(August 15, 2010 at 6:46 am)The Omnissiunt One Wrote: I can't see how the universe equates to nothing overall. If it does, it's a special type of nothing. Nothing, as conceived by theists, and indeed most atheists, is a lawless absence of matter, time, space, energy, etc., all of which exist. That's not to say that the Cosmological argument succeeds, though. One interesting comment is that true nothing has no laws, and therefore something could arise from that nothing, because, if it couldn't, that would equate to a law. 'Something cannot come from nothing' is a law of the universe that wouldn't apply to lawless nothingness.It clearly depends on the definition of nothing you use. I get you're point. Obviously the cosmological argument is not framed as "why does something exist instead of nothing", but it is commonly restated in that form. But it misses the point. Only something can exist, nothing as you have defined it cannot exist, it is by definition non existence. So a working definition of nothing in the context of the something/nothing question probably amounts to whatever existed just before Planck time at the big bang. We may never know what that was, but it was the universe and if science demonstrates our universes positives and negatives match each other then it's as close as we are going to get to a "nothing".
A better question especially in the terms of your definition of nothing, which is a good one, is why is there everything rather than nothing. That of course is a leading question because straight away the supernatural realm is excluded because that question states that the universe is indeed everything and the whole of existence.
