Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

[datc]

The only non-thing that can conceivably fit that description is "goodness."

Why? Why can't it be sadness, evilness, darkness, and lochness.

Why reserve the term "goodness" for self-diffusion of God and not call the other two modes of causation, physical and teleological, good? There are two reasons. First, nature and men do not have to do good. Their actions need not have good consequences and often, in fact, do not, whereas God's providence is presumably far superior in its ability to do good. Second, because physical causality and teleology, in making the world a better place, are motivated by the cause's own needs: to persevere in one's nature or to become happier. But God has no needs and acts solely so that good things may exist.

For example, suppose that God was not completely happy and created because, say, He wanted company. Then it would no longer be true that God "wills nothing except by reason of its goodness." He would have created because of the utility to Him of the creation which would be good as a means to the satisfaction of God’s "selfish" ends. In other words, there would be an evil in God which the creation would help remedy; and therefore, the creation would spring from something evil rather than from something good.

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Nothing is the absence of everything which is defined by a collection of something.

Yes, that is why our possible world Empty depends on the things you can think about that are absent in Empty. Possible worlds are ideal abstract (as opposed to real) objects and as such, they exist only in your mind. So do the ideas of things that we deny really exist in Empty.

Thus, you think of X = "a lion" or Y = "a unicorn" and say that neither X nor Y exists in Empty; and X does and Y does not exist in Earth.

In other words, X has both meaning and reference for Earth; Y has an ideal meaning ("a mythical animal generally depicted with the body and head of a horse, the hind legs of a stag, the tail of a lion, and a single horn in the middle of the forehead") but lacks a real reference; "Blarg" has neither meaning nor reference.

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What do you mean by imperishable exactly?

I mean that once Earth has been generated (come into existence), there is no possibility of its ever corrupting (going out of existence).

That there is matter is a contingent fact; there might never have been material objects in the universe. But once there are such objects, they cannot be destroyed as per the law of conservation of matter and energy.

Same with the universe as a whole: once it's here, it will exist forever.