NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

A friend recently asked me to comment on this little video from New Scientist, which summarizes some of the claims made in an article from the July 23 issue on the theme “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

The magazine has been sitting on my gargantuan “to read” stack for a few months, and I finally got to it. But when I did, I found it extremely troubling. Many pop science writers, including scientists when they are writing pop science, try to translate traditional philosophical issues into terms they are familiar with. At best the result is, usually, to change the subject while pretending not to. At worst it is nonsensical. And sometimes it is both. Consider the article in question, which informs us that:

"Entropy measures the number of ways you can rearrange a system’s components without changing its overall appearance… [N]othingness is the highest entropy state around -- you can shuffle it around all you want and it still looks like nothing. Given this law, it is hard to see how nothing could ever be turned into something, let alone something as big as the universe."

What kind of “system” is nothing? If nothingness is a “state,” what exactly is it that is in that state? What are the “components” of nothing? What does “shuffling around” those components involve? How exactly does all of this differ from not shuffling around anything at all, or there being nothing in a state at all, or there being nothing with any components at all? What exactly does it mean to turn nothing into something, even something small? Isn’t the very suggestion pretty mystifying even apart from the law of entropy? What exactly is it that the law of entropy is governing when there is nothing around for it to govern?

The confusion continues throughout the article:

"But entropy is only part of the story. The other consideration is symmetry... Nothingness is very symmetrical indeed. “There’s no telling one part from another, so it has total symmetry,” says physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

So, “nothingness” or “nothing” has “parts.” And how exactly does the claim that nothing has parts differ from the claim that there is nothing with parts? Surely what the article does not mean to say “It is not the case that there is an x such that x has parts,” since that is both false and irrelevant to the subject of the article. So is it saying instead, “There is an x such that x is nothing and x has parts”? But what does that mean? How can there exist something that is “nothing”? Does “being nothing” involve being a kind of eccentric something? Similar questions could be asked, of course, about what it means for this something that is nothing to be “symmetrical.”

The article continues:

"Wilczek’s own specialty is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes how quarks behave deep within atomic nuclei. It tells us that nothingness is a precarious state of affairs. “You can form a state that has no quarks and antiquarks in it, and it’s totally unstable,” says Wilczek. “It spontaneously starts producing quark-antiquark pairs.” The perfect symmetry of nothingness is broken."

So we’ve got nothingness, except that it isn’t nothingness, because what we’re really talking about is a “state” that is unstable, and this state starts producing quarks and antiquarks. Indeed:

"“According to quantum theory, there is no state of ‘emptiness’,” agrees Frank Close of the University of Oxford… Instead, a vacuum is actually filled with a roiling broth of particles that pop in and out of existence."

Again, a “roiling broth” governed by the laws of quantum theory is not “nothing.” In which case all the preceding stuff about how “nothingness” has “parts” and can be in “states” and is “symmetrical” wasn’t really ever about “nothingness” in the first place. And a good thing too, because none of those things could intelligibly be said about “nothingness,” since nothingness is, of course, not a kind of thing at all.

Nor are the reasons for this as profound as the article insinuates:

"[T]here is an even more mind-blowing consequence of the idea that something can come from nothing: perhaps nothingness itself cannot exist. Here’s why. Quantum uncertainly allows a trade-off [etc.]"

I struggle to see how it is “mind-blowing” that “nothingness cannot exist,” since this truth seems completely obvious and well-known even to young children just as well as to experts in quantum uncertainty. This is because “nothingness” just is the non-existence of anything.

But perhaps the article is here just badly expressing another thought, to the effect that it is necessary that something must always have existed, that it could not in principle have been the case that there is or ever was absolutely nothing at all. And I would say that the article is right about that. But neither “quantum uncertainty” nor any other theory of physics is or could be the reason, for quantum mechanics and all the other laws of physics presuppose the existence of a concrete physical reality that behaves according to those laws. Therefore such laws cannot coherently be appealed to as an explanation of that reality.

So what’s the point of all this ado about nothing? It seems to me the author and those are involved are trying to show that physics alone can explain the existence of the universe. Hence the key line of the piece: “Perhaps the big bang was just nothingness doing what comes naturally.” But read in a straightforward way, this is just nonsense, for reasons of the sort already given. If this so-called “nothingness” has a “nature” and “does” things, then it isn’t really “nothingness” at all that we’re talking about. And of course, the article and the physicists it quotes don’t really mean “nothingness” in a straightforward way in the first place. They mean a “roiling broth” governed by the laws of quantum theory, entropy, etc. That not only isn’t nothing, but just is part of the universe and therefore just is part of the explanandum and therefore does nothing whatsoever to explain that explanandum.

You might as well say: “Let me explain how this whole house is held up by nothing. Consider the floor, which is what I really mean by ‘nothing.’ Now, the rest of the house is held up by the floor. Thus, I’ve explained how the whole house is held up by nothing!” Well, no you haven’t. You’ve “explained” at most how part of the house is held up by another part, but you’ve left unexplained how the floor itself is held up, and thus (since the floor is itself part of the house) you haven’t really explained at all how the house as a whole is held up, either by “nothing” or by anything else. Furthermore, you’ve made what is really just nonsense sound profound by using “nothing” in an eccentric way.

The scientific "explanations" of the origin of the universe from “nothing” one keeps hearing in recent years are really no less misguided than this “explanation” of the house. They aren’t serious physics, they aren’t serious philosophy, but they are textbook instances of the fallacy of equivocation.
 
 
Originally posted at Edward Feser's blog. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Catholic World Report)

Some critics claim that if God existed, then the universe would not be 13.7 billion years old or be 93 billion light years across as it is currently. Hasn’t science shown that this immense universe was not created for us but that we are an inconsequential part of an uncreated universe?

The problem with this argument is that science can show us only the universe’s dimensions; it cannot reveal any meaning or lack of meaning inherent in those dimensions. In response to this argument, the believer can simply ask, “Why can’t God choose to create a magnificent and grand universe like ours?” The critic might respond that God wouldn’t use such an inefficient process like cosmic and biological evolution and would instead create life instantaneously.

Is Efficiency the Best?

 
But the inefficiency of creating a grand universe would be a problem only for a being that is limited in time and resources. For example, after I completed my graduate studies I drove across the country without stopping, because I didn’t have a lot of time or money to spare (especially after draining my student loans). But if I wasn’t starting a job for six months and had just received a large inheritance, I might have gone on a long, scenic trip instead.

In the same way, because God has unlimited time and resources (due to his being eternal and omnipotent), there is no difficulty in him making a grand cosmos for human beings. It’s not as if God loses track of us in the expansive universe he created. Moreover, the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe, so why not think that God made a grand universe for such brains to explore?

Moreover, how does the critic know with confidence that God would not create a world like ours? Suppose God made a very tiny universe with just our solar system in it. Would the typical atheist think, in contrast, that such a world proves God exists? He might just as plausibly argue that if God existed, surely he would have created something grander. A small and simple universe, he might argue, is precisely what we would expect if it simply popped into existence from nothing, without a cause. As C. S. Lewis put it, “We treat God as the policeman in the story treated the suspect; whatever he does will be used in evidence against him.”¹

Finally, if God chose to create human life through the evolutionary process, then billions of years would be required for the process to culminate in the emergence of human beings. If the universe were static during that time, then it would collapse due to the strength of gravity. Only an expanding universe that eventually becomes billions of light-years in diameter would allow the universe to be life-permitting for the time that is required for intelligent life to evolve.

Is the Center the Best?

 
Other critics claim that Copernicus’s discovery that Earth revolves around the sun “de-throned” the special place human beings possessed at the center of a geocentric, God-created universe. However, the reason the earth resided at the center of the universe in the older geocentric model was not because it was special. It was because it was basically just heavy junk.

According to Aristotle’s view of the world, heavier materials such as Earth would fall closer to the center of the universe. Earth was considered the heaviest of the four elements followed by water, fire, and air. It would make sense that our planet would form in the basin of the universe where all the dirt collected, while the more glorified stars made of light and fire would exist higher up in the universe.

In his commentary on Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “[I]n the whole universe, just as the earth which is contained by all, being in the middle, is the most material and ignoble among bodies, so the outermost sphere is most formal and most noble.”² Far from making human beings insignificant, later astronomical advances have liberated human beings from residing in the most “ignoble” spot of the universe.

So, in conclusion, neither the location of human beings in the universe nor the size of the universe they inhabit constitutes proof that God did not create the universe.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Mysterious Universe)

Why is there something rather than nothing? This question, usually thought to fall strictly within the purview of philosophy and theology, has recently received attention in the world of popular science thanks to books by Stephen Hawking and Lawrence M. Krauss. Interestingly, these authors propose something similar to what Christians have always believed—that the universe came into existence out of nothing, or ex nihilo—but they think this could have happened spontaneously, or without God.

Both books, Hawking’s The Grand Design (2010) and Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (2012), have already been thoroughly reviewed—Hawking notably by physicist Steven M. Barr and philosopher John Haldane, and Krauss by philosophers David Albert and Edward Feser. The reviewers (not to mention Stephen Colbert) focus plenty of attention on the authors’ misuse of the term “nothing,” and I take them to have shown that neither book establishes its extraordinary thesis: that physics can explain why there is something rather than nothing. In the aftermath of this skirmish, I want simply to sketch an outline of the traditional theory.

The theory has at least three basic parts: (1) the universe is created ex nihilo; (2) the Creator possesses infinite power; (3) the existence of the universe is totally dependent on God. Saying that the universe is “from nothing” is meant to distinguish the act of creation from an act of art or craftsmanship. The carpenter and the sculptor make their products out of something—wood or metal, for example—but God’s creative act presupposes no preexisting material. “From nothing” also excludes the idea that creatures are made up of God, that he enters into their composition. Creation reflects the Creator, it does not change him into itself. Note, too, that the creation of a thing from nothing, strictly speaking, is not a change. A change is from something to something, while creation is from nothing to something.

The second proposition, that the Creator possesses infinite power, may seem intuitive. Still, St. Thomas’s explanation rewards reflection. A product, he says, depends on its producer and on the materials out of which it is produced. The more the material is not apt to be fashioned into a product, the greater the producer’s power must be. Now, the “material” of creation is nothing, which, more than anything else, is not apt to become anything. Since there is no proportion between nothing’s utter lack of potency and a finite power, the power that produces something out of nothing must be infinite.

The third proposition, that the universe is totally dependent on God, is probably best shown, again, by contrast with products of human making. A table depends on the property of stiffness in wood, in order to maintain the shape given to it by the carpenter. But the world, made out of nothing, has no such dependence; it is totally dependent on God. Even the actions and interrelations of creatures—the table’s support of the vase, the friendship of two colleagues—are underwritten and embraced by God’s creative action. Creatures, moreover, cannot take over their own creation from God, first, because creatures are not infinite in power and, second, because self-creation would entail the impossible, namely, pre-existing one’s own creation. Even God does not create himself.

The world requires, therefore, to be continuously created. Creation cannot be only a one-time event at the beginning of time. At this very moment, were God not causing the cosmos to exist, there would be nothing rather than something. Such continuous creation theologians call conservation. On this point, the traditional theory of creation is incompatible with Deism, according to which God is like a watchmaker who winds up the world and, for the most part, leaves it to tick on its own. Conservation is important also as a condition for the possibility of an eternal world. St. Thomas argued that, even if the universe had always existed, it would still need to be created at every moment of its existence.

If you’re going to ask, why is there is something rather than nothing? this is the kind of answer you need. The question is not about the character of the universe or the manner in which it exists. It is not a question of why there is movement in the world, or why there is time, or why the physical universe is governed by certain natural laws and not others. The question, why something? primarily concerns not how the universe exists but that it exists. It is precisely the existence of the cosmos—not the content of the cosmos—that needs explaining.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Alan Piper, a Dominican student brother of the Province of St. Joseph. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Vwamlausanne.com)