In the first and toughest chapter of the book, we covered a lot of ground. You might suppose, after all this discussion, that nothing remains to be discussed. So, let’s discuss nothing.
The Greek philosopher Parmenides (ca. 520–450 BCE) is famous for the dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (“from nothing, nothing comes”).[1]+ Put another way, you can’t get something from nothing. Of course, Parmenides never encountered nothing. Nobody ever has. So, I don’t know why he considered himself an expert on the topic.
If we accept that the universe can’t come from nothing, then there was always something, suggesting that the universe is eternal. That was Aristotle’s view.
Christians typically believe the universe came from nothing (ex nihilo).[2]+ However, it didn’t come from nothing all by itself, which they, like Parmenides, would deem impossible. Christians are fine with a universe coming from nothing if God facilitated it.
I have never understood how adding God to the equation solves the problem of ex nihilo creation. As philosopher Felipe Leon remarked, “Saying that ex nihilo creation of concrete objects is possible with enough power is like saying that barfing up a missed lunch is possible with a sufficiently strenuous dry heave.”
Parmenides notwithstanding, no contradiction is inherent in the idea of something arising from nothing, so we can’t declare it to be logically impossible. To argue that it is physically impossible, we would first need to establish the physical possibility of nothing. It’s hard to imagine how we could get physical evidence to confirm nothing.
If there were nothing, there would be no natural laws. No physical obstacle would prevent stuff from appearing spontaneously. That might explain why there is something rather than nothing. It would not, however, explain why this particular world exists, as opposed to some other world. Then again, if nothing implies no constraint, any “why” question we might pose can be dismissed with a “why not” shrug.
Apologists brush off such questions and invent their own: If something can come from nothing, then why don’t plastic sporks and pelicans spontaneously materialize all around us out of nothing? Answer: Because there isn’t nothing all around us. All around us is something: space, radiation, the Higgs field, and so forth. The regular operations of the material world ensure that we aren’t inundated with sporks and pelicans. Quantum theory technically permits a spork or pelican to appear suddenly, but the odds against it are astronomical.
As strange as it may sound, astrophysicists say that a universe arising from nothing is a natural result of quantum fluctuations. The total negative force of gravity, which pulls matter together, appears to perfectly offset the total positive force of dark energy, which pushes matter apart. Thus, the universe contains zero net energy. The fact that it does not take a net expenditure of energy to generate a universe prompted physicist Alan Guth to describe the universe as “the ultimate free lunch,” to which the journalist John Hockenberry deadpanned, “I was actually very impressed with the universe until you said that.”[3]
Dinesh D’Souza is uncomfortable with such strange ideas as quantum fluctuations creating something from nothing and the universe containing zero net energy. Lawrence Krauss addressed the something-from-nothing mystery:
Nothing isn’t nothing anymore in physics. Because of the laws of quantum mechanics and special relativity, on extremely small scales, nothing is really a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can’t see them.[4]
The reason for believing “nothing is really something” is that the mass of a proton or neutron is principally contained in the spaces between its constituent quarks. This is a result of the strong nuclear force carried by gluons.
In direct response to D’Souza’s distaste for zero net energy, Krauss said,
Determining the total gravitational energy of objects being carried along by the expansion of the universe is not subject to arbitrary definition any more than the geometric curvature of the universe is a matter of definition.[5]
Krauss’s answer is problematic. When religious apologists and philosophers refer to nothing, they mean sheer nothing. Physicists like Krauss are talking about a quantum vacuum.[6] That’s not sheer nothing. Using the same word for two disparate ideas is a recipe for confusion. Krauss, when confronted, coyly concedes this point.
Like infinity, sheer nothing has never been empirically confirmed and is difficult if not impossible to conceive.[7]+ The question “Why does anything exist?” implies that sheer nothing is a viable alternative to something, yet no evidence has ever been adduced to indicate that sheer nothing is even an option.
D’Souza insists that “The world cannot be without some ultimate explanation.”[8] He may be right, though this seems to be an intuition, or maybe a desperate plea, rather than an evidence-based insight. In any case, I sympathize with D’Souza. We Homo sapiens have survived largely because we are innately programmed with a deep psychological imperative to seek explanations. I can’t imagine any evolutionarily cogent reason why our curiosity would ever get switched off or why we would ever be content to accept that no deeper explanation exists.
An irrepressible hunger for an explanation plus an absence of evidence upon which to construct a compelling explanation does not add up to a divine explanation. It instead culminates in the kind of frustration that plagues every inquisitive mortal until he either dies or becomes sufficiently sloppy in his reasoning that he fancies that he has solved the mystery.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought the most serious question we can ask is why there is something rather than nothing—sheer nothing, not the physicists’ quantum vacuum.[9]+ It’s a tough question. The philosopher Robert Nozick, as if to kick the question back to Heidegger, notes that there are countless ways for there to be something and only one way for there to be nothing, so nothing is an odder state and would thus be even more demanding of an explanation. Nozick’s teacher Sidney Morgenbesser quipped, “And if there were nothing? You’d still be complaining!”
Religionists who fling Heidegger’s question at atheists are throwing a boomerang. Even if God were somehow demonstrated to be the answer to why the universe or multiverse exists, this fails to explain why God rather than nothing exists. Heidegger’s question ought to evoke humility in everyone, regardless of one’s opinions about the existence of God.
Then again, maybe the proper response to Heidegger’s question is not a humble silence, but rather a dismissive sneer. Asking for an explanation for why there is “something” categorically rules out any explanation that is “something.” The framing of Heidegger’s question thus establishes sheer nothing as the one and only option. In other words, if everything requires explanation, the explanation is necessarily nothing. Yet, as mentioned earlier, sheer nothing is a fiction.
Worse yet, it is an incoherent fiction. As explained by philosopher Bede Rundle, the proposition that there ever could be a time when there exists absolutely nothing implies the existence of time, which is not nothing. If nothing exists at any moment in time, that implies the existence of spacetime. Physicists tell us that even empty space brims with virtual particles, which are not nothing. So, if sheer nothing can exist, it can’t exist anywhere at any time. Yet, since exists is a present-tense verb, the claim that nothing exists entails the passage of time. My concept of nothing is disintegrating into, well, nothing.
Philosopher Dean Rickles goes further than Bede Rundle (or I). He says 2 + 2 = 4 is a logically necessary truth that does not depend on any material existence. Eliminate the whole cosmos and that simple mathematical truth would remain. And that’s not nothing. Therefore, it is logically impossible that nothing exists.
As you see, the topic of nothing is really something.
[1] This Latin phrase has been traced back to Lucretius and Empedocles.
[2] Except for Parley Pratt and other Mormons and except for the unconventional theologian Paul Tillich.
[3] World Science Festival, “Multiverse: One Universe or Many?” August 7, 2014, YouTube video, 1:22:34, https://youtu.be/aUW7patpm9s.
[4] Lawrence Krauss (lecture, Atheist Alliance International 2009).
[5] Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), 148.
[6] Marcelo Gleiser, “The Origin of the Universe: From Nothing Everything?” NPR, March 27, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/03/26/175352714/the-origin-of-the-universe-from-nothing-everything.
[7] William Lane Craig says the infinite singularity at the beginning of the Big Bang occupied no space and therefore was equivalent to sheer nothing. Equating the singularity with sheer nothing contradicts quantum vacuum theory. If space is quantized and can fluctuate into existence, as proposed by Alexander Vilenkin, there would have been no initial space and thus no quantum vacuum—though, in this case, given that there would presumably be some physical principles in operation to enable the fluctuation, this initial state would not be equivalent to sheer nothing.
[8] Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, 2nd ed. (Regnery Publishing, 2007), 86.
[9] Victor Stenger concluded that something is twice as likely as nothing. By nothing, he meant the quantum vacuum, not sheer nothing.