Can something come from nothing

[robvalue]

I don't even understand what the problem is meant to be. Physical = material = literally existent (as opposed to existing as an abstract idea, etc). As far as I know, these are all pseudonyms. If any scientist can correct me on that if I'm wrong, please do.

What does it mean to say something exists but isn't physical/material? I mean, there are already other aspects to reality such as "time", and apparent underlying rules and such, which I presume we don't term as being material.

So what's going on? The objection, such as it is, seems to boil down to "You guys don't believe in magic". I really have no other idea what these people are driving at. There may be many material things that exist which we currently can't detect in any way at all. Material doesn't mean, "Currently detectable and understandable by science". It appears to be an equivocation fallacy, just hiding these magic things from science so the argument from ignorance can continue. "You can't prove there isn't magic stuff going on." I can't believe adults are really saying this. Of course, they're not saying it in so many words, but since they won't elaborate, it's all I can deduce. What does it mean to say somethings exists but isn't material? It's like material is a dirty word to them or something. Not all material has to behave in the same way. It doesn't all have to be visible, detectable, or be affected by gravity or whatever. It's just a word. I think people project onto it everything they hate about science.

Despite Neo's continual efforts to strawman me, I'm a methodological naturalist. Basically, you can have whatever magic "supernatural" made-up bullshit you want. You can have it all. I don't care. I am just ignoring it, for pragmatic reasons. I'm not claiming there isn't more going on than we can detect; in fact I believe there almost certainly is. All I care about is what we can test. What can we learn, through scientific methods? Can we learn anything about these amazing non-material existent things? If the answer is no, then I'll just ignore them until such time that we can. The problem is when people claim to know stuff about this untestable shit, but provide no evidence. Of course they have no evidence; if they did, it would be detectable and they wouldn't have to hide it from science. They claim to be detecting the undetectable, even by their own definition. Such people just don't seem to understand about the importance of evidence, and no matter how many times I go through it, we never make any progress. Arguments are not evidence.