(May 14, 2014 at 11:09 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote:(May 14, 2014 at 10:36 pm)Freedom of thought Wrote: You'll often hear apologists and religious people claim "that's not nothing", like it even matters. Most of the time atheists are not trying to show the universe came come from 'nothing', but that it can come into existence where a universe was not before. Does that mean there was nothing preceding it? No. I think they are just getting these ideas from their own religion (creation ex nihilo). But people like Hawking do claim the universe came from nothing, but I don't think he's talking about the same thing. Sure, if there is no space and no time the laws of physics can form universes easily. But then again, nothing can be redefined by physics, like various other things have been redefined by physics in the past, and 'metaphysics' literally means after physics. So its perfectly fine to say the universe can come from nothing if we have an updated definition.
I'm fairly certain I once heard William Lane Craig say "something cannot come from nothing, because nothing has no properties, its a logical contradiction". Wait, you're assuming nothing should obey those laws of logic? That's not nothing! Nothing has no laws of logic!
You're missing some crucial points. If physics is going to redefine nothing to actually be something, then it's an obvious equivocation fallacy to say that physics shows that the universe came from "nothing" when an apologist asks why anything exists. The apologist is obviously using "nothing" in a way the physicist isn't. This is why people like Krauss are totally full of shit on this topic.
You're misunderstanding Craig. He's saying it's a logical contradiction to say something can come from nothing (at least without a cause) because "nothing" has no properties, which means it has no potentiality for creation.
(May 14, 2014 at 10:54 pm)Marsellus Wallace Wrote: But in order for nothing to be something it has to obey the laws of logic, otherwise it wouldn't have made a universe where you exist in it.
Look at all the balanced things in the universe, think of the atom structure for example, it points to the nothing or balance.
The Atom: proton = +1 , electron = -1 , neutron = 0 . Add them all together you get 0 , which is the nothing in terms of logic..
So maybe the universe is just another value of zero(nothing) : (+1 -1 + 0) = 0
PS : I'm not sure of anything I just said, I just used logic to reach my own conclusions .
That we say things possess "positive" and "negative" properties is not a real thing, in the sense that we could just as easily say that protons possess a negative electrical charge, while electrons possess a positive charge.
And does that nothingness have that property of logic like non contradiction? Then its not nothing... And Krauss is pretty full of shit on this topic, because he's defining nothing as something, but in his defense he did go further to say that without a quantum vacuum (pretty much nothing) due to the effects of gravity a quantum vacuum can form, but this isn't nothing, because you still had the laws working there. Krauss went even further than that though, he said the laws themselves could be formed by random.
