A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

The great pre-enlightenment mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz, articulated the first question of philosophy when he asked: Why is there something instead of nothing? You God-believers feel this is a slam-dunk for your position. It's anything but.

First of all, Leibniz predated modern physics and cosmology by over 300 years. In modern physics, there is really no such thing as nothing. The closest correlation we have is a quantum vacuum. Virtual particles - quantum particles - pop into an out of existence uncaused out of nothing in this vacuum all the time. Did some preexisting vacuum produce a pop that was our beginning - the singularity? Did a preexisting quantum vacuum create our Big Bang?

God believers don't like any of this because it calls into question the need for a First Cause - i.e. God. But you can take comfort in the fact that if the vacuum did create this universe, it was a very fortunate pop. Because of the way our universe is structured, it appears remarkably set up to allow for creatures like you and me. The precision we are talking about here are the values of the fundamental constants in physics, which are truly mind-boggling. This doesn't make my crowd comfortable. A universe with these settings, if the only one, looks far too much like a set-up job, like it was intended. So some have postulated that our universe could simply be one of a nearly infinite ensemble of universes generated by a universe generating mechanism - perhaps the vacuum - and we just won the fine-tuning lottery.

This is a lot of speculation to be sure, but it's simply an effort to be scientific - identifying natural causes for natural effects. The alternative? Is our universe the product of a theist god looking for praisers and worshippers? I think not. The natural features of our planet, if anything, are far more indicative of perhaps a deist god who cared little for us and simply wound things up at the beginning and spun them off to see what would happen. David Hull, the late Philosopher of Science at your Northwestern University described it best when he said:

Siegfried questions the need for a First Cause i.e. God - by introducing the idea of a particular form of nothingness - a preexisting quantum vacuum of sorts. He suggested that this quantum environment might have been the birthplace of our universe. But this sea of "nothingness" is nothing of the sort. In the words of William Lane Craig:

What gives him the warrant to ask about its origin? It's beginning? Because...

If our universe came into being out of some sort of a quantum vacuum, then our universe didn't exist and then it did... along with perhaps a myriad of other universes that didn't exist and then each one did. These events where universes are produced are events in sequence, and this vacuum is a physical environment. So it succumbs to the age-old maxim: it is impossible to traverse a material, infinite past. Ok. What does this mean? Simply - if I can't count to infinity, I can't come from infinity. Here's the idea:

If I'm on page 112 of this book, and I had to read an infinite number of pages before getting to page 112, would I ever get to page 112? No. In fact, I'd never get to any page in this book if I had read an infinite number of pages before it. That's why, when dealing with physical or material things, we're dealing with something that had to have a beginning.

If this book had to have a beginning to allow me to get to page 112, our universe had to have had a beginning to get through a sequence of events to this point in time - this evening - and the quantum vacuum had to have a beginning or else we'd never have arrived at the point where our universe "popped" into existence. This means it would need a cause - something outside of itself; something that transcends it. This isn't physics, folks; this is simple logic at work. And it actually lines up very well with a brilliant Medieval Muslim formula known today as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The argument goes like this:

1. Things that begin to exist have a cause. How do we know that? Because nothing comes from truly nothing.
2. The universe had a beginning. How do we know this? Because it's impossible to traverse and infinite, material past.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.

Siegfried appealed to Occam's razor, so we'll use it in our own argument here. William of Ockham, an early 14th Century Franciscan monk, is credited with the formula widely appealed to even today in intellectual circles, known as Occam's razor. The rationale can actually be traced all the way back to Aristotle. The formula simply says: it is vain to do with more what can be done with less. In other words, if you have competing explanations for the same thing, the simplest one - that which requires the fewest conditions to be met - is to be preferred. We can "shave away" the others. As Einstein said, "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."

So because both our universe and the quantum vacuum require a beginning and therefore a transcendent cause, and because the quantum vacuum is only speculation, we can shave it away as an unnecessary explanation.

Space, time and matter, began at the beginning of the universe, so the cause has to be outside of space - non-spatial or transcendent. Outside of time - meaning timeless or eternal. And outside of matter - nonmaterial. Three basic characteristics of a creating being or god and that would ultimately include the Christian God.