Was there “nothing at all” that ever existed in the beginning? No planets, no people, no plants and animals, no matter, no energy, no space, no time, no consciousness, and NO GOD!
Or, was there “nothing except God” – that is, there was only God, the primordial source of creation or existence?
The biblical account of creation says that God created the world by simply uttering “Let there be light...day, night...sky, waters, and seas...land or earth...plants...animals...etc.”
This Judaeo-Christian concept of “creatio ex nihilo”(creation out of nothing) does not imply absolute nothing, but rather that “in the beginning, there was nothing except God”.
What’s really the primordial origin of the universe? Did we and our universe originate from NOTHING? Or from SOMETHING?
We have two sides of the issue here: one is “nothing”, the other is “something”. The broad spectrum between “nothing” and “something,” between non-existence and existence, covers a myriad of gradations of metaphysical concepts – actuality and potentiality, necessity and contingency or possibility, etc. But let me just simplify our discussion by postulating two positions regarding the origin of the universe: the NON-THEISTIC which is from nothing; and the THEISTIC or from something (or God).
The first position, NON-THEISTIC or “nothing at all including God” is advocated by some modern scientists and thinkers.
Victor John Stenger – American particle physicist, philosopher, author, and religious skeptic – in his 2007 book “God: The Failed Hypothesis,” argues that there is no evidence for the existence of a deity and that the origin of the universe is not by design.
For Stenger, the universe is nothing. “It’s a kind of crystallized nothing. What we have now is a phase transition that went from nothing to something. The more symmetric state is actually the less stable and so they tend to go through this transformation to something more structured that happens to be the lower energy arrangement of the molecules.”
In other words, Stenger argues that the universe started in a very symmetric situation and “nothing is more symmetric than nothing.”
On a similar vein, Stephen Hawking, British physicist and cosmologist, argues that: “Because there are laws of physics (of quantum physics), the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” For Hawking, the Big Bang, a manifestation of ‘something’, was just a natural consequence of the laws of physics.
Apropos Stenger’s “crystallized nothing” universe and Hawking’s spontaneous creation from nothing, I’d like to counter that the laws of physics, of quantum physics particularly, are not nothing – they are something!
Now, let’s proceed to the other position: that the universe sprung from something, or was CREATED BY GOD.
Our first proponent is Bede Rundle, philosopher and emeritus lecturer of philosophy at Oxford University, and author of the book, “Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.”
For Rundle, it is simply impossible or absurd to have nothing rather than something. “The empty space that science talks about is not purely nothing – it is something. We think we can only make sense of the empty space. But that’s, unfortunately, not nothing.”
Then, we have John Andrew Leslie, Canadian philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph as well as University of Victoria, British Columbia.
Leslie argues that the universe’s origin is not nothing because of the truth about possibilities. “I don’t think it would be possible to say, for example, quantum physics tells us that it’s likely that a blank or nothing would fluctuate into a real world. The reason perhaps why quantum physics prefers for nothing rather than something is because nothing is simpler rather than something. With nothing, you don’t have to explain. However, you’ve overlooked the fact that there’s an infinite richness of truths about possibilities which is bound to exist, even if no actual things exist. So, it’s impossible to have purely nothing, because you always have possibilities.”
This multitude of possibilities, according to Leslie, is grounded on intrinsic ethical value, which leads to the ethical requirement of consciousness. “At the end of the day, I believe some things are better than other things. If you want to understand why the universe exists, you ought to take seriously Plato’s notion that it exists because it’s better that it exists than not, that there was an ethical requirement that a good world exists, and that our world, for all its bad sides, is something good. The supreme good would itself be the existence of something which was infinitely wide ranging in its consciousness. What’s ethically required is a good situation, and the good situation is a situation in which there’s going to be consciousness. In the end, consciousness is the only thing which has any value, either positive or negative. So, it’s a fact that there’s this possibility of having a good situation of consciousness, which leads to the requirement that it should actually exist, and the requirement just wouldn’t be there unless it were true that there’s a possibility of the good of the consciousness existing.”
In brief, for Leslie, the reason there is something rather than nothing is that it is good that something exists.
Indeed, I couldn’t agree more. The reason why cosmic consciousness – or an ethereal God, so to speak – exists is because “something” did exist, and that this something is self-existing, or that its essence is its existence.
St. Anselm thus rightly defines God as the “being none other than which can be conceived.”
In sum, why the universe began to exist as something rather than nothing? Because God created it and sustained it. Benedictus Deus!
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