Yesterday I published my take on a recent debate I had with Andrew Loke, before an audience of philosophers, on whether my conclusion is sound that We Should Reject Even the First Premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I took the stance of a nothing-first cosmology for the sake of that debate (arguendo), although I maintain that, actually, ignorance is our current state of knowledge; reality could have existed for eternity; or started at some past time from some minimal fact, which may have been a logically necessary first state or an entirely accidental brute fact (see my debate on the Cosmological Argument with Wallace Marshall). After all, in either case, if nothing exists to choose one possible state over another, then it remains the case that the probability is still infinitesimal that “nothing” would be the state that obtains.

As I wrote before (in Is Science Impossible without God?):

In my Problem with Nothing model … I consider two possible conditions (past finitism and past eternalism), and show that, no matter which is the case, if we start with absolutely nothing, logic entails our universe then inevitably would come to exist, whether at some past point in time (if there ever really was “nothing”) or not, because if a past-infinite series exists, the lack of anything to explain that would still atemporally explain why that series exists and not something else.

Moreover, it could be that something always logically necessarily exists, which in turn caused the rest of reality as we know it, and that that something is not God, but something far simpler and more fundamental—like spacetime itself, since everything requires spacetime to exist except spacetime (since to not exist anywhere or at any time is by definition not to exist); making spacetime the only thing that can exist by itself, requiring no extra other thing in order to exist, which makes it a far more plausible candidate for a necessary being (see The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit and Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism), or even just a brute fact (as I pointed out in Is Science Impossible without God?).

Nevertheless, though we cannot really know which it is, and none of these options make “God” at all likely to exist anyway, we can explore hypothetical options in more detail. So here I will do that. For the rest of this article let’s assume that all of reality began at a finite time in the past, and that nothing preceded it (not even “nothing”), but that its first state was a realized nothingness. In this scenario, the universe did begin as nothing, and that nothing did cause the rest (all the “something” we now observe), but that “nothing” was not entirely nothing, but just as much nothing as is logically possible. What then?

This Destroys All Cosmological Arguments

In my debate with Loke I was asked in audience Q&A whether it makes sense to speak of an absolute nothing even existing at all so as to have any consequence. I answered that it does. Because we cannot appeal to our intuitions or the limits of our imagination in understanding scenarios beyond all human experience; we can only get to what logically necessarily follows from what we describe as the case. If it is logically necessarily the case that an absolute nothingness will necessarily collapse into a massive and random something, then that is simply a logically necessary property of that state of affairs. You then simply can never have a state of “nothing existing” that lacked even that property, because then you would have a logically contradictory state of affairs: where no force or power exists to maintain nothing as nothing, yet something forces or empowers that nothing to remain nothing. Since logically impossible states of affairs cannot exist, such a nothingness can never have existed—not in any sense whatsoever. Therefore we can rule it out as a possible first state of reality.

This leaves the only logically possible nothingness that can have been the first state of reality: an ontologically potent nothingness, a nothingless with the inalienable property of inevitably collapsing into something else. Hence The Problem with Nothing. As I subsequently noted in Koons Cosmology vs. The Problem with Nothing, this conclusion cannot be avoided by appeals to “I cannot imagine or conceive of how that would happen,” because what you can imagine or conceive no longer has any relevance to what is logically necessarily the case. Your imagination is fallible in precisely all the ways logic is not. Which is why we rely on logic now.

That is also why most of our best-established science confounds what we can imagine or conceive. Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory run counter to our intuitions; most people struggle even to understand them, yet they are certainly true, as they have passed countless of even the most powerful tests. We can expect, therefore, so it will be for things even more alien to us, like what happens to an absolute nothingness, a state of affairs we have never observed nor have ever had an indirect acquaintance with. Because even an empty vacuum of space is full of stuff: spatial extension, time, literal force fields from gravity to electromagnetism, and their resulting virtual and actual particles, from photons to Higgs bosons. So we have never observed a nothingness; and we never will.

Nevertheless, one might still insist that this can never happen because nothing (and that means here not even nothing) can exist before time or in a place that doesn’t exist; so spacetime, at least, must always have existed (as I noted yesterday, even I have advanced this Argument from Nonlocality). This is a problem for theology, too—since it means God cannot in any meaningful sense have created space or time, as that would entail he once existed before time (which is logically impossible) or have existed nowhere (which is logically impossible). Theists respond to this by supposing that God causes things simultaneously with himself, but that’s hardly any more intelligible. If God can only exist by existing somewhere at some time, in what sense then can he cause those things to exist? They must already exist, for him to exist, in order to cause anything. Insofar as theists are allowed to solve this by supposing that a zero point of spacetime is still a location (because, after all, in geometry it is logically possible to exist at a zero-point; and therefore, our intuition against that is again to no avail), then an absolute nothingness can also exist at such a location. In which case “nothing” just means zero things, which is still a count of things, and thus, for space and time, is still a place one can be—whether a God or nothing else at all.

So theists can’t get around this. They either have to admit some nonzero quantity of spacetime existed without God being able to cause it to exist (since it has to be the other way around: a quantity of spacetime must first exist for God to exist and thus cause anything else), or they have to admit a zero-point of spacetime is a real place something can exist, and that is where God existed, from which to then create some nonzero quantity of spacetime. But if they choose the former horn of that dilemma, God is no longer needed as a necessary being—spacetime is; from which follows my entire Argument from Nothing. God is thus eliminated as a needed explanation of anything. So they can’t do that. But if they choose the latter horn of that dilemma, then they can no longer object to “nothing” being a real state of affairs at that zero-point of spacetime—from which follows my entire Argument from Nothing. So they can’t do that. But since there is no alternative to those (this dilemma is a proper dichotomy), all cosmological arguments for God are eliminated.

Unpacking This Nothing-Cause Cosmology

We will assume that “some nonzero quantity of spacetime necessarily existed” is somehow ruled out, and that “a zero-point of spacetime is a real, conceivable location at which something (whether God or anything else) can exist or happen” is an accepted starting point. From that alone follows my entire Argument from Nothing. But suppose you have a hard time understanding what this describes. Now enter science. In my original critique of Loke, I cited the Lincoln-Wasser model as an example of a genuine scientific description of a proper nothingness (Maya Lincoln and Avi Wasser, “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo,” Physics of the Dark Universe 2013), and described how it corroborates my results, by showing that from their description of a state follows everything I expect: an infinite, randomized multiverse (any or all that modern cosmological models entail); from which necessarily (statistically) follows a universe like ours; from which necessarily (statistically) follows people like us (see How the New Wong-Hazen Proposal Refutes Theism).

Lincoln and Wasser describe this using information theory, which proxies to field theory (with fields as an ontological realization of information-states). So as they put it, “In terms of information, ‘nothing’ is equivalent to an infinite number of simultaneous Nullifying Information Elements (NIEs),” which are “information elements that co-exist simultaneously and cancel each other.” Like a photon and its counter-photon; or an expansion of space and a retraction of it; or a law of physics and its negation. Their insight is the same as mine: to even have a nothing of something, you have to have something keeping a something’s value at zero: to not have a photon, you have to have an exactly opposite-phased photon. For every possible nonzero value of every possible thing, there is a field-setting “allows that to be” and a field-setting “prevents that from being.” So to have a total nothing (here defined as every possible thing having a quantity or value of exactly zero), you have to have a perfect balance of things and their anti-things (of all logically possible things), keeping the value of all things at zero.

You can also conceive of this without their NIEs by realizing that this is informationally equivalent to “of all logically possible things, something selects all the zero-states of those things” in order to have any kind of nothing-state. My argument proceeds from the fact that there can’t be any such “something” when there is no thing. Their argument proceeds from the fact that in the absence of all things (every thing’s quantity being set to zero), the selection of state (its path integral) becomes fundamentally indeterministic. A nothing-field is by definition unstable. Because it contains nothing (no laws or forces or powers) to hold its specific selection of settings in place; but once it collapses randomly into some something-state, such things do hold, and will have their particular effects thereafter.

Which means “absolutely nothing” in this material sense has infinite specified complexity. Because it requires a perfect balance of logically possible alternatives across an infinite array of possible states of the field. This could be the default starting point of any reality. But to create one would require intelligent design. Like hitting the bullseye of a dartboard; rather than hitting just any random place on the dartboard. If where the dart hits is random (as it logically necessarily will be if where it hits is not caused or determined by anything), then it is far more likely that it will not hit the exact middle—least of all the geometric zero-point exactly equidistant from the circumference. The probability of that is literally one in infinity.

Which means the probability of hitting at random any other space on that dartboard (which means any space where some quantity, like the distance from that geometric zero point and the circumference) is infinitely close to 1. Which is effectively 1 and thus, simply, 100%. Whereas the probability of hitting exactly nothing is, conversely, simply 0%. Which means if the dart starts out at that zero point, and nothing exists to hold it there (or take it anywhere else in particular), where it then moves will also be random. Which gets the same result. Without intelligent design, any nothing-state inevitably becomes a randomly selected something-state. That is simply a consequence of its physical description. This is therefore a logically necessary law of physics (as all physical laws are, once given the ontological states that entail them: see All Godless Universes Are Mathematical).

The Lincoln-Wasser model is, therefore, that when all things are being held at zero, since that must include even anything that would keep things that way (it, too, must be set at zero), there will inevitably be a spontaneous symmetry breaking: the perfectly balanced nothing-state, having nothing to hold it steady, will inevitably collapse into a something-state, at random. That will then have cascading effects down the line. For example, any collapse of this nothing-state is likely to produce at least one false vacuum (a state close to the Lincoln-Wasser state and thus also unstable but now even more propertied than that), which could inevitably collapse into an eternal inflation event, and thus an infinite multiverse.

But even apart from such physical possibilities, there are the metaphysical inevitabilities: with nothing to set the number of universes, the number of universes that will arise from a collapse of an unstable nothing-field is expected to be infinite or approach infinity (where it will be finite, but so large as to differ in hardly any relevant respect from an infinite multiverse). Because if you pick a number from all possible numbers at random, any number you pick will have a finite number of alternatives below it but an infinite number above it; so when all numbers are equally likely (as when nothing exists to make any more likely than any other) the odds are always infinity to one that the number that will be selected at random will be higher than that. Like a dartboard whose radius is infinite: where do you think a dart blindly thrown at it will randomly land then? Almost certainly nowhere even remotely near the center, but absurdly far from it.

Carrying This Forward

Let’s pursue this in a way that dispenses with you getting lost in any semantic death-loop over whether what Lincoln and Wasser are describing actually “is” an absolute nothingness or not. We can get you out of that by simply conceding the semantic point: that what they are describing still is something; but it is still the least amount of something that can ever be the case. It is therefore the closest to nothing as any state of affairs can be. If then you want to ask why there would ever be such a state of affairs, you are then walking right into the logic of my Argument from Nothing: if nothing exists to make that state of affairs ever come about, you have just yourself explained why it didn’t, and thus why there is an infinite (or quasi-infinite) multiverse instead.

That is my atemporal (existential) version of the argument I mentioned earlier: if it would be too weird for such an exactly coincidental setting of all possible values to zero ever to happen, then conversely, it must be entirely normal that something will exist instead. Therefore, we do not need to explain why something exists rather than nothing; to the contrary, you need a reason to explain why there would ever be nothing instead of something. And by the same reasoning, if nothing exists to choose one possible something to exist over any other possible thing (and vice versa), then which something exists will be determined at random; and since most possible something-states are infinite or quasi-infinite multiverses, the odds that one of those will exist is effectively infinity to one. Which is the same result as if we allowed everything to start with the Lincoln-Wasser nothing-field after all. So either way, you end up with the exact same outcome.

Q.E.D.

At no point do we need God in here. He is not needed to explain why there is something rather than nothing. And he is not needed to explain why the something we observe is the something that exists.

Going at This the Other Way Around

Now let’s go the other direction. Suppose you conclude, instead, that, in the absence of anything to make anything exist, every setting should be at zero. Without anything to cause or make space and time exist, the amount of space and time that exist has to be zero. Without anything to make wave particles exist (like photons, electrons, antiprotons), all waves should be flat and thus zero. Without anything to make any force or power exist, all forces and powers should be at zero (so that there is “no amount” of any of them). That would then mean (per my point yesterday) that without anything to cause a causal principle to exist or operate, the value of “a causal principle exists” should also be set at zero—since there is “no amount” of that principle. It thus does not matter that the principle is non-continuous, that it only either exists or it does not, so that it only has a value of 1 (exists) or 0 (does not exist). It is still the case that if you think that when nothing exists to make anything exist then the values of all possibly existing things should be set to zero (there then being no amount of any thing), then you must agree that there will be a “zero amount” of causal principle, and so its value must also then be set to 0. It therefore won’t exist.

You have just described the the Lincoln-Wasser field-state. Their conclusions then follow. Which are my conclusions. In this case, when we think of “nothing” existing, semantically we are not saying nothing “whatsoever” exists, but rather, that what exists is a total field-state for all of existence all of whose values are at zero. This is a real state—it is conceivable on current science. We can imagine all the quantities of spacetime at zero: all waves flat, all distances null, all forces and constants and principles zeroed in quantity. This is already a condition on Relativity: objects moving at the speed of light collapse time and space in the direction of motion to literally, physically, zero. Yet they still exist. Light waves exactly out of phase cancel each other out, leaving a wave frequency of zero. Any single particle and antiparticle that collide leave no particle left over but a photon, which can then be canceled to zero by an exactly inverted photon. All other values in physics (describing all known reality) can conceptually go to zero. Even if an “absolute zero” ground state for a vacuum (a presence of zero energy, and therefore zero particles) is physically impossible, it is logically possible; as otherwise, we’d be saying that it is logically necessarily the case that all possible spacetimes are governed by quantum field laws, which would make quantum field laws the necessary being, which would be sufficient to explain all observations, thus again eliminating God as superfluous.

So there is no way to avoid the consequences here. Even if you take this tack, that a nothing-state is the inevitable expectation of the absence of any causes, you end up agreeing that there can be a real field-state for the universe all of whose values are set to zero, even its extension in space and time. And that activates the Lincoln-Wasser process. Which leads to an infinite multiverse. So even positing that once upon a time nothing existed in this sense gets the result. Your only other options are to allow a nothing to exist in some sense that is even less a something than this (yet still logically possible), which gets the same result (by my original argument); or to disallow any nothing-state to exist, in which case you are allowing something other than God to be a logically necessary being and thus the cause of all contingent beings. For instance, if spacetime can never be set to zero and still exist, then spacetime necessarily always had a nonzero value. But then we either get the Lincoln-Wasser process again and thus an infinite or quasi-infinite multiverse (if you insist all values must nevertheless start as low as they can go), or we get my described existential selection effect again (if you insist any initial state is, instead, equally likely, then the law of total probability gets us to an infinite or quasi-infinite multiverse, to a probability infinitesimally close to 1).

So no matter where you turn, you end up with the same result: an infinite or quasi-infinite multiverse.

A Zero-Field-State as the Cause of Existence

So we can reconceptualize the only logically possible ‘nothing’ as a particular field-state—in fact the most finely tuned field-state imaginable, requiring all actuals and their counter-actuals to be in perfect balance, thus ensuring all values for the field are set to zero, including the space and time dimensions, as well as all energic dimensions (all possible particles, and thus all possible matter and energy, negated to zero). Lincon and Wasser’s point is that this field-state is inherently unstable: as soon as it appears, it starts collapsing (and metrics of the field start randomly taking on other values than zero), because nothing exists to prevent it collapsing (and therefore nothing is needed to cause it to collapse). And so the result quickly dissolves into a massive cosmogenesis—or indeed, as even Loke himself agrees, an infinite multiverse.

You cannot object to this that ‘nothing’ entails that no material causes exist to produce any outcome, because what I have described is a state whereby its random collapse (the spontaneous symmetry breaking) is logically necessary. It is therefore a logically necessary property of a ‘nothing’-state that it produce something without any further material causes but itself. There is no additional mechanism causing this inevitable random collapse—that is the mechanism: a nothing-field has the logically necessary property of randomly collapsing into something else, all by itself (with odds of infinity to one). It does not matter if we cannot conceive of this; it is a logically necessary outcome of the described state. The limits of human imagination cannot trump that. And we can no longer say this state can never have existed, because, as defined, it is a real state (a zero-field-state, or ZFS). And we are not positing as a hypothesis that “maybe” it will then be subject to random collapse. That is, rather, a logically unavoidable property of the state as described. That nothing-field then is the cause of all subsequent existence.

And you cannot object to this with the semantic argument that this then confirms the causal principle, on the basis that on this description it always is the case that everything has a cause, because here the word ’cause’ is defined such as to allow even nothing to be a cause of everything, which defeats every cosmological argument for God. As I pointed out yesterday, it entails the crucial fourth premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (that only a personal God can be the requisite cause of reality) is then false, as here a nothing-field can be that requisite cause—in fact, as a hypothesis, the ZFS has a far higher prior probability (even as a brute fact, nothing is informationally simpler than this nothing-field, whereas a God has infinite specified complexity), and a far higher evidential likelihood (it predicts everything we observe, including numerous bizarre observations; whereas the God hypothesis makes many failed predictions).

Even if you wish to argue that this nothing-field also has infinite specified complexity (given its perfect balance of infinite opposites) and therefore is also the least likely thing to pre-exist all other things, you still end up back where I started: you are then saying that what should be the most likely thing to pre-exist all other things is what we would get if we randomly chose among all possible things, and therefore it should be something with less specified complexity than either a nothing-field or a God—which gets us to a randomized quasi-infinite multiverse. Because that is less specified than a single universe, as well as than any smaller multiverse, as both of those are more specific selections from all possible states than a randomverse. So there is no way around this conclusion. And even that recourse is contentious—while creating a ZFS requires infinite specified complexity; all reality starting out that way would not. The original intuition may be correct: in the absence of anything to cause any quantity of anything, everything starts at zero, and thus at a ZFS state. Its infinite specified complexity only then obtains if one wishes to maintain it; whereas the fact that it collapses immediately negates its specified complexity—setting that, too, at zero.

The Superiority of ZFS Cosmology to Theism

So even if we are not calling the zero-field-state (or ZFS) strictly ‘nothing’ now but the least amount of ‘something’ that can ever have existed, it is still the most ‘nothing’ amount of nothing that is logically possible, and therefore the simplest possible something, insofar as it contains no contingent properties at all, only logically necessary ones—and therefore requires no suppositions beyond positing the ZFS itself. We can call it a Maximal Nothing, and describe it as zeroed-out field-state, a dimensionless point of spacetime lacking all contingent properties—but still possessing all logically necessary properties.

This ZFS will logically necessarily act exactly as my Argument from Nothing predicts:

• This zero-field is not governed by any force maintaining its stability; it is, therefore, physically indeterministic (just like many scientists suspect quantum physics is), and therefore inherently, physically, unstable. This is not a contingent or arbitrarily assigned property. It is a logically necessary (and thus unavoidable) consequence of this state’s mere lack of already-manifested deterministic forces. You cannot remove all forces (zero them out) and still claim a force exists that will maintain the stability of all the zeroed-out metrics of the field.
• Because of this, the field’s outcome path is defined by a perfectly random selection of state (what Lincoln and Wasser call Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking or SSB). This is the logically inevitable outcome of two logically necessary facts: (1) in such a state there are no forces causing any one outcome-state to be any more likely than any other (because, by definition, all such forces are zeroed-out and thus absent); and (2) a ‘continuous nothing’ is only one possible state out of infinitely many alternative states, all of which comprising a ‘something’ (some nonzero settings on some of the field’s metrics). All are equally likely. Therefore ‘nothing continuing to be nothing’ is an infinitesimally unlikely outcome.
• Of all the randomly selected outcome-states of this field that could be chosen, the probability that the one of them that randomly collapses out of the zero-state will be a quasi-infinite multiverse of randomly configured universes is infinitesimally close to one. Because the odds that the number of universes randomly selected to exist will be more than any finite number equals infinity to one; because any finite number in ratio to infinity produces odds of infinity to one.
• In a quasi-infinite multiverse of randomly configured universes, a quasi-infinite number of universes will be Life Generating Universes (or LGUs) by random selection alone; and being randomly (and not intelligently) selected, they will exhibit the expected properties of randomly-selected LGUs (to a probability extraordinarily close to one), such as vast size, age, and lethality, random biogenesis of the simplest possible life-form then evolving by natural selection over eons into intelligent observers, consciousness thus only arising from inordinately complex machines (brains) resulting from that process, all of which arising from a sufficiently ordered but still largely superfluous subatomic complexity, as well as an observed deterministic and blind causal continuum.

This is a remarkable set of outcomes for so simple an initial condition to predict. If all we need posit is a zero-field, and what unavoidably results are worlds just like ours, in all their particular oddities, this stands as good evidence for the conclusion that reality began as a zero-field, which can be described as a Maximal Nothing-State. The logical consequence of this, of course, is that the Kalam Cosmological Argument fails at its fourth premise: an initial uncaused zero-field explains all cosmology and physics. And this zero-field can be instantaneously eternal in just the same way God is, and thus also be as likely a necessary being or a brute fact as God is. And yet it is a far simpler (and thus far more likely) brute fact to pose, because it has no contingent properties. And, as just noted, it better explains observations. It also matches precedent: so far, only physics has ever been found to explain everything, not supernatural entities; ergo we should expect the ultimate cosmological principle to be purely physical. In fact, precedent so far is that all complex things are the emergent outcomes of simpler things; we should therefore expect regress to end at the simplest possible thing. Which is the ZFS. Because you cannot subtract anything from the ZFS without logical contradiction. There is therefore no logically possible state simpler.

Indeed, the ZFS even qualifies as a candidate for a necessary being. God cannot be a necessary being, because many other god-states are possible (all possible Gods, with all possible interests and qualities), including non-god states. Since it is logically possible for there to be no God, or a different God than modern theists propose, it cannot be that any God is logically necessary. The real God could have been a Confucian or a Buddhist or a Satanist, as much as a Muslim or a Catholic or a Mormon or a Hebrew God, or a Scientologist one; God could have maximally cared about kittens, or cheese, or black holes, rather than people; God could have been Perfectly Evil, or Perfectly Indifferent; God could have been fallible or limited or insane or restricted to some locations in space and time and not others; God could have made Lobster Men on Planet Five of the Oberon System in His Image, and we’re just an accidental byproduct of the same universe he built for them; the greatest of all Gods could simply be a computer mainframe in the year 2525, or a mere idea in the human mind. There is no evidence any one of these “Supreme God States” is impossible. Therefore no God is necessary.

By contrast, the ZFS could actually be a necessary being. Since (per the Argument from Nonlocality that got us here in the first place) it is not possible to exist without location in space and time (since to exist you have to exist somewhere and at some time; and not exist nowhere much less never exist), the fundamental ground of all being must be spacetime. Only spacetime can exist by itself (it requires no second extra place or time to exist; it is all places and times). Existence therefore requires spacetime, in precisely the way that it does not require Yahweh or Earth or Homo sapiens or you or me. Most theists already agree the fundamental ground of all being is a good candidate for a logically necessary being (even if we have not yet discovered the syllogism to prove it). And since something must be selected to exist (whether what is chosen is ‘a continuous nothing’ or any particular something, past eternal or not)—and that is logically necessarily the case—it follows that when nothing exists to select what will exist, the simplest possible thing (simpler than which no alternative thing is logically possible) is the best candidate for the only logically necessary being, whose outcome is then random—and thus just happens to inevitably entail, to an effective certitude, a quasi-infinite, randomized multiverse, and therefore, eventually, us.

We therefore have no need of God. All cosmological arguments fail. God has no virtues as an explanation that the ZFS lacks; while the ZFS has many explanatory virtues God lacks. It is therefore more likely going to turn out to be the case that the ZFS is the necessary ground of all being, an explanation of all explanations that itself requires no further explanation. Even at the very worst, it could just as well be. Which means we are left to determine which is most likely, not just on the great-making virtues of simplicity, irreducibility, and power, but on the empirical merits of which theory explains the most observations with the fewest assumptions. ZFS wins on all counts.

Conclusion

So there is no deep mystery why something exists: logically necessarily, the probability that nothing would exist (or remain nothing if it did ever exist) is infinitesimal and therefore functionally zero. This is in essence the conclusion of Peter van Inwagen and Robert Nozick, as oft discussed in The Puzzle of Existence; and comports, as well, with Graham Oppy’s analysis of “Uncaused Beginnings” and “Uncaused Beginnings Revisited.” Likewise, that what does exist looks like what we observe is no mystery, either: Loke himself admitted the absence of a causal principle entails an infinite multiverse (no God required), which is my very argument; and yet if an infinite multiverse exists, the most likely place we would find ourselves is in just such a universe as we observe. All other possible universes are either incapable of producing observers (and so the probability we would be observing them now is zero) or are vastly rarer than universes like ours—where by ‘like ours’ I mean a causally continuous space of enormous size and age and relatively random arrangement capable of generating observers (by the inevitable Wong-Hazen process).

This conclusion cannot be evaded by saying “nothing” can’t ever have existed; because there is a form of nothing that is the most nothing ‘nothing’ that is logically possible, the Lincoln-Wasser ‘zero-field’, and it entails an infinite or quasi-infinite multiverse. And this conclusion cannot be evaded by saying everything more likely began from something with less specified complexity than that, because that entails the same conclusion (the most likely first-state by that principle is a random chaos, which entails an infinite or quasi-infinite multiverse). And this conclusion cannot be evaded by saying that a ‘nothing’ can exist that lacks any probability of becoming something, because that’s logically impossible—you cannot have a state that lacks all properties and yet still has the property of ensuring only one outcome; whereas you can have a state that lacks all properties and in logically necessary result of that very fact can produce any outcome. Thus, removing all barriers to spontaneous transformation logically entails a potentiality of instantiation; you can never have a state that lacks both, just as you can never have a sphere that lacks a radius. Indeed, in such a state, no outcome is any more likely than any other, either (because nothing exists to make any outcome more likely than any other); which in turn has logically necessary consequences as to what is most likely then to result. And that this predicts everything we observe, even its weirdest features, is then evidence for this actually being what happened.

Maybe it didn’t. Maybe some other fact necessarily exists; maybe some brute fact just existed for no reason. Maybe existence is past eternal. Maybe all possible worlds exist. And so on. But we cannot rule out this zero-field cosmology—any more than we can rule out any of those others. Which means we can never “rule in” any God. All cosmological arguments thus fail.