Something From Nothing

Contemporary naturalistic scientists have a problem. It's very hard to explain in naturalistic terms how the universe could have come into being from nothing, which is what the standard Big Bang model entails.

As an article at Mind Matters puts it:

It does not appear that the Big Bang had a natural beginning. It was the beginning. Before it, there was nothing at all, which is a hard concept for us to grasp. In a debate with naturalist philosopher David Papineau, theistic neurosurgeon Michael Egnor described it as an effect with no physical cause.

For some scientists the solution to the puzzle of how a universe could come from nothing is to redefine what's meant by "nothing."

Physicist Lawrence Krauss, for example, argued in his book A Universe from Nothing, that the "nothing" out of which the universe arose actually included the laws of physics and the quantum foam.

This elicited a lot of pushback from philosophers who argued, rightly, that "nothing" doesn't mean a state where there are only some things like physical laws and the quantum foam existing. Rather "nothing" means "not anything at all."

But how did we get a universe out of "not anything at all"?

The Mind Matters piece discusses some attempts to explain this. One attempt involves the claim that there were brilliant aliens from another universe who somehow constructed our universe out of the seeming void of nothingness:

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, argued in Scientific American last October that advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang and that, when we humans are sufficiently advanced, we will create other universes as well.

Thus, according to Loeb, there must have been some sort of intelligent agents who designed our world in the midst of nothingness.

Neurologist Steven Novella offers another approach. [He] outlines a theory by which the universe could have come about from nothing without a beginning by asking us to reimagine what “nothing” means. Perhaps there can’t be [real] “nothing,” but the fact that the universe is expected to wind down until it undergoes heat death may be, he considers, a way out:

Perhaps the laws of reality ... simply do not allow for a state that we would understand as completely nothing. We think of nothing as simply the absence of stuff, of matter and energy, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that. It may simply be impossible for there to be truly nothing in that simplistic sense.

But where, we might ask, do the "laws of reality" come from? Novella, however, ignores this inconvenient speed bump:

What if the maximally expanded and cold universe mathematically approaches the identical state as the singularity that resulted in the Big Bang? Again, our human minds ... cannot wrap around this concept, but we can crunch the numbers. At some point the heat death universe becomes a singularity, and then starts another cycle of the universe.

Maybe Novella's math can explain how the "heat death" universe is identical to the singularity that produced the universe at its origin, but it's hard to see how. A singularity is a point of zero volume and infinite density. The universe as it dies a heat death expands to an infinite volume and almost zero density. How are these two states identical?

The article continues:

If you want to really blow your mind, some physicists even speculate that this would be the same universe. Not another version of the same matter and energy, but the actual same universe in space and time. Essentially the end of the universe and the beginning of the universe are the same moment in time, the universe loops back in on itself in one giant self-contained temporal cycle.

This sounds a lot like Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence or the Hindu idea of cyclical time. The universe simply repeats itself over and over, forever. This is an idea which is probably deadly to science, which assumes a linear time, and which also leads to fatalism - the notion that no matter what we do the future is inevitable and ineluctable.

The best analogy is a ring, we just keeping going around the ring forever, but there is no true beginning or end. In this concept there is no beginning or end, there is no before, there is just a bound infinite loop.

This idea of a temporally infinite universe falls afoul of two additional philosophical difficulties. One is the set of problems and paradoxes entailed by positing an actual infinite and the other is the difficulty of explaining how we could ever traverse an actual infinite if such a thing could exist. These are serious problems which beset any theory based on infinity.

This solves the “something from nothing” problem, because the universe did not come from anything, it just always was. This still leaves us with the deeper question – why is there something instead of nothing, but that may not be a useful line of inquiry.

In other words, the question why anything at all exists is not "useful" because no naturalistic theory can answer it.

None of these theories, though adduced by scientists, are scientific theories. They're all metaphysical speculations and they're all attempts to explain the origin of the universe without invoking the God of theism.

Even so, whether we're talking about intelligent agents from another universe, or some preexisting laws that somehow formed the universe, most of these speculations seem to ultimately involve a mind of some sort. It's as if these thinkers are trying to attribute the universe to something that has the properties of God but isn't God.

One wonders why there's such desperation to avoid the conclusion that the origin of the universe seems to be the product of either God or something very much like God. Perhaps that's a question for psychologists.