Can something come from nothing

[emjay]

The philosophical question goes back a very long way, doesn't it? I'm not sure where the OP is going with this, but as one Christian apologist to a presumably other one, IF your intention is to justify a creator god based on the idea of a temporal beginning, ex nihilo, THEN your efforts are seriously misguided. The question at hand is not the initiation of the physical universe; but rather it's sustenance. The background premise is that within the physical universe things that now exist could possibly cease to exist. The traditional phrase summarizing the idea is "creation is a constant coming into being." Without a Necessary Being (one that could not possibly cease to be), the argument goes, all of being could collapse into nothing. The complete demonstration is more subtle than that and was fully developed by Aquinas in Question 2 of the Summa Theological. You might want to check it out. Also you will find that the most common objection to the argument relies on the notion of "brute facts" so you should prepare yourself with an understanding of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Hi Chad. I've just read the five ways for the first time now just to see what I've been missing out on. I won't get to them in my course proper for a long time to come though, or the intricacies of the logic that surrounds them and how they're usually argued, but no harm in giving my first impressions at this point. First thing's first though, do you find all five of them convincing? And just to be sure, I presume you're talking about the third way in the above post?

As for me, the first argument to go is number five... evolution and natural selection are a non-intelligent 'designer'. So that's the argument I'm most confident in rejecting.

The second most doubtful for me is number three; because at the atomic level of nature at least, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change its form. So I'd argue that at that level nothing ceases to exist, it only does in our perception... we perceive one configuration of atoms one way, another configuration another way, and a dispersal as ceasing to exist, but that doesn't mean the atoms are gone, it just means they are no longer in the arrangement/form to be perceived (and mentally classified) as they previously were by our minds. So that leads me to ask, if you had to choose one, are you a direct realist, an indirect realist, or an idealist? Going lower, quantum stuff... particles popping in and out of existence seemingly randomly, adds further doubt for me about number three.

Number four I can't really get my head around yet. It seems to me that all value judgements are relative, but not necessarily to a fixed standard. For instance it is in our nature as humans to be constantly/usually searching for something or working towards a goal, and when we find it/realise it we soon take it for granted and start searching for the next thing, seeing it as relatively better than our current state... the principle of 'the grass is always greener on the other side'. So the concept of a perfect being does not make sense to me; if it is perfect then it has everything and can be in no 'better' state... it should 'want for nothing' and as such would have no reason to do anything. Yet, Gods as described do do something that implies want (ie creation), and therefore incompleteness... not perfection. Granted I don't know exactly how perfection is defined in terms of God, and I will get to that later in my course, but as it stands, that is my objection. Furthermore, where the logic is along the lines of 'if it can be conceived it exists'... and again I don't know/understand the full ins and outs of the logic of that at this point but my objection here is irrespective of that... it is to the word 'conceives'. IMO to conceive of something means to create a logically coherent concept, not just name/label some random/arbitrary collection of properties... which is what seems to be happening when you define something as absolute truth, love, goodness etc and call it God. Putting that aside, as I said, I don't understand that argument at all yet so I won't take a position on it yet even if it can be logically conceived as a coherent concept.

Numbers one and two are subject to the same potential quantum doubt as before, but not being well versed in that subject I won't take that any further at this point. To me, they are the strongest of the five arguments, but nonetheless I personally still have doubts... though I doubt my particular doubts will be shared by many people. Mine come from the perspective that we are causality detectors by 'design'... that it is our nature to seek and find causality even when it is not there... we know nothing else other than to see the world in these terms. But, from the neural view, causality itself is never detected per se, only inferred by our brains. What we actually do is detect and associate coincidences, which our brain infers as causality. And reason is IMO just a more focused and coordinated (in terms of needs and plans of the system) form of this usually passive process. I'm not saying I don't believe in causality... we do indeed appear to exist in a stable environment of mind-independent stuff 'out there' that our minds model and perceive 'in here'... but what I am saying is if that environment is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, then our very design as causality inferrers precludes us from ever thinking outside that particular box... precludes us from ever truly comprehending the concept of infinity, if that applies, or the concept of something uncaused, again if that applies. So basically to the extent that our perception and its conceptual limits regarding causality is taken for granted, the arguments seem reasonable at first sight (though they don't imply a particular God, just a prime mover in general), but you should know me well enough by now to know that I never take perception for granted , hence doubt in this case.

So anyway, that's my take on it from first impressions. But I'll be going into it in much more depth later in my course, and not only that I'll also be developing proper skills in formal logic and argumentation as I go along... skills I know I lack at present, so I hope, in due course, to be able to address this more formally and with much better understanding of the terminology used