(April 18, 2012 at 3:13 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: It runs into problems as soon as you try to say 'if nothing existed'. Does nothing have no properties? Isn't 'having no properties' a property?
I suspect the idea of 'true nothingness' of the sort things need to be created 'ex nihilo' from is indeed incoherent. And God makes it worse: how can you have 'true nothingess' if God is around? Especially if it is omnipresent and eternal. If God is everywhere and eternal, 'true nothingness' is completely precluded.
Theists think creation out of nothing is only a problem for naturalistic explanations of the universe. They think that if God doesn't exist then either the reality is eternal, or it came from "nothing" (as they define "nothing"). They think reality can't be eternal for reasons I can't remember at the moment, and they think something coming out of "nothing" on its own is impossible, so they think God is the only thing that could create something from nothing, or at least create something from himself. To me, this all assumes that such a "nothing" is something that is possible which hasn't been shown as far as I know. In the Kalam cosmological argument, it is said that an actual infinite number of things is an absurdity. Have they also determined whether or not true nothingness is an absurdity too?
My ignore list
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
