Atheists Can’t Answer This Question

You’re listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today, I want to explore a really simple, straightforward, and I think powerful argument against atheism, and the argument is simply to ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Now, if you’ve been following the last couple of weeks, it’s okay if you haven’t, this is the third of a five-part series, Exploring Arguments Against Atheism, inspired by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. In each of his five ways, so to speak, we’re interacting with some other great thinker, in this case, partly the 20th century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, but as we’ll see, there have been variations of this, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” question that had been asked for centuries by a number of different brilliant minds, so Leibniz will be another person we look at, and we’ll get there. But first, I want to set the stage a little bit in how Pope Benedict XVI kind of frames the question, and he does so in a memorable Q&A.

So he’s asked in 2007 a question that gets him into a conversation about evolution, and this was kind of the headline statement. He says that, “The antithesis between Christianity, on the one hand, and evolution on the other, is absurd, because on the one hand, there’s so many scientific proofs in favor of evolution, which appear to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such.” Now, that, as you might imagine, garnered headlines around the world, because he called this fight between Christianity and evolution absurd, and a lot of people on both sides of that fight don’t find it absurd, and so to hear … Here’s the Pope saying, “Why are we fighting about evolution?,” understandably, headline news. I’m not going to touch any of that, rather, it’s the second half of what he says that went a little underexamined, underreported, but is, in my view, the more important half, he says on the other hand. The doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question.

Now, what’s the great philosophical question? Where does everything come from, and how did everything start, which ultimately led to man? In other words, if you want to believe in evolution, fine, go nuts, but it doesn’t answer the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Saying human life exists because it evolved, okay, but why was there anything for it to evolve from? Hopefully, that’s clear, that you haven’t actually answered the, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” question at all by positing evolution, or having this fight about evolution.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think people who are positing evolution usually think that answers the, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” question. The Pope’s point is just the bigger question is, “Why does anything at all exist?” So why does anything exist? As I kind of alluded to, there have been variations of this question asked, and I want to give a few different variations, and you’ll see why I think in the course of this video, that a lot of times, when atheists try to answer this question, they just redefine nothing to mean like very little, which is just not what nothing means, and they can say, “Well, if we have a little bit, if we’ve got atoms, if we have molecules, if we have quantum states, if we have fill in the blank, then we can get the rest of the stuff,” but it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, but you can’t do that. You can’t redefine nothing to mean like some thing,” and so here are different ways of presenting the question, which I offer for your own edification.

You can choose the form of this question you find the most coherent, convincing, compelling. And so I already mentioned Martin Heidegger. He argues that the first rank kind of question, the fundamental question of metaphysics is the question, “Why are there beings at all, instead of nothing?” So that’s one way of putting it. Another, if you go back several century to Leibniz, the co-founder of calculus, so to speak, he argues for what’s called the principle of sufficient reason. He says this is a great principle that says that nothing happens without it being possible for someone who knows enough to give a reason sufficient to determine why it is so and not otherwise.

In other words, if X phenomenon exists in science and human behavior, and fill in the blank, the principle of sufficient reason says there’s some reason that thing happened. We may not have all the information to explain why, but things happen for a reason. Leibniz is not here arguing things happen for like a higher purpose, because God wills it so. It could just be the vase broke because it fell on the ground because of gravity. That’s a reason, right?

That’s what he’s arguing for. The principle of sufficient reason, almost everybody agrees with this, because if you don’t, then you just kind of can’t have an intellectual inquiry, if you just say vases just fall on floors. Okay, you’re no longer even trying to give an adequate explanation for reality. So the principle of sufficient reason says if something happens, there’s a reason why, and so he says, “Okay, if you assume that, the first question to ask is then, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Right?

You cannot just say, “It’s a brute fact, just is.” It’s just so because then, you’re denying the principle of sufficient reason. You have to give some explanation, “Okay, all this stuff doesn’t have to be here, and yet, it is. Why?” So I like Leibniz’s version of it, but I’m just offering you different versions.

Father John F. Whipple, he describes the ultimate why question, in his words, “Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?” What I like about Father Whipple’s version is the anything at all and the nothing whatsoever are obviously stressed. Not just, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” but, “Why is there anything at all of any kind rather than nothing whatsoever?,” because as I already alluded to, the atheists who try to answer this question almost invariably redefine nothing whatsoever to mean like a little bit. So here’s the existence argument in a nutshell. The first premise, if God did not exist, no things would exist, there’d be nothing whatsoever.

Second premise, things do, in fact, exist. I think that should be self-explanatory, self-evident. The conclusion then is that, “Therefore, God exists.” And so the test I would offer is Carl Sagan’s apple pie, which is to say if you want to build … “Well, I’ll let Carl Sagan do it. He does it so well. This is from his series, Cosmos.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Thank you very much.

So that’s what I mean by Carl Sagan’s apple pie. If you are starting from an ingredient or a recipe, you are not starting from scratch, and so if you want to build an apple pie from scratch, you got to create your own universe. Well, likewise, if you want to explain why the universe is there, you can’t start with a recipe, ingredients, or any of the rest. Now, the argument, as I put it, I think is pretty simple, pretty straightforward, and so I want to explore the responses that many prominent atheists have kind of come back with, and I’m going to look briefly at the arguments that have been found persuasive by or have been made by Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow. I mean, these are people who are brilliant scientists, and popular or were popular atheists, and I want to look at two books, in particular, that are dedicated to trying to answer this very simple question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

The first of those is Lawrence Krauss’ book, and it’s called A Universe from Nothing, and then the subtitle is Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, and so you think, “Oh, wonderful, someone’s actually answering the question.” And that is certainly how everyone involved in the book talks about it like, “Well, thank God, someone’s finally answered the question to explain why we don’t need God.” No. Obviously, they wouldn’t really say, “Thank God,” but Richard Dawkins, at the very end of the book, gives the afterward, and he just mocks religion, and he says, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.” Then, he ends …

This is the very last line of the book. He says, “The title,” remember, “A Universe From Nothing, means exactly what it says, and what it says is devastating.” Now, he means it’s devastating towards the religious case because Lawrence Krauss claims to have been able to prove that you can get an entire universe from nothing, and that’s not just how Dawkins presents Krauss’ argument. This is also how Krauss presents his own argument. He says, “For more than 2,000 years, we’ve been asking, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?'”

He argues that this is an argument for, that the universe couldn’t have arisen with that design intent or purpose. It’s even, in some ways, more fundamental than that, because even if you say God just did it kind of haphazardly, you would still have to have there be a God. So even if it wasn’t particularly well-designed or thought through, if you spill paint, there’s still some action on your part. Even if it wasn’t intentional, even if it wasn’t designed, the paint doesn’t spill itself, right? So that’s kind of the explanation.

It’s actually even more fundamental than design intent or purpose, neither here nor there. It’s certainly related to those things, so we can maybe grant him that. So yeah, for 2,000 years, people have been asking that question, and Krauss acknowledges this is usually framed as a philosophical or religious question. Now, that should just give a little bit of pause that Krauss is writing a book about philosophy and theology, even though he’s not trained in those areas, but he thinks that’s okay because the, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” to his view, is first and foremost, a question about the natural world, and so the appropriate place to try and resolve it, first and foremost, he says that twice, is with science. All these religious people, all these philosophers, all these people who are not scientists are asking this question that Krauss says, “Well, isn’t this just a scientific question?”

Now, I think we’re going to see, “No, it’s not,” and that by not understanding terms like nothing, which doesn’t seem like a hard term to understand, but Krauss claims not to understand it, he’s just completely unqualified to kind of answer this, but I’m giving away the game a little bit. In his words, “The purpose of this book is simple. I want to show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of, ‘Why there is something rather than nothing?'” He even goes on to say that, “The various scientific answers and the theories that underlie much of modern physics all come together to suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem.” That’s a bold claim, right? You’ve got nothing, and now, you suddenly have something, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, that happens. That’s not a problem.”

Indeed, he says, “Something from nothing may have been required for the universe to come into be. Moreover, all signs suggest this is how our universe could have arisen.” Now, whenever you hear someone talking like this, in response to this question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” or, “How do you get from an atheistic nothing to something?,” the question you should always be asking is, “He’s not just going to redefine nothing, is he?” And sure enough, in Krauss’ book, which again, he gives an entire book on, he just redefines nothing. He says, “By nothing, I do not mean nothing, but rather,” italicized, “nothing.”

In this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space. So he’s just said, “By nothing, I don’t mean nothing. I’m not actually going to do the thing I said I was going to do. I’m going to tell you instead how you can get a universe from empty space.” Now, if he titled his book A Universe From Empty Space, people would probably not be interested in buying it, because the question is, “How did the empty space get there?”

If you already have what we normally call outer space, where is that coming from? But no, he’s just redefined it. So by nothing, he means empty space, and he says, “Okay, take everything. Take a region of space, take everything, and it dust, gas, people, even the radiation passing through, namely absolutely everything within that region.” He says, “If the remaining empty space weighs something, that would correspond …” There’s a whole question here about Einsteinian physics, so we’re not going to get into that, but his idea of empty space is just you take some area of space, and you take everything out of it, and that, he defines as nothing.

Then, later on, he explains that, “The observation, the universe is flat, local Newtonian gravitational energy is essentially zero today, strongly suggests that our universe arose through a process like that of inflation, a process whereby the energy of empty space,” which again, he puts in parentheses, nothing, even though it’s not nothing, gets converted. Now, well, hang on there. There’s energy here, and it’s empty space that isn’t actually at zero. “There’s some level of energy that then gets converted into the energy of something,” he says. So what you have here is not nothing becoming something.

What you have here that he’s describing is actually just energy converting from one form to another, which everyone who knows anything about science already acknowledges can happen. So now, you don’t even have a universe from empty space, you just have energy in the universe went from one phase to another, which is a remarkably less interesting claim, is entirely unobjectionable from a Christian perspective. The idea that you can have phase states that change is no more exciting than to say, “I can get ice from nothing, and by nothing, I mean water when it freezes.” So okay, you’ve completely given away the whole game. This isn’t something from nothing at all.

Krauss goes on to say, “It would be disingenuous to suggest that empty space endowed with energy, which drives inflation is really nothing.” Well, thank you. You’re right. It’d be disingenuous to have a book called A Universe From Nothing when you really mean what you acknowledge isn’t nothing. Now, I’m going to jump back to earlier in the book, because he defends this choice.

He knows that he’s playing a game here. He knows he’s redefining the word, nothing. He says, “I want to be clear about what kind of nothing I’m discussing at the moment.” He says, “The simplest version of nothing is this, namely empty space.” Well, that’s not the simplest version of nothing. The simplest version of nothing is non-being.

It just is, it’s remarkable. I’ll say that, it’s remarkable, that he’s arguing that empty space is even a defendable version of nothing to use in a book like this. He says, “For the moment, I will assume space exists.” Well, okay, if it exists, it’s not nothing, right? Like it could exist or not exist, and so the question ought to be, “Why does space exist?,” and he’s like, “Ah.”

So if you’re saying this thing exists, it has being, that doesn’t count as non-being, it doesn’t count as nothing. It is something. It is empty space. We can talk about it existing or non-existing. He’s literally is talking about existing or non-existing. He says, “I’ll assume space exists with nothing at all in it.”

It doesn’t matter if anything’s in it. You could say, “Well, vanilla ice cream is nothing because I didn’t put toppings on it.” No. It’s not how that works. It’s still something. So empty space exists with nothing at all in it, and that the laws of physics also exist.

So this list of stuff, in the nothing, is getting longer and longer by the second, because now, you have these universal laws of physics, “Why do those exist?,” and you have empty space, “Why does that exist?,” and he doesn’t talk about it here, you’ve got some amount of energy in that empty space, and, “Why does any of that exist?” So what you see he’s done here is just redefine nothing, and it’s funny because Neil deGrasse Tyson, who thinks this is a good argument, has a blurb for it, where he says, “Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something.” Hold on a second. If the whole point of the book is, “I can get a universe from nothing if I redefine nothing,” no one cares about that argument because it’s a terrible argument.

It’s like saying two plus two is six, as long as my six, I actually mean four. That kind of reasoning is ridiculous, or saying, “Look, I’m going to write an entire book about how I found unicorns, and by unicorns, I mean horses.” That is an absurd kind of bait-and-switch. You just switch the definition such to make it sound like you’re saying something interesting when you’re not. David Albert, back when this book came out in 2012, had a scathing review for it in The New York Times, and Albert is himself a physicist, and he says, “Look, Lawrence Krauss apparently means to announce to the world that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing.”

But then, Albert asks the obvious question, “Well, for starters, where are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?” He says, “Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue. He acknowledges, albeit, in a parenthesis, in just a few pages before the end of the book, that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted, and then he quotes Krauss is saying, “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with, or at least, I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” But then Albert says, “What if he did? What if he did know some productive work?”

“He could explain where quantum mechanics came from. He could announce that quantum mechanics, the laws of it, can be traced to some deeper property X in the universe, that because of X, therefore, the laws of quantum mechanics had to arise.” Even if that existed, even if Krauss wasn’t just shrugging his shoulders and actually had an explanation, we would still have to explain why that property X of the universe existed. This is the whole point. When you say something from nothing, you can’t just say, “This one thing gave us this other thing.”

You have to say, “Well, why did that one thing exist?,” and if you’re saying, “Well, another thing,” well then, you haven’t gotten to nothing yet. As long as we can ask, “Why does this property of the universe exist?,” we’re not at the state of having nothing. Albert explained, “This is kind of just the whole way this thing has gone on scientifically for half a millennium, roughly.” He points to the scientific revolution of the 17th century. So, I mean, not quite half a millenium, but you get the idea, that physics has given us, by the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature, some at the bottom of everything, some basic elementary, eternally persisting concrete physical stuff.

Now, Albert is purposely using non-technical kind of language, but this is actually really helpful to think about it in these terms, that you’ve got stuff, and then you’ll have the laws that regulate stuff. So if you’re Isaac Newton, for instance, the elementary stuff is material particles. If you’re a scientist at the end of the 19th century, the elementary stuff is particles, but also electromagnetic fields. So that’s your stuff. That’s just the matter, the pieces of the universe.

Then, you have the laws of nature, and what the laws of nature are all about, and all they’re about, and all there is for them to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how the elementary stuff is arranged, so it’s the organization or arrangement of the stuff. Hopefully, that makes some sense that this is just saying, “Okay, gravity. Gravity is not something that exists out there apart from the material world. Gravity is a set of laws describing the regular interaction between different parts of this stuff that’s out there.” I hope that’s clear.

I hope that’s self-explanatory, because Albert is making the point that these two things are the two categories. When someone is talking about things in the universe, they either mean some physically existing thing, the stuff, or a law about how physically existing things interact with other physically existing things. Those are the laws, and that’s what physics deals with. And so Albert says, “The laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from.” Right?

Gravity doesn’t give rise to physical objects, it explains the physical objects interact with each other. To say that gravity gave rise to it would be like saying, “Oh, this car’s on the road because the speed limit sign caused it to be there.” Like, oh, no, no, no.” The speed limit sign is regulating how it behaves in space. In this case, someone artificially, but you get the idea.

The law regulates the behavior of the thing. It doesn’t actually give rise to it. That’s not what a law does. So hopefully that’s clear, that you can’t point to the laws, the arrangements and say, “Well, the shape or the interaction or the pattern is what gives rise to the stuff, because now, you’ve just turned the law into a physical thing, like imagining electromagnetism as a thing floating in space. Okay.

So that’s the basic argument Albert’s making there, and he’s saying the laws don’t explain why there is something rather than nothing at all. Now, in the case of Krauss’ version of this argument, the fundamental physical laws that he’s talking about, the laws of relativistic quantum field theories are no exception. In his case, the particular eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world, it’s obviously relativistic quantum fields. That’s why it’s right there in the name, and so quantum fields is the stuff. But then, you have the rules, the laws that regulate the possible arrangements those fields can make, which ones are physically possible and which ones can’t, and then there are these rules connecting the arrangements in those fields at later times, the arrangements at earlier times and so on.

Now, we don’t have to get into whether quantum field theory is right. The question is whether even if it is right, it provides an explanation for the universe, and Albert’s saying no, because you’ve got two things. You’ve got the quantum fields, then you’ve got the rules governing the quantum fields, and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does or why it should have consisted of fields at all, or why there should have been a world in the first place, period, case closed, end of story. That’s his argument. You can have quantum states, and you can have vacuums, and those are just arrangements.

So Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing is really quantum fields can give rise to a universe. Whether that’s right or wrong, that is not a universe from nothing, and that’s not an answer to the question of something from nothing. And so Albert says, “Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states, no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff.” Right? It’s just the pieces put together in a certain pattern or shape.

The true equivalent to there not being any physical stuff isn’t this or that particular arrangement of fields, it’s the absence of fields, right? If you’re saying, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” the two categories, something, nothing. Now, that’s very obvious when you’re dealing with a physical thing, if you’ve got a balloon and say, “Why is there a balloon?,” and the negation is not a balloon. Well, if it’s quantum fields that you’re concerned about, and you’re saying, “Why do these quantum fields exist?,” the negation isn’t why the quantum field’s in a slightly different form or order. No.

The negation is no quantum fields. That doesn’t seem like it’s hard to grasp, especially if one’s a scientist, that nothing just means nothing, but grasping the entire book, imagining nothing means something. And so Albert says, “The fact that some arrangements of quantum fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist, and some don’t. The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles, and some don’t, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist, and some don’t.” The fact that particles can pop in and out of existence over time, as those fields rearrange, themselves is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence over time as my fingers rearrange themselves.

Now, that is actually really helpful as someone who doesn’t understand quantum physics very well, because it sounds like just mysterious like stuff popping in and out of existence, and Albert’s point is it’s not. It’s fields arranging themselves as particles, or not, or particles arising, given certain fields or not, which is like saying fist versus fingers. It’s an arrangement question. It’s not a question of something existing where there had been nothing before. It’s something existing where it existed in a different form before, which is a lot less mysterious, but is more accurate to the actual physics.

Albert says, “None of these poppings, if you look at them right, amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of creation from nothing.” Right? If you read about someone making a fist, and you didn’t know anything about the human body, you might imagine there had been nothing in a person just created a fist ex nihilo, from nothing. It’s like, “No, no.” If you understand human anatomy, you realize what they mean is that these fingers formed into a fist because, you know, human action.

Well, likewise, on the quantum level, we talk about these things popping into existence. We don’t mean from literally nothing. We mean from these prior states, that there’s just a change in state. Now, Krauss realizes this is a weakness of his arguments, but thinks he can kind of get away with it, for lack of a better term. And so towards the beginning of the book, he says, “Before going further, I want to devote a few words to the notion of nothing, a topic that I will return to at some length later.”

Says, “For I’ve learned that, when discussing the question in public forums, nothing upsets the philosophers and theologians who disagree with me more than the notion that I, as a scientist, do not truly understand nothing.” I love watching the man’s hubris get the better of him, because he’s like, “Huh, as a scientist, why wouldn’t I understand nothing?” Well, because this is a philosophical question of why being or non-being exists, like, “Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?,” is a question of ontology. You’re not an ontologist. You’re not a metaphysician, you’re a physicist, and so what you think people mean by nothing is empty space, which is not what any philosopher means by nothing, not what any theologian means.

It’d be like me walking into a conversation about quantum physics, hearing the use of terms like strange and taste, and be like, “Oh, I understand what this means,” and then writing an entire book completely not understanding what those terms mean in a scientific context. That’s what Krauss has done here, and so he’s just mocking this idea that he is a scientist, wouldn’t get the idea of nothing, and he says, “I am tempted to retort here that theologians are experts at nothing.” Look, what I find really funny about this is he goes on to make fun of this idea that nothing is non-being, which he says, is like some vague and ill-defined sense. It’s like it’s not vague or ill-defined at all. If you understand anything but what we mean by being, non-being is just not existing.

When he says theologians are experts at nothing, he doesn’t mean they’re experts at empty space and the energy levels at it. It’s not what he means by nothing at all. He means that they’re experts at nothing, that there’s no being, there’s nothing at all in the category of what theologians are experts at, in Krauss’ condescending and dismissive view. Likewise, when he says, “Nothing upsets the philosophers and theologians more than his total arrogant, lack of understanding of the word nothing,” he doesn’t mean empty space upsets them more. He’s saying there is not a thing that upsets him more. So he, twice in a paragraph, or in the couple paragraphs proceeding when he claims not to understand this use of the word nothing, uses it correctly in the way that he claims as ill-defined and vague.

Like no, that’s perfectly clear. That’s what people ordinarily mean by the word nothing, that if there’s something in the category, then it’s not nothing, right? That’s one way to think about it. If you have a category, what are theologians experts at, or if you have a category, what bothers them more than you not understanding the word nothing, then you say there’s zero things in that category. Okay.

Now, you’ve met the criteria for nothing. If you say empty space or the universe, or something else is in that category, well, you’ve got things, you’ve got beings. You don’t have non-being, or nothing. So I’m spending a lot of time on this because it’s apparently confusing to a physicist, but I don’t think it should be confusing at all. And so Krauss claims that we are the ones redefining nothing.

We’re not. He says, “Some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine nothing as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe.” Well, first of all, no. We’re not the ones redefining nothing. Nothing has always been non-being.

That’s it. We’re not the ones doing the redefinition. Krauss is the one redefining it to mean empty space with low levels of energy in it. He says, “But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely …”

And this is a brilliant line, “For surely, nothing is every bit as physical as something, especially if it is to be defined as the absence of something.” He’s just a thoroughly confused scientist here. He can’t imagine nothing except by imagining a visual, like physical something, which means that he just doesn’t even understand what the debate about nothing is about. Now, he goes on to defend this and says, “I realize that in the revised versions …” Again, we’re not the ones revising, but nevertheless.

“I realize that in the revised versions of nothingness, those who wish to continually redefine the word …” We’re not the one’s redefining, “So that no scientific definition is practical, this version of nothing doesn’t cut the mustard.” Now, when you say that, you should just put the pin down and say, “I guess I’m wasting my time writing a book.” Like I’ve waded into a conversation I realize is done by philosophers and theologians, in that what I think of as nothing doesn’t cut the mustard. Okay.

Maybe I should learn what they mean by nothing, or maybe I should understand where the actual argument is on their perspective. But no, he doesn’t do any of that. He just says, “Ah, I bet.” He says, “I suspect that at the times of Plato and Aquinas, when they pondered why there is something rather than nothing, empty space with nothing in it was probably a good approximation of what they were thinking about.” What’s hilarious about this is in his hubris, he has no idea what he’s talking about.

How do we know that? Because that’s not at all what they meant by nothing, and we know this because going back to Aristotle in De Caelo, he talks about the existence of void, that he says, “In rejecting the existence of plurality of worlds, there can be neither place nor void nor time outside the heaven.” So notice that void. He’s distinguishing non-being from void, and void is said to be that in which the presence of body, though not actual, is possible. In other words, empty space, that there was a category for empty space with nothing in it, going back to prior to the time of Christ to Greek philosophers like Aristotle, and that was void.

So if they were to read this book, they would say, “Okay, look, you say you’re getting a universe from nothing, but instead, you’re getting a universe from void,” but to have void requires you answer the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” So they were actually making this really clear distinction between a void and literal nothingness, and Krauss isn’t making this, and he’s claiming we’re just redefining these terms. Like, no, no, no. If you actually read any of the stuff you’re critiquing, rather than just assuming you knew better, you’d realize that the distinction you’ve muddled here has been made for literally millennia, a void in which a physical object could be but isn’t, isn’t non-being, because a void still has metaphysical properties, for instance, permeability. Aquinas, meanwhile, since he mentioned him, is very clear in the Summa, that nothing is the same as no being, and so this is not some redefinition because scientists were so smart, we had to figure out a new definition of nothing.

No. That’s what the word literally means and always has meant. Aquinas describes the not being, which is nothing. So nothing is negation of being, always has been, always will be. It’s not a void. And so his just assumption, that when he says empty space with nothing in it, that means the same thing, is just an extremely elementary mistake that he makes by assuming he knows what the ancient Greeks and Aquinas would say without bothering to read the ancient Greeks or Aquinas on the subject as they make those very careful, very clear distinctions, but let’s leave that aside.

David Albert’s going to say, “Even if that’s right, this is a ridiculous argument,” that as far as he can see, Krauss is dead wrong, his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about 100 years ago, right? Let’s imagine for a second that Aquinas and Aristotle wouldn’t have realized there was a difference between a void and non-being. That would just mean they were wrong, right? If what we formerly took to be nothing turned out on closer examination to have the makings of protons and neutrons, and tables and chairs, and planets, and solar systems, and galaxies, and universes in it, that it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing in the first place, and the history of science, if we understand it correctly, gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.

In other words, the best case version you could make about Krauss’ argument is if someone was reading this 100 years ago and thought that there was no difference between a void and non-being, which they actually did understand that distinction, but imagine they didn’t, then they could read this book and realize, “Oh, okay, I thought that was completely empty space, and it turns out it’s not. Cool.” It doesn’t answer the question why there’s something rather than nothing, right? He hasn’t moved any conversation forward in any measurable degree, but least of all, as he moved forward the conversation, he claims to be moving forward. He claims to have this universe from nothing, and as I say, he just has quantum fields under the right conditions, giving rise to the universe.

So that’s Krauss’ book, and for all its praise from people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, it is a remarkably intellectually shoddy work, in that it’s trying to solve a problem that it just doesn’t understand and doesn’t offer any coherent answer to. Around same time, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow released the book, The Grand Design, in which they were trying to do the exact same thing. So let’s see how they do. They’re well-respected, and they say, “To understand the universe at the deepest level, we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why.” Now, I like this, because Lawrence Krauss had said, “We don’t need to ask these why questions, we can just ask how questions.”

So the question, “Why are there eight or nine planets in the universe?,” is really a question of, “How?” Now, that’s, I think, remarkably incurious because you’re stifling a whole realm of human creativity. Why questions are a really major part of our understanding of the world, and thankfully, Hawking and Mlodinow understand that, that we don’t just want to know how, but why. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist?

Why this particular set of laws, not some other, and they say this is the ultimate question of life, the universe in everything. We shall attempt to answer it in this book, and you say, “Hey, wonderful, thankfully.” I just got done looking at this book, where this guy, Krauss, claimed to do that, and then he didn’t at all, but you’ve identified this as the ultimate question of life and said you’re going to answer it, so I’m looking forward to that, right? They say at the end of their book, in their Thanks section, “The universe has a design, and so does a book, but unlike the universe, a book does not appear spontaneously from nothing.” So that’s a really remarkable set of claims.

Now, they’re being a little bit tongue in cheek there, but they’re saying, “The universe is designed but doesn’t have a designer, it has no author, and instead, just arose spontaneously from nothing.” That’s a weird set of things to believe. It’s weird to believe you got something from nothing. It’s also strange to believe the universe is designed but wasn’t designed. Those are hard things to square.

Well, how do they plan to square them? Well, they say, “We will describe how M-theory,” that’s multiverse theory, “May offer answers to the question of creation. According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe, instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.” And so you remember what question you should be asking here, right? They’re not just going to redefine nothing, are they?

And it turns out, they are. Instead, they say, “The creation of these many universes does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or God, rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.” So what do you have here? Well, first, you have law.

Remember the relationship of stuff, being treated as a possible cause of stuff, that you’ve made law into something that a law isn’t definitionally. This is like saying cars exist because speed limit laws create them, just misunderstands what a law even is. But, nevertheless, you’ve got in this schema, a multiverse, and you have physical law. So I want to kind of square that because this is, in some ways, the funniest one, because when we talk about a universe from nothing, Krauss is like, “Well, why nothing? I’m going to fudge it a little bit and say, you’ve got space and you’ve got physical laws, and you’ve got some energy passing through that space,” but Hawking and Mlodinow go to the other extreme and just say, “By nothing, we mean you have a multiverse. You have a ton of different universes,” and I’m reminded here of Richard Branson’s joke, that he’s the founder of Virgin Air, and he said, “If you want to become a millionaire, just start out as a billionaire and start your own airline.”

And so it’s easy to go from a billion down to a million. That’s not the question anybody has. Likewise, it’s easy to go from a multiverse. We have a bunch of universes to a single universe. The question is, “Hey, you get from nothing to one, not from a bunch of universes to one.”

Here’s their best attempt to answer that. They say, “Because there’s a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” that mind-boggling claim for educated people to make. If the universe doesn’t exist, how is it creating itself from nothing? This is worse than the bootstrap paradox, that you’ve bootstrapped an entire universe that doesn’t exist into creating itself, and they say, spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. They say, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

So when they say they’re getting the universe from nothing, they mean if you have a multiverse and physical loss, particularly gravity, then you can get a universe out of that. None of that explains why there would be a multiverse. Leave aside all of the last decade or so of criticisms of how bad multiverse theory has kind of fared in terms of how poorly its physicists and proponents have actually shown any of its claims to be true. Assume that it is true, and you’re still left with, “Why are there a bunch of universes rather than nothing?” All you’ve done, if the question is, “Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?,” when you expand hypothetically the realm of anything at all that you have from one universe’s worth of stuff to a bunch of universe’s worth of stuff, you’ve only made this problem worse and said, “You haven’t solved.” Right?

I mean, it should be, I would imagine, clear to see this. Why do you have nothing whatsoever? Well, if you have a multiverse, then you don’t have nothing whatsoever. That’s why I was stressing at the beginning, be really clear that you mean nothing by nothing, not a multiverse, not physical laws, not quantum states, not the ingredients to an apple pie, nothing. That’s the test.

So that’s all the argument proposes, that if you don’t have God, you don’t really explain why you have anything at all, and so we could say, “If God did not exist, no things would exist.” Things do exist, therefore, God exists. It’s a simple argument, it’s a straightforward one, but as you can see, even some of the best minds out there really stumble over this in their effort to avoid how obviously this points to God. Last thing I’ll say here, you may remember Dawkins calling it the theologian’s last trump card. That shows something of its effectiveness of its power, and so they can kind of wave it away and say, “Oh, no, no, we can explain that,” but they can’t.

The argument is clear, it’s profound, and it’s simple. So if you’re a Christian, I would encourage you to kind of take to heart some form of this argument and be prepared to share it. If you’re not a Christian or not a believer at all, if you’re an atheist, I would encourage you to really ponder this question and say, “Okay, when I think of a universe coming from nothing, what am I actually meaning by nothing?,” or alternatively, “Do I just sort of shrug and say, ‘This is a brute fact,’ and deny the principle of sufficient reason?,” because neither of those are effective answers, I would argue. All right, I hope you enjoyed. The next two weeks are going to be a little less sciencey, or a lot less sciencey, and a little less heady.

We’re going to be looking at beauty and holiness, as arguments against atheism in a unique kind of way. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Thank you, and God bless.

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