"Everything has a cause and an explanation" discussion.

[The Reality Salesman01]

[edit: Crap, I think I'm targeting the wrong person, who's arguing creation ex-nihilo here?]

Not me. Creation ex-nihilo actually assumes there was this "nothingness" and yet somehow, magically, God has always been in a "parallel" sense. So the theist position has a logical problem in that sense.

I agree. Nevermind!

[Alex K]

May I stop you here - when you say arise, do you mean that in a temporal sense? And if so, what precisely counts as something arising?

Could be temporal, could be some other sort of sense (atemporal or whatever), whatever it may be. There is no specific sense attached to the term. If you want a better term than "arise", I can't think of one atm.

Could you explain why this is something I need to specify? What logical problems would arise from me not specifying?

Because you can't claim some premise to hold if you haven't even proper clarity what the words mean.

[GrandizerII]

Even setting that aside, and imagining that normal things cause other things, that does nothing to prove that nothing cannot cause something, or, what would appear to be the same thing, something spontaneously coming to be without some external cause.

Nothingness has no capacity to allow anything to arise from it. If it did, it would not be nothingness. It would be a "something".

From what I've read in science (no science expert here), spontaneous occurrences seem to be occurring from a "something" (unstable quantum field with some capacity to trigger stuff to exist or occur). I don't see how this is the same as arising from "nothingness".

The "out of nothing, nothing arises" is an assumption people make, not something that they prove. I am not presently willing to grant you such an assumption.

I think it's a self-evident truth. Unless you redefine "nothing" to mean "something".

If I understand your meaning, you seem to reject the possibility of an infinite regress, that everything cannot have a prior cause, that the universe cannot simply have always existed (where "the universe" is understood to be the collection of all that is; a collection of things, not a separate thing). I see no reason to accept that claim.

Actually, I'm saying that the universe/reality in the sense you speak of should always have existed.

---

Could be temporal, could be some other sort of sense (atemporal or whatever), whatever it may be. There is no specific sense attached to the term. If you want a better term than "arise", I can't think of one atm.

Could you explain why this is something I need to specify? What logical problems would arise from me not specifying?

Because you can't claim some premise to hold if you haven't even proper clarity what the words mean.

Ok, but it does not matter what kind of "arise" it could be in my argument so long as you understand that "arise" implies some cause (prior, simultaneous, whatever). It's just the English language has its limits and will not have a word for every concept there may be in one's mind.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Anything that "arises" does so because the potential for it to arrise exists. Without a field of potentials, there can be no first "it". Nothingness in an absolute sense isn't much different than infinity. But, something that is finite can exist within an infinity. Our universe may be finite but that doesn't exclude the possibility of it arising within an infinite system. Zero, has no properties or potentials and doesn't give rise to observable anythings. It's not plausible that the universe came from zero, the existence of our universe is proof of that. Absolute Zero is incoherent of any value beyond its descriptive and conceptual application to the abstract.

[Pizza]

I think earlier I was confusing the idea of an empty set existing with "nothing" existing.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Countable sets/actual infinities; 0s/Absolute Nothings...

They're all head-pretzels when you try to quantify them in terms of universal origins!

[The Reality Salesman01]