From nothing, nothing comes…or does it?

This is mostly a bookmark for myself, but this article about scientists breaking into an old philosophical/theological question looks interesting, and mentions a lot of books that I’d love to read sometime soon.

It’s about the philosophical question of where existence comes from. Note, this is not the question of where the universe comes from, and “the big bang” is not a correct/incorrect answer so much as an inappropriate answer: an answer that misses the point. The big bang is the answer to, “Why does the universe exist as it does today?” But theorists of the big bang posit that there was something prior to the universe: the universe came from this something.

But why is there something? The classical theological/philosophical answer, of course, is that something outside the natural order of things must have brought this into existence. It’s impossible for it not to have been something outside the natural order, because the question is not (once again) why nature exists as it does, but why nature exists at all. Any answer that resorts to natural causes of course is already presuming the existence of nature; it still begs the question.

Given that all scientific explanation depends on natural causes and observation (which is necessarily of natural phenomenon) the question of “from where nature comes” has rightly been placed outside the realm of science, as I point out to my students from time to time.

But this article claims that scientists actually are using science, for the first time, to deal with this question legitimately. As a philosopher, I’m naturally skeptical: these sorts of claims are made from time to time, but once investigated we find that these scientists were misunderstanding, well, science. (Rarely  can you trust a scientist to understand the true nature of their own field! I recently met a biologist who claimed biology wasn’t a physical science, based on the fact that the college’s biology department is not in the physical science department! Nevermind the fact that biology deals strictly with molecules, cells, and processes that result from complicated formations of these things! As if cells, molecules, and resulting processes shouldn’t be considered physical. Sigh. I’m ranting. Sigh.)

Anyway, the notion that we can understand, scientifically, how something comes from nothing would be astonishing and revolutionary if true. So I’d like to see how these scientists give it a go.

In philosophy, one thing that is often noted is that if something comes from nothing, then that something, call it N, required no cause to come into existence: lacking cause is sufficient for N to exist. If something exists for no cause, then nothing, as a thing, is sufficient for it’s existence. Which means that thing necessarily exists. The self-existing thing is the basis for many conceptual descriptions of God, particularly in Spinoza.

For Spinoza, God is Nature, and lacks the moral, mental, and teleological (goal-oriented) qualities almost always ascribed to god. Spinoza was declared an atheist in his day, and a “god-obsessed philosopher” some 130 years later for this very reason. Perhaps all these new scientists are declaring is that Spinoza basically had it right all along…. perhaps. Though I’m sure there’s more to it than that.