This morning, CH has by implication raised the issue that has been hotly debated recently: getting a cosmos out of “nothing.”
I thought it would be helpful to headline my comment:
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>> . . . “Something from nothing” is always problematic.
Now, I know I know, here is Ethan Siegel of Science Blogs in partnership with Nat Geog, inadvertently illustrating the problem:
It’s often said that you can’t get something from nothing. And while this may be true for most practical applications of your life, it isn’t true for our physical Universe.
And I don’t just mean some tiny part of it; I mean all of it. When you take a look at the Universe out there, whether you’re looking at the wonders of this world or all that we can see for billions of light years, it’s hard not to wonder — at some point — where it all came from.
And so we try to answer it scientifically. In order to do that, we want to start with a scientific definition of nothing. In our nearby Universe, nothing is hard to come by. We are surrounded by matter, radiation, and energy everywhere we look. Even if we blocked it all out — creating a perfect, cold, isolated vacuum — we still wouldn’t have nothing.
We would still exist in curved spacetime. The very presence of nearby objects with mass or energy distorts the very fabric of the Universe, meaning that if we want to truly achieve a state of physical nothingness, we cannot have anything in our Universe at all.
Physically, that ideal case would be true nothingness. No matter, no radiation, no energy, no spatial curvature. We can imagine existing in completely empty, void space, infinitely far away from the nearest star, galaxy, atom or photon. The spacetime around us, rather than having curvature to it, would appear as completely flat . . . .
The only physical freedom that such nothingness could have is the freedom to expand or contract, depending on the nature of this nothingness. Recently, Edward Feser picked on me — among others such as Hawking, but me in particular — for using this scientific definition of nothing. (Which yes, I’m fully aware is not the same as philosophical nothingness, which I explicitly stated in the fourth sentence of the post Feser criticizes.)
Yet it is a form of this very nothingness that I have just imagined with you that — to the best of our scientific knowledge — the entire Universe is born from, and that it will return to in the distant future.
Here’s how.
You removed all the matter, energy, and sources of curvature from your Universe. You are left with empty spacetime. On large scales — where “large” means larger than the size of a subatomic particle like a proton — spacetime indeed looks like that flat grid we referred to earlier. But if you start looking at ever smaller scales, this picture breaks down.
On the tiniest physical scales — the Planck scale — spacetime isn’t flat at all. Empty space itself vibrates and curves, and there is a fundamental uncertainty in the energy content — at any given time — of nothingness . . .
See the inadvertent switcheroo?
A space-time continuum, at whatever scale, is plainly not genuinely nothing.
{It’s worth adding a picture and a video May 13, HT CR:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
But by imagining that — by virtue of wearing the lab coat — one can redefine something as nothing and add an adjectival prefix: physical, one has nothing, one then thinks one can pull a cosmos out of the hat, as if by magic.
Not so.
In the relevant sense, nothing is non-being: no matter, energy, space, time, information, mind, ideas, etc. Therefore, no properties or capacities. An empty blackboard, write a zero, then erase it then erase the board and the space in which the board is. (That is the error in the above.)
Nothingness, classically, is what rocks dream of — as, rocks do not dream.
Nothing, then, cannot be a credible causal matrix from which something comes.
That is, if you appeal to a speculative high-energy quantum vacuum in which there are nano-scale fluctuations, that is not nothing. If you appeal to the forces summed up by laws of gravitation etc, that is not nothing.
Space is not nothing.
A vacuum is not nothing.
Nothing is what rocks dream of.
It is therefore a reasonable first premise of scientific thought, that nothing — non-being — is not a credible appeal as a causal root of being.
So, we can safely say that if something now is, a cosmos with us in it, something always was, with capacities that can credibly account for a cosmos with us in it.
Is it some form of matter-energy in space-time, as an eternal entity? That was what was once thought via what was called the Steady State cosmological model.
It collapsed.
We are stuck with a cosmos that appears strongly to have had a beginning 10 – 20 BYA.
That which begins, is contingent, there is some enabling factor that once set allows emergence.
So, there is something beyond our observed cosmos.
Oscillating models, inflationary bubbles, etc etc all point to that.
The issue is, that at that point we are beyond empirical observation, and we have crossed over into philosophy, unannounced and perhaps unrecognised. Which, means that we have no right to exclude any serious alternative, including that it is not merely something beyond, but at root — even through a multiverse — someONE.
Multiply that by a cosmos that appears fine tuned for C-chemistry, aqueous medium, gated metabolising automaton, molecular nanotech, self replicating, code using cell based life, and we have some relevant empirical facts that point to contrivance.
Not of some small thing, but of a whole universe.
No wonder, Sir Fred Hoyle went on record:
Once we see that life is cosmic it is sensible to suppose that intelligence is cosmic. Now problems of order, such as the sequences of amino acids in the chains which constitute the enzymes and other proteins, are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed intelligence enters the picture, as was recognised long ago by James Clerk Maxwell in his invention of what is known in physics as the Maxwell demon. The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare’s plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.” [[Evolution from Space (The Omni Lecture[ –> Jan 12th 1982]), Enslow Publishers, 1982, pg. 28.]
From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 MeV energy level in the nucleus of 12 C to the 7.12 MeV level in 16 O. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? . . . I am inclined to think so. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. [F. Hoyle, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20 (1982): 16]
The big problem in biology, as I see it, is to understand the origin of the information carried by the explicit structures of biomolecules. The issue isn’t so much the rather crude fact that a protein consists of a chain of amino acids linked together in a certain way, but that the explicit ordering of the amino acids endows the chain with remarkable properties, which other orderings wouldn’t give. The case of the enzymes is well known . . . If amino acids were linked at random, there would be a vast number of arrange-ments that would be useless in serving the pur-poses of a living cell. When you consider that a typical enzyme has a chain of perhaps 200 links and that there are 20 possibilities for each link,it’s easy to see that the number of useless arrangements is enormous, more than the number of atoms in all the galaxies visible in the largest telescopes. This is for one enzyme, and there are upwards of 2000 of them, mainly serving very different purposes. So how did the situation get to where we find it to be? This is, as I see it, the biological problem – the information problem . . . .
I was constantly plagued by the thought that the number of ways in which even a single enzyme could be wrongly constructed was greater than the number of all the atoms in the universe. So try as I would, I couldn’t convince myself that even the whole universe would be sufficient to find life by random processes – by what are called the blind forces of nature . . . . By far the simplest way to arrive at the correct sequences of amino acids in the enzymes would be by thought, not by random processes . . . .
Now imagine yourself as a superintellect working through possibilities in polymer chemistry. Would you not be astonished that polymers based on the carbon atom turned out in your calculations to have the remarkable properties of the enzymes and other biomolecules? Would you not be bowled over in surprise to find that a living cell was a feasible construct? Would you not say to yourself, in whatever language supercalculating intellects use: Some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. Of course you would, and if you were a sensible superintellect you would conclude that the carbon atom is a fix . . . .
I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce within stars. [[“The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering and Science, November, 1981. pp. 8–12]
It is time for us to rethink.
PS: Feser’s comment on the concepts restated in the clip from Segal.>>
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So, everything from nothing morphs into effectively rebranding a quantum vacuum as “nothing” and allowing it to bubble and froth up our cosmos.
Is such truly nothing?
And, is that something genuinely debatable?
What about what happens if we rebrand something as nothing? Is that akin to asking how many legs a sheep has if we rebrand the tail a leg? Or, was Lincoln right to point out that relabelling like that has not addressed the reality of what makes tails and legs inherently different? END
PS, Jan 10 2014: This came up again, and I have provided clips from Feser and Albert, here on:
EXHB A, Feser: >> 404
F/N: Feser nailing the key point, on a Krauss interview with Australian TV. I add a parenthesis or emphasis or two in the Krauss clip within the clip:
about 27 minutes in, where a questioner asks Krauss to explain how the universe could arise from nothing. Krauss answers:
[E]mpty space [–> oopsie!!], which for many people is a good first example of nothing, is actually unstable. Quantum mechanics will allow particles to suddenly pop out of nothing and it doesn’t violate any laws of physics. Just the known laws of quantum mechanics and relativity can produce 400 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars [–> reification, mere laws can have no causal force in themselves . . . ] and then beyond that it turns out when you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, space itself can arise from nothing, as can time. [–> reification on steroids; contrast, In the beginning was the LOGOS, and the concept that same upholds all things by the word of his power, i.e. words, decrees, laws only take force from who stands behind them . . . as in, K has inadvertently given away the game: In the beginning . . . God said . . . ] It seems impossible but it’s completely possible and what is amazing to me is to be asked what would be the characteristics of a universe that came from nothing by laws of physics. It would be precisely the characteristics of the universe we measure.
This is, of course, a summary of the argument of Krauss’s book. And the problem with it, as everybody on the planet knows except for Krauss himself and the very hackiest of his fellow New Atheist hacks, is that empty space governed by quantum mechanics (or any other laws of physics, or even just the laws of physics by themselves) is not nothing, and not even an “example” of nothing (whatever an “example of nothing” means), but something. And it remains something rather than nothing even if it is a “good first approximation” to nothing (which is what Krauss presumably meant by “good first example”). When people ask how something could arise from nothing, they don’t mean “How could something arise from almost nothing?” They mean “How could something arise from nothing?” That is to say, from the absence of anything whatsoever — including the absence of space (empty or otherwise), laws of physics, or anything else. And Krauss has absolutely nothing to say about that, despite it’s being, you know, the question he was asked, and the question he pretended to be answering in his book. (Krauss has the brass later in the show to accuse a fellow panelist of a “bait and switch”!) . . .
In short, just remember, nothing, proper is non-being. Anything else standing in to claim the title is a case of not the real McCoy.
KF>>
EXHB B, Albert: >>405
F/N 2: David Albert (philosopher with a background in physics) in his critical review of Krauss:
. . . there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! 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. And 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. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
Again, nothing is non-being. Anything standing in for non-being is something, not nothing.
Fallacy of equivocation, anyone?
And, onlookers, if it takes so much to hammer home a patent even trivial point in responding to the Darwinist objectors to design thought we tend to see, what does that tell us about matters where we deal with inference to best explanation regarding traces from an unobserved remote past of origins?
As in, fallacies of selective hyperskepticism, here we come.
KF >>
Get your own spacetime!
related note:
background info:
implications:
supplemental note:
Verse and Music:
Before answering the question on how something can come from nothing, should we not bother to check whether something actually did come from nothing?
It seems much like the rest of Darwinist reasoning, and is why evolution can never be as proven as gravity. I can observe events caused by gravity, and I can bring such events into being at will. I can create situation X, which gravity turns into situation Y.
With evolution it is different. We can only observe Y. Everything we could say about X rests to a greater or lesser degree on assumptions. Darwin, and his followers, have assumed an X that only evolution can transform in the Y we observe.
Our atheists friends don’t have a leg to stand on, Phil. They don’t have nuthin’…. even. Not even a legitimate double negative, swallowed up, doubtless, by some ‘random’ vacuum foam.
Dawkins is still, doubtless, pondering the best ‘scientific’ way to describe nothing.
As to Ethan Siegel’s comment here trying to redefine space-time and virtual photons as ‘nothing’:
Uhh,, Einstein’s general relativity equation has now been extended to confirm not only did matter and energy have a beginning in the Big Bang, but space-time also had a beginning. i.e. The Big Bang was an absolute origin of space-time, matter-energy, and as such demands a cause which transcends space-time, matter-energy.
Of note:
Of related interest, Roger Penrose exposed Stephen Hawking’s complete lack of empirical evidence to support his book ‘The Grand Design’:
Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, of Tufts University in Boston, delivered a paper at Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday party a paper characterized as the ‘Worst Birthday Present Ever’, a paper that went much further than Hawking, Penrose, Ellis’s original paper:
And please note, Vilenkin’s 2012 paper was even more certain in its conclusion than the already devastating 2003 Borde-Guth-Vilenkin paper:
As to the ‘fundamental uncertainty in the energy content’ that Ethan Siegel referred to as ‘nothing’, the uncertainty in the energy content is far less uncertain than he imagines it to be. ‘Exotic’ virtual photons, which fleetingly pop into and out of existence, are tied directly to the anthropic principle through the 1 in 10^120 cosmological constant for ‘dark energy’ (postulated expansion of the space-time of the universe by ‘dark energy’):
Yet a “‘True’ cosmological constant” is found to rule out the materialistic theories for ‘uncertain’ Dark Energy since it is far more precise than the materialistic Dark Energy models allow:
Here are the verses in the Bible, which were written well over 2000 years before the discovery of the finely tuned expansion of the universe by ‘Dark Energy’, that speak of God ‘Stretching out the Heavens’; Job 9:8; Isaiah 40:22; Isaiah 44:24; Isaiah 48:13; Zechariah 12:1; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 42:5; Isaiah 45:12; Isaiah 51:13; Jeremiah 51:15; Jeremiah 10:12. The following verse is my favorite out of the group of verses:
I started looking up comments and quotes about nothingness based on this post. I found an interesting point made on a forum devoted to physics: “I think it is safe to say that absolute nothingness cannot exist in our universe because the universe, as well as “what it is in”, are both the universe. The universe is both the contents and the space-time continuum the contents are ‘in’. Anywhere that isn’t solid liquid gaseous or plasma, there are still fields and other results of energy forms existing and/or reacting within their environment. I am assuming that ‘nothingness’ cannot be made, and so, since space-time was developed along with everything else when things commenced, none of it is empty/devoid, and all of it is indeed ‘somethingness’.”
I tend to agree with this point; there is always “something” out there, even if human technology cannot detect it yet.
Hi Barb:
The problem is that the space-time continuum itself is not nothing. Nothing is quite literally just that: NO + THING, i.e. non being, something like a square circle or what rocks dream of.
AmHD may help some people realise that this is not an idiosyncrasy of suspect people like me. Though, this is at risk of a strawman dismissal. Nope, I am simply citing the AmHD to show that this is a reasonable usage:
The whole project of trying to relabel something to be nothing, is misconceived. But, it seems that some find it very hard to grasp that point. KF
KF: That was the point made by the person I quoted, although he posited that the space-time continuum was part of the universe itself. I will leave that debate to the astrophysicists and philosophers.
I’m wondering why they’re trying to relabel spacetime as nothing. Is God monkeying around with their physics again?
Barb: I know, I was writing for the benefit of those confused by the rhetoric out there. The problem here of course is that a beginning implies a begin-ner. Or, maybe that should have a capital B. KF
“The problem is that the space-time continuum itself is not nothing.”
Thanks Kairos,
The empty space is not really empty. Our reality needs a structured framework where different activities can happen: energy will propagate, condense, interact etc This framework is resilient, transparent and superconducting. We call this space time.
In his book, The Lightness of Being, Frank Wilczek (Nobel prize for asymptotic freedom- physics) goes into detail about this idea of a space-time as a framework.
http://www.frankwilczek.com/core.html
As side note-interesting visualization; if we could somehow appear in an intergalactic void we would find about one hydrogen atom and a few hundred thousand photons in each cubic meter of space. The photons would mostly be leftovers of the Big Bang. They are transferring energy i.e. equalizing temperature between different regions of the universe.
Notes: Einstein showed, in General Relativity, that time, as we understand it, is tied directly to space. i.e. 4-D space-time,,,
,,,Thus the expansion of space-time coincides directly with the ‘march of time’ into the future. Which is exactly why they are able to mathematically deduce an absolute beginning for both space and time for our expanding universe. Moreover, both the expansion of 4-D space-time and curvature of space-time, i.e. Gravity (General Relativity), are tied directly to entropy which is, by far, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the universe:
For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power for time:
In fact, it has been noted many times that if you ran a film backwards one of the first things that would stand out to you is the reversal of entropic processes.
Also of interest, higher dimensional mathematics had to be developed before Einstein could elucidate General Relativity (4-D space-time),,
And yet, contrary to the many untestable ‘folded up’, i.e. extra, dimensions of string/M-theory, both General and Special Relativity give us hard evidence for higher ‘eternal’ dimensions above this temporal dimension. It is important to note that higher dimensions are invisible to our physical 3 Dimensional sight. The reason why ‘higher dimensions’ are invisible to our 3D vision is best illustrated by ‘Flatland’:
Yet these higher invisible dimensions, again contrary to the untestable dimensions of string theory, are corroborated by Special Relativity when considering the optical effects for traveling at the speed of light. Please note the optical effect, noted at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape around the direction of travel as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light:
The preceding video was made by two Australian University physics professors.,, As well, as with the scientifically verified tunnel for special relativity to a higher dimension, we also have scientific confirmation of extreme ‘tunnel curvature’, within space-time, to an eternal ‘event horizon’ at black holes;
As well it is important to note the now verified ‘time dilation’ of General and Special relativity:
Moreover, we have hard evidence for two very different qualities of eternity/time dilation for both special relativity and General Relativity. One ‘precisely organized’, and the other ‘totally chaotic’:
And we have testimony from Near Death Experiences of both going up through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension and falling down through a tunnel to hellish eternal dimension:
A man, near the beginning of this following video, gives testimony of falling down a ‘tunnel’ in the transition stage from this world to hell:
Seeing as the Theistic postulations are validated by modern physics, and materialistic conjecture for many ‘folded up dimensions’ are found to be wanting for validating evidence, I think it wise to heed Jesus’ words,,,
Perhaps some hardcore atheists will, once again, scoff at this evidence but,,
E: Good catch. I want to keep this very simple: nothing is non being, and you cannot relabel something as nothing, then hope to gain the advantage of starting from nothing. KF
I’ve always found the following intriguing:
1. Matter can not be created or destroyed. It only changes forms.
2. Energy can not be created or destroyed. It only changes forms.
3. The Bible describes God as neither matter no energy but as spirit.
We know that our universe is made of matter and energy and that the two are related E=mc^2. We also know that these things can not be created by our universe per 1. and 2. above.
God being spirit is in a different category of “stuff” and must not be bound by those laws.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate” as the famous movie quote goes. It’s the Kalaam Cosmological Argument in a nutshell.
1. Anything which begins to exist must have a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
Ergo, the universe must have a cause.
Premise 2, for the most part, seem unproblematic. The idea of an actual beginning to the cosmos seems more and more widely accepted among cosmologists, astrophysicists and such. Premise 1, should be rather obvious, but apparently if your a philosophical naturalist, it is a huge problem. Apparently the actual premise for the naturalist is “anything which begins to exist must have a cause, except space-time, or a vacuum, or…some energy field or other.”
I’ve actually seen (though I can’t recall who…possibly Dawkins, but don’t hold me to that) one of the more popular atheists restate premise 1 as “anything which exists must have a cause”, leaving out the key word “begins”. I do recall Dawkins in The God Delusion trying to argue that God needs an explanation too.
The short and long of all this is that KF is absolutely right. Science can’t just re-define “nothing” to include an actual something, which isn’t actually nothing. So all the claims that we actually can have an entire cosmos from “nothing” is hand-waving wishful speculation.
It’s surreal that it’s even being discussed. The proper response was the loud guffaws of the audience, during a panel discussion at one of the Oxbridge colleges, I believe – to Dawkins’ utter bewilderment – as he tried to define ‘nothing’ ‘scientifically'(!),(and not as an absence of anything).
Then, when Dawkins asked why the mirth, the priest on the panel spelt it out. Louder laughter ensued, and Dawkins sat there looking utterly dumbfounded, as you could see there was a battle going on in his wee bonce, between his acute embarrassment and a struggle to think of a way to respond; mouth agape.
It’s only the inevitable, final flat-lining of the materialists’ brains’, the galloping course of which evidently elicited such profound contempt from the likes of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Pauli and Godel.
Bohr’s arguably being the most profound contempt, for being expressed in its affably patronising way. He’s claimed as an atheist, of course, like just about every deistic and theistic, genuine luminary. But he evokes Buddhism and Taoism, I believe for a closer understanding of a world-view offering a window onto the deepest truths of physics. Their explanatory powers, however, as we know, fall short of those currently evinced by Christianity.
Einstein is even claimed as a pantheist, when he was manifestly a panentheist, who believed absolutely in an almighty and all-knowing Spirit, which indeed he expressly revered.
On the subject of nothing, this video has some fun with Dawkins’ troubles with philosophy. Don’t miss Sir Anthony Kenny’s rundown on the difference between complexity of structure and complexity of function after the six minute mark.
Yes indeed, ‘nothing’ is quite parsimonious. 😉
Nothing explains . . . gnihton. KF
CR: Added the vid and some image clips. KF
KF, great picture addition. 🙂
F/N: Updated pic. KF
Of note: New principle may help explain why nature is quantum – May 14, 2013
“An information-theoretic principle implies that any discrete physical theory is classical”, Nature Communications, (2013)
Excerpt: Corsin and Stephanie show that this principle rules out various theories of nature. They note particularly that a class of theories they call ‘discrete’ are incompatible with the principle. These theories hold that quantum particles can take up only a finite number of states, rather than choose from an infinite, continuous range of possibilities.,,,
,,discrete ‘state space’ has been linked to quantum gravitational theories proposing similar discreteness in spacetime, where the fabric of the universe is made up of tiny brick-like elements rather than being a smooth, continuous sheet.
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-p.....antum.html
Divinely Planted Quantum States – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....aM4#t=156s
I seem to recollect that you bods have routinely referred to space-time as a part of the material universe.
DonaldM’s hilarious joke in the Darwinism/ID thread seems appropriate here, too:
“…..in fact, we’ve progressed so much, we now create life from scratch.” “Really?”, replies God, “show me!” So, the scientist reaches down and scoops up a handful of dirt to begin. “Stop!”, says God, “Go get your own dirt!”
Axel: It’s worse than that — go get your own energy-rich space-time continuum, quantum foam etc. (It is too funny that we now have the pretence that something is effectively nothing, in a context that seeks to undermine causality, where to get an effect — and to scientifically explain it — we need adequate, empirically grounded cause.) KF
William J Murray, @ your #1, not an historic event, I’ll concede, but the penny’s finally dropped. Well spotted!
‘….where to get an effect — and to scientifically explain it — we need adequate, empirically grounded cause.’
You couldn’t get more fundamental than that, KF. The irony of it! These guys are without shame, never mind grey cells.
F/N: Clips from Feser and Albert in reply to Krauss:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-541398
As in something is not nothing, and the force of laws depends on who provides the backative. KF
PS: Added to the foot of the OP, for reference. The onward exchange on “nothing” is simply incredible, it has to be seen to be believed!