Creatio Ex Nihilo - Forming Something out of Nothing?

[Esquilax]

Fair enough. Do I strike you as a person who begins a rational discussion only to fall back on faith when my arguments are rationally critiqued?

I don't know: you do seem to be making a lot of references to "revealed faith," and like Robvalue, I'd like to know what that is too. I have suspicions, but I'd rather not put words in your mouth when you seem perfectly capable of expressing yourself eloquently. Whether it's relevant to the thread or not, it's a piece of terminology you've used repeatedly, I think asking what it is is a fair question.

Can you please help me see the contradiction which YOU see in the following two propositions?

1) If there ever was a moment in which no thing whatsoever existed, then no thing whatsoever will ever exist.

2) Some existing thing caused the existence of all other existing things.

Here's the thing: regarding premise one, at a certain point you're trying to apply our normal understanding of how reality works to something that... isn't that. The universe as we understand it came into being at the point of the big bang, the beginning of our current expansion models of reality. Before that, it's a rare physicist willing to make any kind of declarative statement about what came before, because beyond that point, we're talking about a form of reality, whatever it happens to be, that's completely unlike anything we've been able to measure before. It's a state of being that we can't even adequately discuss, because our language is a product of beings that exist in linear time, in a universe of cause and effect, etc. What we need is an entirely different vocabulary to deal with a pre-expansion universe, one we can't even begin to formulate without knowing more.

So when you say something can't come from nothing, as though that's a binding statement for the universe, I have to say no, that's not necessarily true. Linear time is a function of spacetime, which only came into existence in the big bang; before that, our understanding of cause and effect no longer really applies. "Things only come from things" is not a truism at that point, and hence constructing a syllogism around it isn't necessarily accurate. It's better just to say we don't know, which is a true thing.