Is absolute 'nothing' really possible and/or coherent?

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I was thinking about ex nihilo... Theist of course use this in cosmological arguments, and the more sophisticated arguments define "nothing" as having no mass, energy, or temporal qualities. They define it this way to get around the quantum mechanics examples where something comes from nothing. So "nothing" isn't just empty space. Space itself is something to theists. But is "nothing" when defined this way really possible and/or coherent? My impression of this sort of "nothing" seems impossible to imagine sort of like trying to imagine a square circle.

[Darwinian]

As soon as you start defining nothing as...(whatever) then it ceases to be nothing and become something that possesses qualities or the absence of qualities.

You can't imagine something which isn't because you will always be imagining the wrong thing.

'Nothing' in physics however is a very different beast.

[Nine]

[Faith No More]

Excellent reference, Insanity.

[Nine]

Excellent reference, Insanity.

* Nine rides off into the distance on Falcor

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[toro]

'Nothing' in physics however is a very different beast.

If we define nothing as external to spatio-temporal properties as well, it doesn't exist physically by any coherent theory and it has no effect on anything.

There are vacuum states, but those are measures of the energy of the background fields (of which space time is one).

If we define "nothing" as a space time field with no matter fields within it, nothing is just a simple Minkowski metric. There we have it: God is a linear matrix. Not really something to be devoting babies to and having prayer rallies for in my opinion...

[jackman]

conceptually, if "nothing" can be imagined or thought of, then it is something. not to be confused with emptiness, "absolute nothing" is a concept that requires something observable, measurable, inferable, etc...

[Mister Agenda]

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.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

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?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Not all theism claims that the world was created out of nothing. Both Pantheism and Panentheism take existence as a given, i.e. "out of nothing, nothing comes."