Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[Angrboda]

A universe requires a cause, it can't just pop out of nothing.

Even you don't believe there was ever actual nothingness: no matter, no energy, no space, no time, no God. Even Stenger's 'Universe from Nothing' isn't talking about that kind of absolute nothingness. No scientific hypothesis for the origin of the universe starts with 'first, there was absolute nothingness and then there wasn't'.

'Why is there something instead of nothing?' is a philosophical question that can't be answered definitively, but I am satisfied with the answer that absolute nothingness is impossible. Where would it have been with no space? When would it have been with no time? It's one of those questions like 'What's north of the north pole?'.

At any rate, and you've been told this before, no one is claiming the universe just popped out of nothing.

The question of what came before the universe is a lot like the question about what lies beyond the edge of the universe. If the universe is finite, then surely there must be an edge to the universe, a place where all this stuff ends. But if so, what lies beyond it? The answer seems to be that there is something wrong with the way that we conceive of the question, that there is a conceptual problem in how we think about it. In Kantian terms, space and time are built into our thinking. We perceive things as things in space. We perceive things as existing in time. When we perceive things, space and time structure our perception, rather than being another thing that is perceived. Like a priori truths, the existence of space and time precedes our thinking about any object or thing. We are simply incapable of imagining a lack of space or time as every percept and conception necessarily includes both. So imagining that there must be a something beyond the edge of the universe, or some when that is before the universe, both may simply be invalid artifacts of the limits of our thinking.