Absolutely Nothing
But that isn’t the only nothing out there. I’ve described the best “nothing” we have evidence for. Some of the religious argue this is the wrong “nothing” to be thinking about. Take this review of Laurence Krauss’s book “A Universe from Nothing,” written by Robin Schumacher:
You would think that by the title of Krauss’ book he answers the question that Leibniz posed, but he doesn’t. Instead, he redefines what ‘nothing’ is. ‘Nothing’ to Dr. Krauss would be empty space or the quantum vacuum. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who is an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, says in his brief review of the book: “Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something. That’s how a cosmos can be spawned from the void — a profound idea conveyed in A Universe From Nothing that unsettles some yet enlightens others. Meanwhile, it’s just another day on the job for physicist Lawrence Krauss.” [21]
Fair enough, let’s consider a more basic nothing. First on the agenda is demonstrating that it exists. Here, we stumble badly; Schumacher’s review asserts all “the scientific evidence points to the universe exploding out of true nothingness,” yet as I’ve shown above there is no evidence for this, and we can never find any by definition.
Think about it: we define things by partitioning the universe into “parts of X” and “not parts of X.” A definition of “nothing” cannot throw anything into one of those partitions, because the instant it does our “nothing” consists of at least one thing. Everything we know of must go into the other partition, which means that we are perpetually finding evidence for things that are not nothing. Thus we will never have evidence for that definition of “nothing.”
Let’s ignore those trivial details, though. What would this “nothing” be like? Well, nothing, of course. The scientist’s version of nothing, as I outlined above, includes rules like “Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle” and the “Conservation of Energy;” these would have to go. You’d also have to toss out all the rules of logic, as they too are something.
Which means we also have to toss out “something cannot come from nothing” from this nothing. But if there is no rule that prevents something from forming from nothing, then why couldn’t something spontaniously arise? It’s not against the rules, as there are none.
So even if we accept Schumacher’s “nothing” as possibly existing, it’s still possible for something to arise from it!
So Bad It’s Not Even Wrong
Even if you can somehow find a way past all those problems and patch up Cosmological, you face a minor problem.
The conclusion of Kalam is that the universe was caused… and that’s it. At no part of the argument does it say what that cause was. Do we need a god to cause a universe to exist? As we have no clue how to cause a universe, we don’t know. This opens up the possibility of a non-god creator, which we cannot rule out unless we offer up evidence (which, as I’ve argued, will never arrive).
In other words, Cosmological doesn’t even prove the existence of a god! Its continued popularity in religious circles should be an embarrassment to believers the world over, for that reason alone.
[21] http://carm.org/lawrence-krauss-atheist-definition-of-nothing