.” Albeit, not any extension of spacetime (so barely really a thing; having a duration and volume of zero).
And the problem doesn’t even arise for the atemporal existential model (per above), where there was no time or place when the “decision” was made what would exist. It just simply existed or it didn’t. We are then just describing the consequences of there being nothing that selected what would exist. The temporal nothing model, IMO, does require a dimensionless existence of spacetime, the where and when that “nothing” existed; as otherwise, it can never be the case that nothing existed (and then we are in a past-eternal system and thus back to the atemporal existential model).
By proving something else must have existed instead, which is not predicted to exist by the absolute nothing model. For example, if scientists succeed in proving Krauss’s primordial quantum state model explains observations better than a “totally random” model, and then succeed in proving it is logically impossible to define any existing state dispossessed of the properties of that primordial quantum state (without positing an even more complex brute fact), then they will have disproved the “absolute” nothing model by proving in its place a “ramified” nothing model.
Theoretically the same could have been done even for theism: if scientists proved the literal truth of Genesis etc. and conversed with God about all this and thus ascertained how it is, in fact, logically impossible for that God to have been caused to exist or selected existentially at random, then we’d have disproved all nothing models; but alas, that is not how the evidence went, which is why we don’t buy any God models as even plausible anymore.
That’s not quite true. We have evidence from experience that complex brute facts don’t exist (or exist so rarely as to explain why we don’t see any). Consequently, we cannot produce a probable explanation of existence by appealing to a complex brute fact (this, I noted, is already a serious problem for theism, as for all their handwaving, their “brute fact” is absurdly complex, compared to those actually constructed in the science of cosmology today).
So, we know, empirically, the explanation must be some simple brute fact. Now, we can then propose lots of hypotheses. But any hypothesis that (a) predicts what we observe and (b) requires fewer ad hoc assumptions than any competitors also meeting condition (a) will always be the most probable. This is literally Scientific Method 101. Thus, that what we observe is predicted to be by the nothing-state model and that the nothing-state model, by lacking all ad hoc attributes, is theoretically simpler than all competing models, is evidence for the nothing-state model.
Yes, science could come along and find out the first brute fact is something a bit more complex. But that doesn’t matter to the argument: the nothing model is already outperforming the God model; so it is already adequate to disprove the latter (as being indeed the least likely explanation of anything).
As to my own opinion, I put high odds on the nothing model being correct, and indeed the temporal version even. But not conclusive odds. It is entirely intelligible to me that we are in a past-eternal existence and that only an existential nothing model need be appealed to to explain why. It is also plausible that my absolute-nothing model is itself logically impossible and that any dimensionless point of spacetime must necessarily have certain properties such as are proposed in ramified nothing models (like primordial quantum vaccuum theory), and therefore those will turn out to be true. The only argument I have against that is that we have no evidence of any such logical necessity, whereas an absolute model already perfectly predicts observations (so adding properties to the nothing is not necessary, logically or empirically; it is, at present, like angels pushing the planets: we have no need of that hypothesis).
Thank you for taking the time to address my questions. And I really am trying to digest this concept, but am still stuck on a couple of things…
I was loose with my phrase “potential energy of some kind,” and should have put the emphasis on “of some kind.” As I understand it, your nothing-state model requires, A) Absolute Nothing was the condition prior to the existence of the first something, and B) Absolute Nothing can transform into something because it has no physical laws or limitations preventing it from doing so. My sticking point is that, while the nothing-state may have none of these limitations, it is also definitionally absent any “spark” or “energy” or “power to produce” or “change potential” or “phase transition” or whatever word(s) make sense that grant the nothing-state the “energy” to change – to spark the multiverse into being. Even the Lincoln, Wasser model you link to says: “In terms of information, ‘nothing’ is equivalent to an infinite number of simultaneous Nullifying Information Elements (NIEs) – information elements that co-exist simultaneously and cancel each other.” Furthermore, “We rely on the notion that information and energy are closely related and that information can even be converted into energy […] information is a form of energy.” They even use the term potential energy themselves, “It is possible to consider the matching relationships between NIEs as forces that operate on the NIEs (to maintain their match). According to this description, each NIE has a POTENTIAL ENERGY [emphasis mine], determined by the NIE’s relative ‘position,’ meaning, its structure of relationships to other NIEs. When information is changed due to potentially additional NIEs, these changes are in accordance with the current force fields.” But your nothing-state model doesn’t allow for self-annihilating “bits,” “force fields,” or any type of energy whatsoever to cause a change in status.
Some poor analogies come to mind, but I’ll explore them nonetheless: You start with 0 (nothing-state). Then, you transition to 0 + 1 = 1 (something). You seem to be trying to account for the necessity of the zero, without identifying the plus (+, or “energy”) which provides the transition from zero to one. For nothing to become something, it seems to me you still need a verb – not just the absence of preventative nouns (physical barriers). Another imperfect analogy: If I remove all barriers around a turtle such that it has all degrees of logical freedom, that doesn’t mean that turtle will move in any direction at all if that turtle is dead.
There isn’t anything that seems more dead and devoid of the potential to change than an absolute nothing-state. No matter how many degrees of freedom a nothing-state may have, if it doesn’t have the “energy, power, [insert action verb here]” to transition to a something-state, it seems more dead than the poor turtle. Lawrence Krauss’s “nothing” is unstable because it relies on the fluctuating forces of quantum mechanics to transform into a universe. Your nothing-state doesn’t have access to those forces.
Lincoln, Wesler rely on energetic symmetry breaking information bits to jump start the Big Bang – bits of something not countered by matching anti-somethings. Their formula looks like 0 = -1 (anti-something) +1 (something), where sometimes +1 randomly fails to annihilate (for… reasons), causing the Big Bang. In this model, it again seems there was always something, it’s just that something is almost always (but not always) annihilated to zero (nothing) prior to transitioning to a universe. Your model has no initial somethings (positive information bits), no energy, no symmetries to break.
When you say, “And then my argument proceeds by showing that this entails that “what exists” will have been existentially selected at random from among all possible things that could have existed instead; and “nothing” is just one possible thing to choose from among infinitely many alternatives…”
But if we take this one step back, couldn’t we just say the initial brute fact “nothing-state” you propose is just one possible thing to choose from among infinitely many logically consistent initial or past-eternal brute fact “something-states”? Which makes the nothing-state highly improbable when grouped with all other possibilities for how something could logically exist.
Just so you know, I am not challenging your hypothesis on theistic grounds (I have never been a theist, thank God!), but have only encountered “something-state” models from physicists (like the excellent Before the Big Bang YouTube series by SkydivePhil). And I include Krauss and now the Lincoln-Wessler model as “something-states,” especially when compared to your nothing-state model. So your model presents a paradigm shift that challenges my intuition and understanding. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it is somewhat difficult to grok.
In the absence of anything governing what happens, what happens is necessarily random. That fact is the “spark” that produces the outcome. And this is a logically necessary fact.
Nothing more is needed here. There is no “extra” thing we have to add to a pure nothing-state to have this physical result.
One cannot try to propose that something even more nothing than this can have existed, because there is nothing more nothing than this—any attempt to describe anything less (like the absence of both all actualities and all potentialities) leads to logical contradictions (e.g. the absence of all actualities logically entails all potentialities, so you can’t have a state that lacks both, any more than you can stand simultaneously on the North and South poles).
Since logically contradictory states of affairs cannot exist, such states cannot have existed, and therefore are out of account. Therefore, such a state, we can be absolutely certain, never existed. Therefore, we have to address nothing states than can have existed.
You can complain that the most nothing nothing that can logically exist still entails measurable outcomes. But that’s just wingeing. Like complaining that you can’t get a circle that doesn’t have a circumference proportional to pi. Complain all you want. It’s still the case.
That’s what I have proved. You have not offered any rebuttal. All I see so far is a failure to comprehend the logical necessity established here, and the impossibility of escaping it.
Indeed, strangely, you end by repeating my own argument as if you were rebutting me: that a nothing state remaining a nothing state is too improbable to credit, because it is one state out of infinitely others, is precisely my point.
This leaves two possible scenarios, which together exhaust all logical possibilities: there was at one point nothing (i.e. time is past finite; meaning, there is a point in the past beyond which no further time exists); or there wasn’t, and “nothing” existentially decided what would exist.
The former is the “there was once nothing” condition.
While the latter I have also been explaining to you multiple times, and I have several mentions of it in the article you are commenting on as well: if the past is eternal, but what existentially selected which past eternal sequence would exist, or none, is the fact that nothing selected which past eternal sequence would exist, or none, then which eternal sequence would exist, or none, was selected at random—the only remaining logical possibility when we eliminate the alternative of something selecting what will exist—and when that is the case, the least likely thing that would exist is “nothing.” (And the most likely thing that would exist is an infinverse. Q.E.D.)
This is my point. You get the same conclusion whether you accept or reject an actual nothing-state having obtained. I only focus on the “having obtained” alternative because Koons did; exactly as I explain in this article. But I have repeatedly made clear the same follows even if we reject this assumption.
In case you missed it (how?), I have a whole section on this. Quote:
Richard, I disagree with your view that Krauss’s model implies the universe came from some quantum state/vacuum in contrast to absolute non-existence.
See my (non-peer-reviewed) paper on Academia: https://www.academia.edu/81932940/Lawrence_Krausss_A_Universe_from_Nothing_A_Systematic_Defense
People don’t mean an extended spacetime by “initial quantum vacuum.” They mean an empty state (usually not defined in terms of spacetime coordinates, i.e. a volume of zero or undefinable size) governed by the equations of Quantum Mechanics. This is Krauss’s model. He has to presume Quantum Mechanics governs what forms from an initial void state. This is the objection. Not its spacetime content.
True, he requires that void state to have existed, which means it had to exist somewhere and at some time. Hence he requires a dimensionless point of space and time. But that is IMO a logically necessary property of any actual nothing-state so that isn’t any objection to his definition. That’s indeed as nothing as nothing can get.
The problem is when he then just arbitrarily says this state is governed by a whole set of physical laws, without explaining where those came from. That is, alas, not “nothing.” Although it is vastly simpler than any God hypothesis, and has support in observations, so as brute fact models go, it’s definitely more epistemically likely.
If Krauss could prove Quantum Mechanics (all the equations he uses to derive his results) are logically necessarily always true, even in a void state (any existent dimensionless point), then he’d be describing a true nothing-state.
You wrote: “People don’t mean an extended spacetime by “initial quantum vacuum.””
I disagree. If a quantum vacuum pre-existed the Big Bang, then it is, in fact, an extension of the spatio-temporal manifold. As Dr. Krauss said, when he refers to a quantum vacuum, he is talking about empty space (which implies an extension). I mentioned this in the article. However, his model denies that (1) there is an extension of spacetime — prior to the Big Bang — and that this extension (2) is a quantum vacuum.
You wrote: “usually not defined in terms of spacetime coordinates, i.e. a volume of zero or undefinable size”
Well, Dr. Vilenkin (from whom Dr. Krauss ‘borrowed’ the model) postulates the radius (and by extension the volume) of spacetime vanished out of existence (to zero size). To me it is unintelligible to claim an existent physical thing has zero size/no size. It is non-existence. If you have a car of zero size, that means you have no car at all. It makes no sense.
You wrote: “Hence he requires a dimensionless point of space…”
A dimensionless thing is still a point. It still has a size. Dr. Krauss’ model implies there wasn’t even a dimensionless point. Rather, space itself vanished; went out of existence as we run the clock backwards in time.
You wrote: “He has to presume Quantum Mechanics governs what forms from an initial void state. … The problem is when he then just arbitrarily says this state is governed by a whole set of physical laws, without explaining where those came from.”
I also explored this in the article. First, Dr. Krauss postulates the laws of physics came into existence along with the physical universe. His reasoning is that the string landscape implies laws are not fundamental, but instead emergent. Laws can be set/selected at random when a new Big Bang takes place. That implies such laws probably didn’t exist without the universe. Second, unlike Dr. Krauss, Dr. Vilenkin postulates laws pre-existed the physical cosmos in some Platonic sense (i.e., without the physical). One possible explanation of the existence of these laws (which I briefly mentioned there) is that they are self-existent/eternal and metaphysically necessary. So, this problem is not insurmountable.
That would be impossible. Perhaps you don’t know what the word “extension” means? It means more than a singularity; any additional amount of spacetime than the smallest unit of it possible.
The original classical Big Bang model started at zero spatial dimensions, called a singularity. There are no spatial extensions prior in that model or in that model.
Quantum Mechanics adds the impossibility of a definite singularity, i.e. you can’t have “zero” anything; what you have is an undefined singularity of spacetime (a kind of probabilistic haze of a singularity), the nearest equivalent to a geometric singularity allowed on QM. But there are still no extensions of spacetime here; except in the QM sense of that undefined spacetime singularity, which is what allows for universe formation in Krauss’s model.
Sure. But that’s what people are criticizing him for. That’s not what most other folks mean by that term. What they mean is an undefined singularity of spacetime governed by the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Which simply isn’t “nothing.” It’s close. But it still has that unexplained brute fact of “the laws of Quantum Mechanics,” by which Krauss can get a universe-forming incident. He can’t get his results without that quantum vacuum state, that initial undefined void condition (a quantum singularity) where and when “the laws of quantum mechanics” can have produced an outcome.
Again, the problem isn’t his requiring a minimal unit of spacetime (a singularity) where and when his quantum universe-forming event can be spawned by quantum mechanical laws. The problem is the existence of those quantum mechanical laws. Any void state governed by those laws is a quantum vacuum, even if it has no measurable extension of space or time.
But it would be even more nothing if that void state wasn’t even governed by any laws at all (quantum or otherwise). This is where we get my line of argument, where we look to see what happens when we chuck those laws as well.
Krauss is adding something to my nothing (those laws). I am taking them away and then seeing what happens. That way, I don’t have to explain why those laws (instead of others, or none at all) would just exist and govern what happens for no reason. This is the difference between our two projects.
I can’t help you if you don’t understand geometry, but a zero dimensional point is perfectly intelligible. It is well-defined in mathematics and regularly employed in calculus. Perhaps what you mean instead to say is that such a singularity is as nothing as any nothing can be, so we shouldn’t call it a something. Since I already myself said that very thing, we would not be in any disagreement here.
Hence, again, the problem is not with whether we each require some manner of singularity as starting point (a dimensionless “where and when” there would be nothing or something, from which anything could then arise; like his quantum mechanical laws and anything they then “do”). Any theory of nothing requires that. Because, as I explain in my article, it’s a logical contradiction otherwise. To say that nowhere was there ever nothing is to deny the existence of any nothing-state and thus assert instead a past-eternal existence of some kind. The only way to say the universe began with nothing is to assign a place and a time for there to have been nothing. There is no logical way to avoid this.
The problem is thus not with whether there was a zero point of spacetime at which nothing existed (not even extensions of space or time). The problem is with what “just exists there” for no reason, that will govern what happens to or at that zero point. Krauss adds a bunch of somethings (all the laws of physics his argument depends on, which are particularly quantum mechanical, hence a “quantum” vacuum and not just any vacuum singularity). I take all those away.
I’m thus talking about actually nothing. Krauss is only talking about almost nothing. And that is what his critics have rightly taken him to task for.
This is not what Krauss argues. He does not come up with some complete random table of all logically possible physical laws and then determine from that the probability that his preferred laws would be selected and thus cause the quantum event his model depends on.
No.
Krauss self-selects the laws he wants to have existed to have produced that event. He gives no explanation why those laws would be selected, and thus why his model would proceed at all. This is true of all other universe-from-nothing-models in the literature (except the Lincoln-Wasser model, which is why I cited it).
As Krauss puts it “Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics.” That requires there be “the laws of quantum mechanics.” If even those don’t exist, then his statement about what nothing can do fails to follow. Thus, he depends on the arbitrary existence of something; that’s a brute-fact cosmogenesis, not a nothing-state cosmogenesis.
Krauss does correctly say “nothing is unstable, it will always produce something,” but that describes the Lincoln-Wasser model, not his own model. His own model doesn’t say “nothing will always produce something,” he says “nothing” will produce something specifically because a weird and very specific set of physical laws (the laws of quantum mechanics his model depends on) exist to govern what a nothing does or what comes from it. But there is no basis for asserting that. He has just arbitrarily insisted those laws will exist and/or govern what happens when there is nothing. This is what he is criticized for.
I personally don’t see that as being that much of a defect of his case, since his brute fact is still vastly simpler than any God hypothesis and has (unlike God) actual evidential support (the laws of Quantum Mechanics we can indisputably say do indeed exist and operate as he describes). But it is a philosophical error of semantics for him to keep calling this “nothing.” It isn’t “nothing” as that word is meant by theists (the people he claims to be responding to), and it isn’t “nothing” by any logically reductive definition—because his initial state still contains “something” that we can still take away without logical contradiction: all those laws of quantum mechanics he uses to get his result.
You don’t actually have nothing until you’ve taken away everything that isn’t logically necessary. And that means taking away the laws of quantum mechanics Krauss’s model employs. Which leaves no Krauss model left to discuss.
I’ll not respond to everything you wrote, Richard, because it consumes much time (mine and yours). I’ll try to address your best objections.
You wrote: “Perhaps you don’t know what the word “extension” means? It means more than a singularity; any additional amount of spacetime than the smallest unit of it possible.”
I do understand what the word means, and I’m not talking about a classical singularity. A classical singularity (of spacetime) is defined as geodesic incompleteness; or as missing points of the manifold (or more precisely, b-incompleteness) as is predicted by GR. A spatial manifold is geodesically incomplete if it lacks extension in some direction. In the case of cosmology, if there were a classical initial singularity, it would imply space simply disappears as we reach the Big Bang (running the clock backwards).
However, it should be noted that singularities are predicted by General Relativity; not quantum mechanics. But the semi-classical (euclidean) approach used by Dr. Vilenkin is quantum mechanical (see his book Many Worlds in One, for example). Therefore, it doesn’t postulate an initial classical singularity. It does postulate, however, that spacetime has a boundary.
You wrote: “The original classical Big Bang model started at zero spatial dimensions, called a singularity.”
A singularity is not a zero-dimensional spatial point. To my knowledge, the only qualified person who seriously defended this proposition was Quentin Smith (in his 2001 paper “Time was Created by a Timeless Point”). However, he changed his mind about this and admitted the singularity is not a thing because of further study. Singularities are not points. They are boundaries of the spatial manifold. As Tim Maudlin notes, depicting a singularity as a line or point may mislead “the incautious observer” because he might assume that “the singularity were some sort of thing”. However, “the singularity is an edge of space-time itself, where time-like curves simply cannot be continued”.
You wrote: “There are no spatial extensions prior in that model or in that model.”
Yes, Richard. In the singularity model, there is no spatial extension prior to the Big Bang — not even a zero-dimensional point. And while Dr. Krauss’ model is not classical (it is based on the Euclidean approach and Feynman’s path integrals) it also postulates there was no pre-existent quantum vacuum/quantum state prior to the tunneling event.
You wrote: “I can’t help you if you don’t understand geometry, but a zero dimensional point is perfectly intelligible.”
Of course the concept of zero-dimensional point is intelligible. I didn’t say it is not.
You wrote: “He gives no explanation why those laws would be selected, and thus why his model would proceed at all.”
Well, as far as I know, emergent laws are selected at random when a new inflationary event takes place. There are no hidden variables determining which laws will appear.
You wrote: “This is true of all other universe-from-nothing-models in the literature (except the Lincoln-Wasser model, which is why I cited it).”
So, I’ve read this paper (not the Wasser paper; the one you linked) several times and (as you may have noticed) I even linked it in my article and briefly criticized its central claims.
With regards to the Wasser paper, I don’t take it seriously at all. Notice that this model relies on a very controversial hypothesis that information is ontological and fundamental (this was originally postulated by Wheeler) and is frequently defended by weirdos who believe the universe is a computer. There is no such thing as “information” in addition to matter and quantum fields. Information is just an abstraction that refers to features of fields. Please see the article “Bit from It” by Julian Barbour. He presented a nice critique of this non-sense.
You wrote: “As Krauss puts it “Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics.” That requires there be “the laws of quantum mechanics.””
He is talking about virtual particles here; not the origin of the universe. Notice he then goes on to say: “Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can’t even measure them.”
However, as I said in the article, in the end of the day, he admits that empty space/quantum vacuum is not non-existence (even though it is called “nothing” by some physicists) and then proceeds to propose Vilenkin’s tunneling model — which doesn’t posit a pre-existent quantum vacuum/emtpy space: “…some people would say… empty space isn’t nothing. You know, there’s space. How did the space get there? But the amazing thing is, once you apply in fact quantum mechanics to gravity…, then it’s possible… that space itself can be created where there was nothing before…”
As I explained many times, his model entails empty space/quantum state came into existence.
You’ve lost the plot at this point. Most of what you are saying is just repeating back to me what I already said. You don’t seem to even know what position you are arguing against.
The bottom line is, Krauss can’t get his results without a package of somethings (certain laws of quantum mechanics). Therefore, he isn’t actually talking about absolutely nothing. What we “call” that package (“quantum vacuum” or anything else) is just semantics, and it isn’t worth your thousands of words trying to bicker about semantics. Stick with the substance of what we are saying. Then you’ll realize you can’t argue your way out of this one.
“On the one hand, this is as true of the God model (God cannot have existed before or outside of spacetime; those statements are self-contradictory and therefore literally meaningless),”
But this is simply factually wrong as we already have entities in physics which exist outside of spacetime. The whole field of emergent spacetime which tells us space is an illusion and emerges from more fundamental entities outside of spacetime informs us of this.
You seem not to understand what a contradiction is. In emergent spacetime models (as also holographic models), the effect is a logically inseparable consequence of the cause, so it is still the case that you can’t have fields without places for them to exist, and thus without space. Spaceless fields (or particles or forces or anything else) is nonsensical even according to that system of physics. Nothing exists without or outside of spacetime. Not even the entities that hypothetically produce spacetime.
(This is also not a settled question. Emergent spacetime remains a hypothesis competing with fundamental spacetime physics. But that is moot to the present point.)
Hello Dr. Carrier. Many of the ideas you have defended I see come from Nozick’s work Philosophical Explanations (Chapter 2) where he explained why there’s something and not nothing. I don’t know if you read it but it might be a helpful source. Wikipedia page “Why there is anything at all” has a link to a brief exposition of Nozick’s answers. Farewell.
No, I have not read that. I am not a fan of Nozick generally (I think he’s a terrible philosopher, so I rarely consult him). But thank you for pointing this out. I appreciate these kinds of references. So I can now check and see if he makes any sound arguments here and thus if he is worth citing on this point.
Okay, I checked, and he doesn’t exactly argue for the point, he just mentions it as an option (and answers a couple of trivial objections, and not vert forcefully). But as such, his third option (“Indifference”) corresponds partially to my argument. As worded, he is making it about existential and not temporal selection, and thus the version I set aside for my debate with Koons, since we opted to share for the sake of argument the assumption that existence had a beginning to simplify the debate; but that existential version is still important to recognize. Still, Nozick develops no ontological argument from this; he just throws up his hands and says “maybe.” He hasn’t worked anything out. So it’s weak tea, really.
Dr. Carrier wrote:
“When absolutely nothing exists, then it cannot be true that “from nothing, only nothing comes.”
Response: But does nothing actually need to “come from” nothing? It is already a nothing state, without any change (nothing happening) it simply remains nothing, correct?
-and-
“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.”
I don’t disagree with you latter point, that if nothing could somehow cause something to exists then there wouldn’t be a law of physics to stop it. But I don’t see how that makes it a given that or explains how something would even come from nothing to start with. It would be like saying that without a mother or someone watching over her newborn baby asleep in
the crib, there is nothing to stop the newborn baby from crawling out of it’s crib, grabbing the car keys and driving off the Chuck Cheese. While I might be in agreement that there could be a scenario where nobody is present to stop the newborn baby from doing so, it is not a given that the baby is capable of doing so. Lack of a force in place to stop the baby does not in of itself assure that capability.
Furthermore, based on your logic then even a complex God could come from nothing, because as you indicated there would be no laws of physics to stop that. It wouldn’t be an eternal God but all of the other traits would be possible from this (anything is possible) noting state.
I don’t know what you mean by “need” to. Nothing “needs” to happen, except what is logically necessary. And it is logically necessarily the case that in the absence of anything, the continuing absence of anything requires something to ensure that happens rather than something else. But when nothing exists, nothing exists to ensure it stays nothing. There is no way to have it both ways. That would be a logical contradiction. So either something exists to keep nothing staying nothing (in which case that something exists, rather than nothing), or nothing exists to keep nothing staying nothing. Only the latter is actually “nothing,” and yet consequences logically necessarily follow from that exactly as I lay out.
All of those things require manipulating existing things. The analogy therefore does not carry to the complete absence of things. What babies can think and do is constrained by physical and material laws and facts. But when no such laws and facts exist, neither do the constraints they create. A total nothing-state is therefore not constrained in these ways; in fact, by definition, it is not constrained in any way at all. Very much unlike a baby in a crib. That is why, in fact, “nothing” must necessarily behave very differently from something like a baby in a crib.
I actually mention this repeatedly and link to my previous discussion of it. Evidently you missed that. Please re-read my article to glean what I already said about this possibility, and follow the corresponding link I supply on the point to read the full discussion.
Thank you for posting this. You have stirred me to think further on the meaning of “nothing”.
I started a discussion of this post at https://www.christianforums.com/threads/a-thread-about-nothing.8249707/ . I was surprised that it was such a lightning rod for disparagement, even by atheists. I do think you make some very valid points. As always, I appreciate what you do.
Yeah. Deploying ad hominem instead of any real response is indicative of panic. They have no reply, so have to resort to trying to convince people not to consider the argument at all. I discuss the psychology of this in Randal Rauser on Treating Atheists Like People.
I am not a philosopher, but I love this argument. I also enjoyed the debate with Koons although he seemed a bit dismissive.
I have noticed Christian apologists tend to be like that when confronted with an argument they don’t have a pre-planned response to.
Yeah, as I mentioned in my comment that’s why I quit watching those for the most part. I can’t stand newer (ish) channels like Capturing Christianity or the analytic (whatever the hell it’s called) that reuse the exact same arguments I heard when I was an undergrad which were the same arguments St.Paul heard when he was in school which were the same arguments Adam and Eve heard at their Reasonable Faith chapter. I liked Craig’s mathematical argument even though I don’t find it convincing only because it’s a lot different than the “standard five”.
Why does hardly anyone ever point out to these people that Gen 1 presupposes matter co-existing with God (as in Sankhya)? I’ve yet to see anyone in a formal debate make this point with apologists and it has turned me off from much if not all of these debates since the apologist never takes an Ancient Near Eastern view of the Bible and the divine but rather the “classical theist” (i.e. post-enlightenment) view.
This has been noted (and they have “rebuttals” to it; which are lame, as usual, but still).
The main reason you probably don’t see it in debates much is that almost no one debates Genesis anymore, and those rare few who do aren’t, typically, experts in ancient languages or cultures and thus not equipped to hold fort on a point like that.
The best discussion of Genesis in its ANE context (which points out a lot more than this detail) is Babinsky, “The Cosmology of the Bible,” in The Christian Delusion.
Okay. Also, is it just bad apologetics that results in translations of “ruah” as “spirit” rather than “breath” or “wind”? Mark S. Smith mentions in his book Origins of Biblical Monotheism that “Yahweh” comes from the root for “wind” so Gen 1:1 would be “wind of God over the waters” right?
Most ancient languages at some point used “wind/breath” to mean “spirit/soul” so there is nothing unusual about that (it was the same in Greek, the psyche life/soul originally also meant breath/wind/cold, just as you find for ruah; but that was in the Homeric-era, comparable to when Genesis was written; by the time the NT was written psyche had evolved entirely to mean life/soul/spirit).
It is normal for translations to never be accurate, because words in modern languages simply don’t have the same valences and connotations as the ancient words did. Thus it is very easy to draw inaccurate conclusions from a translation. You really can only understand the text in its original language.
Case in point, it is fair to translate “breath” as “spirit,” because when Genesis was written those did mean the same things, however someone who does not know that can be misled by such a translation, since today “spirit” and “breath” don’t mean the same thing anymore.
Really, no one should ever be “drawing conclusions” about the text from a word choice made by a translator, for exactly this reason. Anyone who wants to do that really needs to rely on a peer reviewed textual commentary (for example, the New Interpreter’s Commentary on Genesis).
As to the intended meaning of Gen 1:2, it means both breath and spirit, as then there was no comprehension of there being any difference in the context of a possessive clause. So the author of that text imagined an actual physical breath of God (possibly even as, literally, the body of God, e.g. gods were then understood to become or animate mists and winds and the like).
This makes more sense when you understand these are the same authors who believed their god had a humanoid body that someone could wrestle with in the street, that he had a face and hands, and a backside you could safely look at (whereas gazing on his face would kill you), and so on. This all predated theological reforms in Second Temple Judaism that “re-interpreted” all this as references to angels speaking for or representing God (the burning bush thus became the Metatron, the Voice of God, an angel operated by God like a puppet, instead of an actual Earthly appearance of the pagan god Yahweh).
Babinski covers these things; they perfectly fit the theological context of the time (these books were written by polytheistic monolatrists, not monotheists as was anachronistically claimed later).
Okay, thanks! Just to clarify, elohim here is in the singular as “god” rather than “gods”? My lexicon has it in the singular but has “el-him” (if I’m not mistaken) for the plural.
I don’t know what lexicon you mean, but those are the same thing, and are plural. (In case it wasn’t clear, vowels didn’t exist in Hebrew then; so elohim and elhim are identical. It’s simply El, the supreme God of Canaan, with a masculine plural suffix.)
The question of the plural is much discussed in the literature. Many claim it’s a royal singular (or a similar idea of plural intensive or honorific plural), although that actually logically entails a plurality of beings (kings can only describe themselves as “we” because they represent a plurality of agents and subjects acting on their behalf). IMO, these terms refer to the Creator and his angelic court (which at the time of writing would be understood as a court of subordinate gods; the semantic maneuver of re-naming these gods angels was a second temple development). This is confirmed by the identical use of the correlating word at the time in Ugaritic.
Wikipedia has a reasonably useful article on this.
That notes the honorific plural was used for other large things, but IMO, the examples don’t hold the point. For example, Behemoth in Job appears to refer to a species of animals, not a singular beast, and certainly nothing all that large, which is only poetically described in the singular. The idea of Behemoth being a singular monster arose centuries later, after the “plural of greatness” had developed as an idea to convert the polytheistic Genesis into a monotheist treatise. The same was then done for Behemoth to carry an intended parallel of divine greatness. Likewise, achot, sister, looks plural but it’s actually an accident of etymological compression from a similar-sounding non-plural ending. Which cannot have happened to elohim. And the references claimed for the use of Baalim in the singular don’t check out. And so on.
(See Thomas Keiser’s article “The Divine Plural: A Literary-Contextual Argument for Plurality in the Godhead “; IMO his own thesis is incorrect, but he cites and summarizes all the scholarship covering attempts to explain this.)
I was going to joke that the universe, if it’s designed, would look more like a universe made by Q, but that world would be way less boring and we would get a lot more chances for Q to screw with us. Mischievous and evil gods would make a world way worse than this one. It’s telling that almost every human (fictional) creation of a universe assumes a greater degree of ability to cross it and a greater variety of stuff to find and things to meet (and maybe shoot at).
In my mind, a huge amount of this comes from people who are unable to recognize when their intuitions will be leading them astray (and then picking a theory that is not actually all that intuitive but they have emotional reasons to prefer and which they have been indoctrinated into ignoring how mysterious the ontology behind it really is). These theistic discussions always take us far beyond the limits of our understanding. What were things like before even our best physics work? What was it like before causality, if that is what it was? The infinite regress possibility of a past-infinite universe feels weird even though there’s nothing logically wrong with it because our minds don’t take well to infinity (WLC trades on this when he misuses Hilbert’s Hotel while also himself believing in plenty of actual infinities). We actually have no idea how nothings would work. We struggle to actually imagine the Big Bang. Apparently, there is a quite natural way of thinking people have to imagine this kind of primordial void from which stuff can come… but only if some kind of great magic is done. But that’s reasoning from our thought about what would happen if we removed stuff: We would remove the land but the ocean would be left; we would remove planets but a vacuum is left. But this isn’t what a primordial void would be like.
This is another version of the theist two-step I’ve talked about. First, the theist invites us to imagine a situation that is weird, that is beyond our everyday understanding. Then they make arguments that implicitly rely on us maintaining that everyday understanding, in a selective fashion as they need. And then they will disguise us from the fact that a God is a very weird thing too.
Oops, accidentally posted a comment I made in the fine tuning post alongside my point here. Oh well!