Nothing
Posted in Religion, Science on April 10th, 2011 by moody
Warning: Words nothing and something are used a lot in this article so I suggest reading it slowly and really trying to imagine what the sentence is trying to imply. To make it easier to spot, every time you see nothing in italics it will imply the state, and not the the word, in linguistic sense. For example the word nothing in the sentence “today I did nothing” simply implies that today I did not do anything. But the famous question “why there’s something rather than nothing?” implies the state of nothingness which will be in italics. Same goes for the word something.
Let us first define nothing. Nothing is when there’ no anything. I am not talking about linguistic tricks here for the word nothing. Like mathematical nothing (zero) or logical nothing (I have nothing drawn on this paper). I mean nothing in the most literal sense of the world. No matter, no time, no light, no dark, no space, no dimensions, no thoughts, no observers, no abstract. Pretty much, no anything. Nothing is simply put “the absence of everything. Still hard to comprehend? Of course it is… but will get to that later.
Is nothing a default state before the existence of anything? Was there really a “before”. Before there was something, was there really nothing? Is nothing a default state from which everything start existing (or got created)? Many assume that the default state of our universe has to be nothing, and that the something came right after. Meaning; at the beginning there was nothing. Nothing existed, not even nothingness, and then our Universe got created (or appeared) out of that nothing. Now, why would this have to be true? Is nothingness more natural state than something? Is nothing a default state? There is no good or logical reason to think that. As a matter of fact, the opposite is what’s probably true. Or at least what is known so far.
First of all, It’s impossible for humans to imagine nothing. Even if you close your eyes and try really hard to imagine nothing, you will not be able to do it. Not only that you would have to imagine that there is no matter, atoms, light or the actual Universe, but you would also have to imagine that there is no space, time, thoughts or even an observer. Which in this case would be you, so nothing is contradiction in philosophical spectrum already. Moving on…
Can you image no space? Can you imagine spaceless …uhmm what…space? A state with no space? You can’t, because you still need an observer to deduct that kind of reasoning. Nothing, simply cannot be observed, because if it can be, then it would imply an observation from the outside. If we can observe nothing from the outside then you don’t have nothingness. If we can observe nothing from the inside, the same applies;from the inside of what?. What about with no observer? Of course not. It’s silly.
So why is it so hard to imagine it? It is hard because our conscious brain doesn’t know what nothing is. Our brain hasn’t evolved the need to know that. Nothing simply makes no sense whatsoever. In the whole history of human civilisation and the Universe, state of nothing does not exist. We have never encountered or dealt with nothing. Ever. Not even in the vacuum of space. We know that vacuum is not totally empty. But even if it was; even if you were somehow able to suck everything out of the vacuum, you will still have space and time left. Empty space doesn’t mean nothing. There’s still space left.There is no such a thing as nothing. So our brain doesn’t need to worry about it.
Now, many will say “but what if some intelligence created everything from nothing?”. But that implies that some kind of intelligence exited while there was nothing, it existed alongside with nothing, immediately making the whole point silly. But lets say we did allow for existence of that kind if intelligence along side with nothing, then we would go into infinite regression. Who created the intelligence? Did that intelligence arose from nothing? Did the intelligence always existed? How come that intelligence can exists? You might say “well it always existed”. (First Cause argument). Then I could say “ if the intelligence always existed, then we can use the same logic to say that the Universe (in one form of another) always existed. Why add unnecessary complexity? Why add the middle “man” where there is no evidence for it?
So why would we even start to think that there was nothing before something? Why would we even suppose such a question in the first place; when all of our senses, all of our data, all of our history shows that there was always (and still is) something. I bet you can’t name an event in our known history when there was nothing. Even the first law of thermodynamics confirms that. Law states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Let’s break that down:
matter cannot be created – If nothing indeed existed, then matter would be absent and would clearly violate this law.
matter cannot be destroyed – matter can only change its form so regardless how hard we tried, there would always be something.
Then why in the hell would we ever assume that everything got created form nothing in the first place? when all our logic and data shows that something (in one form or another) always existed.
To me it looks like humans are never taking the simplest answer for granted. We have to invent problems and then find unnecessary solution for the same. Be that for religious or personal reason, I have no idea, but most of the times the simplest and the most elegant solution is the correct one. In our case, something always existed is the best and the most elegant solution. You also might have a hard time to wrap your head around “something always existed”, but when you really think about it long and hard, there is no other solution for now. Nothing simply does not make sense and I really don’t see a way around this.
So how else do we know that nothing never exited? Logic, deductive reasoning and data. That’s how. We know that the same way we know that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, has never existed and probably never will. No evidence or data whatsoever. No sane logic supports it. We know that it is true the same way we know that Hitler did exists. Tons of evidence for his existence. So why would anyone assume that Hitler did not exists and Santa Claus did? Because essentially they are using the same logic; discarding the current data while using the data that doesn’t exist, by trying to prove that something came out of nothing. In my opinion the sole question “why there’s something rather than nothing?” is meaningless. If there was indeed nothing instead of something, then we wouldn’t have any observers (you can’t have “something” while nothing exists at the same time) and would not be able to ask this question anyway. As Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy so eloquently put it when asked the question; Why is there something rather than nothing? Their answer was: “Well, why not? Why expect nothing rather than something? No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.”