Theories around the Big Bang provide an interesting test of the concept. Some argue that our universe is constantly coming into and going out of existence, in an endless series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches:
It does not appear that the Big Bang had a natural beginning. It was the beginning. Before it, there was nothing at all, which is a hard concept for us to grasp. In a debate with naturalist philosopher David Papineau, theistic neurosurgeon Michael Egnor described it as an effect with no physical cause. Despite their other differences Papineau agreed with that.
Some have argued that there were multiple Big Bangs, each building on the ashes, so to speak, of the last…
Perhaps the laws of reality (the metaverse, whatever) simply do not allow for a state that we would understand as completely nothing. We think of nothing as simply the absence of stuff, of matter and energy, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that. It may simply be impossible for there to be truly nothing in that simplistic sense. This, of course, deals with the ultimate nature of reality, where physics borders metaphysics…
What if the maximally expanded and cold universe mathematically approaches the identical state as the singularity that resulted in the Big Bang? Again, our human minds limited by the frame of the Earth cannot wrap around this concept, but we can crunch the numbers. At some point the heat death universe becomes a singularity, and then starts another cycle of the universe. If you want to really blow your mind, some physicists even speculate that this would be the same universe. Not another version of the same matter and energy, but the actual same universe in space and time. Essentially the end of the universe and the beginning of the universe are the same moment in time, the universe loops back in on itself in one giant self-contained temporal cycle.
The universe would then be temporally finite but unbound (Stephen Hawking discussed this in his book, A Brief History of Time). The best analogy is a ring, we just keeping going around the ring forever, but there is no true beginning or end. In this concept there is no beginning or end, there is no before, there is just a bound infinite loop. This solves the “something from nothing” problem, because the universe did not come from anything, it just always was. This still leaves us with the deeper question – why is there something instead of nothing, but that may not be a useful line of inquiry.
Steven Novella, “Was the Big Bang Something from Nothing” at Neurologica Blog (January 20, 2022)
The non-theistic explanations are colorful but it is not clear that they solve problems. Rather, they demonstrate the difficulty we have imagining… absolutely nothing.
News, “How easy is it to imagine absolutely nothing?” at Mind Matters News (February 6, 2022)
Takehome: The non-theistic explanations are colorful but it is not clear that they solve problems. Rather, they demonstrate the difficulty we have imagining… absolutely nothing.
You may also wish to read:
Freebits: An interesting argument from the Big Bang for free will There are two types of uncertainty, we learn, only one of which could create free will. Astrobiologist Caleb Scharf argues that “information isn’t just a way to probe the fundamentals of nature; it may be part of the fundamentals.”
and
Round 3: Egnor vs Papineau: The Big Bang has no natural beginning, In the debate between theistic neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and naturalist philosopher David Papineau, the question gets round to the origin of the universe itself. Egnor maintains that the Big Bang, which is held to have created the universe, is an effect with no physical cause. Papineau agrees.