I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others…. But it was after dinner and I let it go!
—Winston Churchill1
Why are we here?
I don’t mean, “What is the meaning of it all?” I mean, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Nothing comes from nothing, we often hear, so how can something come from nothing?
Those seem like great questions, and believers say the answer is God. Some nonbelievers are at a loss to reply: “The reason there is something rather than nothing is … just because.” A witty response to “why is there something rather than nothing?” is “why not?” But that doesn’t really answer the question.
“How can something come from nothing?” does sound provocative, but is it a valid question? Maybe “why is there something rather than nothing?” falls into that group of questions that look profound from the outside but when logically unpacked reveal hidden assumptions leading to circular logic or incoherence—what Daniel Dennett might call a Deepity Question. “What is south of the South Pole?” is such a question. If a minister were to ask in solemn tones from the pulpit, “Why is up not down?” some in the pews might wonder, “I never thought of that! Why is up not down?”
“Why is there something rather than nothing? How can something come from nothing?”
Before I try to unpack those questions, let’s assume for a moment they are valid and look at the common response: “The reason there is something rather than nothing is because God created something out of nothing.” That sounds straightforward, but is it an honest answer to an honest question? I think saying “God did it” is not really an answer: it is the reason for the question in the first place. Very few people initially come to their belief in a god by pondering metaphysical riddles. (Bertrand Russell did briefly, as a young man, but he very quickly jettisoned ontological arguments when he realized that they just boil down to “bad grammar.”) “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a question most nonphilosophers pose after they choose to believe in a supernatural world, in order to defend their faith. It is like asking, “If there is no god, who pops up the next Kleenex?” The question is shaped to lead to the answer they want. “Who caused the thunder?” the pagans asked. “Thor did!” Any question that starts with “who” assumes that the answer must be a person. This is known as begging the question.2
And if a nonbeliever replies honestly, “I don’t know why there is something rather than nothing,” believers will crow: “Aha! You don’t have an answer, and I do!” This is known as a “god of the gaps” argument, or an argument from ignorance. Any mystery can be “solved” without doing any work, simply by plugging the hole with magic.
But let’s be charitable and fair. On its face, the question is not necessarily religious. The motives of those who ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” may be honest and sincere, and even if not, that alone is no reason to dismiss their conclusion. Since something cannot come from nothing, their argument goes, and since something obviously exists, then it had to come from something else, and that something else could be (must be) “God!”
The obvious flaw with this reasoning is that a god is not nothing. A god is something. If something cannot come from nothing, then neither can a god. A god can also ask: “Why am I here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there a god instead of no god?” If it is true that nothing comes from nothing, then God does not exist.
If you replace one mystery with another mystery, you still have a mystery.
I got plenty o’ nothin’
And nothin’s plenty for me.
—Ira Gershwin3
Nothing is real.
—John Lennon4
When asking “why is there something rather than nothing?,” what does “nothing” mean? In English, it is a word broken into two parts: no + thing. The word “nothing” actually contains something: something to be negated. Linguistically, nothing is the absence of something. When we say there is nothing in a hole in the ground, we mean there is no dirt there. A hole is not a thing in itself: it is the lack of whatever is around that space. It depends on what the hole is surrounded by in order to know what is not there. A hole in the wall and a hole in the ice are not the same thing, but they are both holes, both nothing. What exactly is a doughnut hole? Or a cave? “What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?” asked Bertolt Brecht.5 If I see a pothole in the road, I know it is empty because I expect there to be a smooth, unbroken surface there. The pothole is not really empty—it is filled with air, or maybe water—but we still say there is nothing there. It is the absence of road that makes the pothole what it is.
Picture the pothole in the highway. Now take away the road around it. Erode the landscape down a few meters so that the space that used to be the pothole is now surrounded by nothing but air. Is the pothole still there? We don’t define “nothing” by itself. We define it by the “thing” it is expected to be but is not. We define nothing by something. (It is the same in Latin. The phrase ex nihilo means “out of nothing.” Nihil is from ne + hilum, which means “no + little thing.” The word “nil” is a contraction of nihil.)
In other words, you can’t have nothing without something. “Nothing” is not a thing. The question “can something come from nothing?” treats “nothing” as if it were a thing from which another thing could theoretically come (else why ask the question?), but that is backward. It is nothing that “comes from” something, not the other way around. It is like asking if a road can come from a pothole.
Looking at it that way, “can something come from nothing?” actually has a good answer. If you have the holes—if you are examining those “nothings”—then in a surprising way we can actually say that something indeed comes from nothing. If you have a pothole, you have a road. If I see a doughnut hole, I see a doughnut. If we have no money in the bank, we have a bank. If we have nothing, we have something.
In music, a rest is a symbol indicating that nothing is to be played for a certain length of time. It is a pause between notes. If you were to quickly enter the concert hall during a rest and exit before the end of it, you would have heard nothing: you could have said the musicians were not performing. But they were performing, and that rest is deliberate. The “hole” in the music gives emphasis to what preceded it and causes the listeners to anticipate what follows. The musicians are actually “playing nothing,” which means something else exists around that space, before and after those notes. Miles Davis said, “Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.” When I am improvising in a jazz combo, I often like to tease the listeners (and the other musicians) by not playing what they expect, such as the very last note of a dramatic phrase. Of course, the rhythm section is keeping time, but that’s why it works. The listeners are waiting, so in that context, the nothing becomes something, like a doughnut hole. Jack Kerouac said, “It is only through form that we can realize emptiness.” When a standup comic pauses before the punch line, does the crowd think nothing is happening? The musical rest and the pregnant pause are quite meaningful. “Art adores a vacuum,” art critic Roberta Smith said. Those gorgeous “nothings” exist by virtue of what they are surrounded by.
If there is nothing, then there has to be something.
So, “can something come from nothing?” really means “can something come from something?” and that is a no-brainer. “Can something be what makes it different from what it is not?”
“Nothing” is just a word we use to identify absence. It is a concept, not a thing. The concept of absence can apply to things that are real as well as to things that are imaginary. The absence of Neanderthals and the absence of leprechauns are not measured the same way, but they end up the same. Absence is absence.
Since “nothing” is a concept, and concepts are a result, not a cause, of a brain, asking if something can come from nothing is like asking if a brain can come from a thought it is thinking.
In the quantum realm, even nothing never sleeps. Nothing is always up to something.
—K. C. Cole6
The vacuum might even be the “source” of all matter in the universe.
—Lawrence M. Krauss7
Some believers will agree this far but complain that I am equivocating. We are not dealing with potholes or bank accounts, they say. We are not talking about “nothing” in any particular example. The question “can something come from nothing?” really means “can something come from nothing-ness?” They are imagining an absolute void, a state of existence in which there actually are no things, no “something” anywhere that might give “nothing” its meaning.
But if nothingness is what is actually meant in the question, “can something come from nothing?” the problem does not go away. If nothingness is a state of existence, then it is something. A state of existence is not nothing. If you have a state, you have something that can be in a state. “The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something,” wrote Samuel Beckett.8
It does no good to counter that we are only talking about existence as a concept because if somethingness and nothingness are possible states of existence, then we are talking about a real thing: a reality that accommodates matter and energy even if it isn’t there. I don’t think existence is a thing (see below), but if believers want to talk about a state of existence, then they are saying it is a thing. Anything that can be in one of a plural number of states will have a certain potential for each of those possibilities. Therefore, in order for nothingness to truly be an optional state of existence, there must be a potential for another state to take its place. And how do we measure the likelihood of a potential state? The only way to get a probability is to divide one number by another. If nothingness and somethingness are two potential states of existence, we could estimate their probabilities by asking how many ways it is possible for nothing versus something to exist. There would be only one way for nothing to exist, but there is a very large number of ways for something to exist. By that logic, it is much more likely that something exists rather than nothing. Let’s say there are a billion ways for something to exist. Assuming these all have equal weights, that would put the likelihood of nothingness at one in a billion plus one, or a 0.00000001 probability. Would you bet on that? Of course, it’s much smaller than one in a billion. Nothingness is extremely unlikely. If the number of potential “somethings” is infinite, then something must exist.
Even if you think the odds are equal—that there is only one way for somethingness to be a state of existence, or that the number of nothingnesses is the same as the number of somethingnesses—then it is 50-50, with no preference for nothingness. But is that right? That would be like saying H2O has a 50 percent chance of being ice or water, a grossly simplistic assumption (besides ignoring the possibility of a gas). Strangely, even if the odds were truly 50-50, many believers would still feel that nothingness is more likely than somethingness. If reality is the result of a coin flip, heads needs an explanation while tails does not? If there were nothing at all, these same people would probably protest: “Why is there nothing rather than something?!” They might imagine a supernatural being using its power to restrain somethingness from invading the void. But where do we get the idea that nothing is stronger than something? Why do we assume that reality, unmanaged, collapses to nothingness? Is it like gravity? The path of least resistance? From whence comes the great power of the void? (And if the void has this power, then it has something.) Perhaps it is the other way around: the great power of matter and energy is holding back the void. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Aristotle thought.
But that all seems pretty silly, because something/nothing is not a proper yin/yang. They are not balanced opposites of a composite whole. If they were, then zero would be the reciprocal for every other number and math would be meaningless. But one thing we do know—and if there were a god, he/she would know it too—is that something indeed does exist, so there is no argument. Reality has not decayed into nothingness, or remained in such a state, not in the natural world or the supernatural world (if there is such a place). In fact, if there were truly nothingness, there would be no reality at all, natural or supernatural. We are aware of the reality that something does exist. That’s what reality means. Whatever the Theory of Everything (TOE) turns out to be, there will come a point where we simply have to refer to a brute fact—perhaps strings or branes or quantum wave potential, or something else. That is exactly what theists do when they refer to their brute fact of an intricate creator mind with desires and elaborate rules magnificently orchestrating the natural world from a supernatural platform, sticking his TOE into our world, though I don’t see how an absurdly complicated brute fact should be more likely than the simpler brute facts uncovered by science.
But let’s give the believers a chance to define their terms. If the phrase “nothing comes from nothing” makes sense, we need to know what those words mean. Close your eyes and try to picture complete nothingness. What do you see? Perhaps you see darkness, emptiness, absolute coldness, zero Kelvins, silence. But you see something. Aren’t you picturing it in space and time? Aren’t you imagining a vast open area that is devoid of all matter and light? If you are seeing “nothing there,” you are at least picturing a “there” there. Or if you are like me, you are trying to conceive of an infinitely small dot—an iDot—devoid of all space, time, matter, energy, potential. But still, I am imagining that invisible, dimensionless weightless iDot hanging there, surrounded by all the potential everything that reality could actually be but isn’t. And I can’t help intuitively framing the iDot floating in space. The truth is that actual nothingness cannot be pictured or imagined in any way. Nothingness is something, isn’t it? The only way to conceive of utter nothingness is not to conceive of anything at all. You have to be asleep, or in a coma, or dead, to do that. There is no way to know what nothing means. So the phrase “nothing comes from nothing(ness)” contains an incoherent or unintelligible word. Those who preach its possibility are mumbling iDots.
But let’s try to keep going. Let’s pretend we can indeed talk coherently about nothingness, just like we can talk about and even use imaginary numbers in equations without knowing how to picture them (if we can’t imagine them, why are they called imaginary numbers?), or how we use zero as a placeholder. Not all words have objective or coherent referents, but perhaps “nothingness” might still be useful in spite of our lack of imagination.9 Let’s say that the “state of nothingness,” at least, would be a complete absence of matter, energy, space, and time. But those are not the only things it would lack. It would also lack laws. The state of nothingness would lack a law that says “nothing comes from nothing.” How’s that for a brain twister? In a state of utter nothingness, with no restrictions (because there is nothing to restrict), everything is possible! Physics Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek wrote: “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”10
A believer might object that laws can only apply to actually existing things and that in a state of nothingness laws are meaningless because there would be nothing to apply them to. Besides the fact that this admits that nothingness is not an actually existing thing (so why talk about it?), remember that we are talking about a state of nothingness. Believers think that there is a state of reality that could be either nothing or something. If a state is one possible form of reality, then there must be something keeping it in that state, preventing it from entering a different form of reality, such as low temperature keeping ice from changing into water. But if utter nothingness were the state of reality, then there would exist no conditions, no barriers to prevent it from turning into another state. In such a lawless state, all things are possible, including one state becoming another, something coming from nothing. Spontaneously. All without a god.
And that is not so hard to imagine. Even in our own merely natural universe, it happens all the time. If by “nothing” we mean a completely empty vacuum devoid of all matter, then something indeed comes from nothing. Empty space contains seething quantum potential from which matter and energy emerge. In a tiny volume of a total vacuum, trillions of particles of matter and antimatter are randomly coming into existence out of nothing and then immediately annihilating each other, canceling each other out, the net effect of which is nothing. It is a weird invisible subatomic froth that produces utter silence. Physicist Lawrence M. Krauss describes it as “a boiling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time so short we cannot see them directly.”11 However, sometimes the two matter/antimatter particles become separated. For example, if they happen to come into existence at the exact event horizon of a black hole where only the antimatter particle falls in, then matter emerges from the void.12 Voilá, something from nothing.
So in the real world, something does come from nothing.
This certainly sounds counterintuitive, but science is not guided by our intuitions. Science does not follow us; we follow the science. Krauss, in his book A Universe From Nothing, points this out nicely:
[S]omething can arise from empty space precisely because the energetics of empty space, in the presence of gravity, are not what common sense would have guided us to suspect before we discovered the underlying laws of nature…. [N]o one ever said that the universe is guided by what we, in our petty myopic corners of space and time, might have originally thought was sensible. It certainly seems sensible to imagine that a priori, matter cannot spontaneously arise from empty space, so that something, in this sense, cannot arise from nothing. But when we allow for the dynamics of gravity and quantum mechanics, we find that this commonsense notion is no longer true. This is the beauty of science, and it should not be threatening. Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa.13
Of course, a believer might object that since the vacuum contains quantum potential, it is not really empty. But we could say the same thing about the “state of nothingness” vacuum. Anything that has a state has a potential, quantum or otherwise. If reality has the potential to be either something or nothing, then like the vacuum of space, it is not empty either. If it has no potential, quantum or otherwise, it is no state at all. If nothingness has no potential, then nothing can’t exist.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking thinks our entire universe, not just particles, has arisen from the void. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”14
The place of God in my soul is blank.
—Mother Teresa15
One way to show why Bertrand Russell thought the ontological argument was bad grammar is to point out its reductio ad absurdum when applied to something other than God. Anselm’s eleventh-century version of the ontological argument went something like this:
This silly argument was countered in Anselm’s day by Gaunilo, who used it to “prove” the existence of a perfect island.17 But we could do the same thing with nothingness:
Therefore, nothing exists. Putting the two bad-grammar arguments together, we could prove that God is Utter Nothingness.
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?
In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
—Woody Allen18
There is a deeper problem, one that is logically fatal. A slippery sleight-of-hand occurs when we change the question from “can something come from nothing?” to “can somethingness come from nothingness?” To treat those questions equally is to commit a category error. If you think they are equivalent, you will apply the assumptions from the first question to the second question, and a god or supernatural world will magically appear. (Now that’s something from nothing!) But “something” and “somethingness” are not the same. “Something” refers to an object within the universe, but “somethingness” refers to the cosmos, the entire multiverse, all of reality.
If we are looking at “something,” any particular thing in the universe, then indeed we can ask about its origin. Where did it come from? What is it made of? What properties does it have, and why? What color is it? How much does it weigh? How much space does it take up? Who or what forces made it? How was it assembled? Does it have a purpose? How old is it? How long will it exist? How does it relate to other things? We might even ask “why is it here?” but notice that that question, like all the others, implies that the object resides within a context larger than itself. You can’t have a naked “why.” To ask why is to reach out beyond the object to explain its cause, purpose, or origin by referring to something other and earlier, or contingently antecedent “out there.” So to ask “why is there something rather than nothing?” is simply to assume there is a transcendent realm. Presto! God exists.
There are two good reasons we can’t do that. The first is the category error. You can’t take a finding from one logical level and apply it to a higher level. For example, every soldier is under the authority of a higher-ranking member of that army, but that fact applies only within the army, not to the army itself. We can’t reason from that fact that every army on the planet is therefore under the authority of another army. Some armies are under no authority at all, most are under the authority of a government (a nonarmy), and although armies sometimes cooperate, it is certainly not true that the armies of the world are arranged in a hierarchical chain of command like the members within those armies. If so, there would be no need for armies! You can’t treat “army” the same way you treat “member of the army.” You can’t treat molecules the same way you treat the atoms that make the molecules. In the same way, you can’t treat “somethingness” (the group) the same way you treat “something” (an item in the group). You can’t say that since “something” has to come from something else, then “somethingness” also has to come from something else. That is a category error, mixing logical spheres—which is a polite way to say it is illogical.19
The second reason we can’t ask “why is there something(ness) rather than nothing(ness)?” is because “somethingness” is an incoherent term. Like “nothingness,” we really don’t know what it means. Is it the quality of being a material object? As opposed to what? Why do we pretend that by bootstrapping up from “something” to the higher logical sphere of “somethingness” we have done anything meaningful? “Somethingness” is not a thing or a quality of anything. If we say it is a “thing,” then we are referring to some supposedly known context within which it resides, a context that is excluded from existence, which is like saying “existence doesn’t exist” or “thingness is not a thing.” Neither can “somethingness” be a quality or characteristic of existence. We can’t say existence is blue, or heavy, or silent, or irritable. We can’t say it has actuality, or “somethingness.” At most “somethingness” would be a synonym for existence. (The same fallacy occurs in most forms of the ontological argument when a God who exists in actuality is compared with a God who exists only in conception, treating existence as if it were merely a property of an object.) “Something,” any particular thing, might indeed exist or not, but “somethingness” is simply a label for “anything or everything that exists.” Realizing this, the phrase “why is there something rather than nothing?” reduces to the incoherent “why does existence exist?” It’s like the children who constantly ask “why?” after every answer, imagining they are doing something profound, confounding their parents. We could all play that game with logical spheres, composing syntactically correct but meaningless or ambiguous questions: “What is harmony in harmony with?” “How is digestion digested?” “What do thoughts think of?” “What is it that is conscious of consciousness, and what is conscious of that?” “How does conception conceive?” (Answer: immaculate conception.)
We can’t ask, “Why does existence exist?” Existence does not have a context. Existence is not a thing. The verbs “to exist” and “to be” are just language. If there were no minds forming language, there would be no “existence,” no question of whether something is or is not. Reality would just be reality. “To be” is a special kind of intransitive verb, treated differently in different languages. Although Russian does have a formal “to be,” most people tend not to use it. For “you are my friend,” they usually say “you my friend,” and for “that is all,” they say “that all.” This is not because “to be” is implied, but because it is unnecessary. Spanish and Portuguese tease out the difference between where you are and what you are with two different verbs for “to be” (estar and ser), showing that “being” is syntactical, not a thing or a quality. I think “to exist” is just a way of putting words together, which is what “syntax” means. “Existence” is a label for a philosophical concept, not a name of anything out there. To “be a thing” is not to “have existence.” The verb “to exist” represents the appearance of an object within a mind. There might be a rich vein of gold under the ground in my back yard, and there might not. But to say that there “is” or “is not” such a treasure is to say that “I know” something. That vein of gold might actually be there, but it is not saying, “Look at me! I’m existing!” (Should I go look for it?) It is only minds, which use language, that need to put it into words. If it is not there, it doesn’t mean anything real to say “it has no existence,” because “it” was nothing to begin with. It was just a concept. (Philosophers and scientists indeed talk about hypotheticals, but this is precisely because they are resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions.) Likewise, if it is there, saying “it is in existence” does not create the reality. It only creates the truth in the mind. Truth is just the degree with which a statement happens to correspond with reality. We only say “it exists” for our own sakes, to hold an image of reality in our brains. Bertrand Russell might have said that “why does something exist rather than nothing?” is another example of bad grammar.
In the beginning there was nothing. God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.”
—Ellen DeGeneres20
Notice that when we ask “can something come from nothing?” we are playing a loaded game similar to “who caused the thunder?” We are swallowing the claim that something, anything, always has to “come from” something or someone else. If we do that, we are forced to look for a “what” or a “who.”
When we ask “can something come from nothing?” what do we mean by “come from”? I think there are two normal usages of that phrase: impersonal and personal. In ordinary usage, “comes from” means something physical and impersonal. A house “comes from” lumber or stone or building material. The lumber comes from trees, the stone from quarries, the bricks from mud, the nails and hardware from metal. A tree comes from a seed, the stone and metal comes from physical processes in the earth and the stars. And so on. These are all sufficient answers. So asking where the universe “came from” in that sense would be asking for the location of a huge quarry or forest of materials from which the construction materials were obtained, such as learning that the heavy elements that make up the earth were cooked up from hydrogen inside a star. That is not what believers mean when they ask that question. If we were to find a mammoth cosmic quarry from which the universe was chopped, we would simply ask where that came from.
The other usage is personal, dealing with minds rather than materials. We can say that a house “comes from” the mind of an architect, or from the skills of the carpenters and masons, and so on. In that sense, we are thinking “who?” rather than “what?” In the first usage, the suspects will be a line-up of physical things, but in the second usage, it will be a lineup of persons. And that is what turns the question into a circular argument, if “God” is the conclusion. If “comes from” means “be created by a person,” then “can something come from nothing?” unpacks to “is it possible for something to be created by nobody?” or “can something come from no person?” Voilá. Who pops up the next Kleenex?
This whole question, then, boils down to believers challenging us skeptics to provide an impersonal answer to the origin of all of existence, and if we can’t, they fold their arms and claim that the personal answer wins by default.
Does everything need a source? Why do we think that something always has to “come from” something else? And if it does, why doesn’t God? Believers claim that our universe is contingent (how do they know that?), and the question “can something come from nothing?” applies only to things that have a source, a beginning, a cause, like our universe (how do they know that?), and that since God does not have a source (how do they know that?), there is no need to ask where he “came from.”21 But even if the universe did “come from” somewhere else, and even if we never find an impersonal answer (we haven’t stopped searching), and even if there is a God (and that is a hugely unwarranted stretch of imagination), and even if his existence is necessary and not contingent, and even if God himself did not come from anywhere, and even if God has the power to create, it doesn’t follow that God is the explanation of where the universe came from. If he exists, he might be the prime suspect—the best possible explanation, fitting the profile, lacking an alibi, even possessing a motive for the crime—but his guilt would have to be proved, not assumed. He is innocent until proven guilty. He might not want the blame. God and the cosmos might be siblings: they might exist side by side and our universe might have some other explanation, such as having “come from” a higher natural super-universe that was the cause of its own existence and even the cause of the existence of God. (Not supernatural, but “naturalsuper.”) I have no reason to believe that contrived scenario, but it is no less fantastic than theism.
God is a spirit.
—John 4:24
There is no good reason to believe in a god, but if such a being exists, he also should ask himself, “Why am I here? Why is there a god instead of no god?” Most believers will claim that a god would never ask where it came from because a god is a great spirit outside of nature. The “great spirit” is above the law: you can’t haul in the king for questioning, they insist. A spirit, they say, unlike us physical creatures, can indeed exist without an explanation, timeless, causeless, not needing a frame of reference or context. They imagine that there are actually three states of existence: nothing, something, and spirit. It is spirit that mediates between nothing and something, they claim. Spirit can cause something to come from nothing. God was looking around one day, saying, “There is nothing, and I don’t like it, so I am going to turn nothing into something. Fiat lux ex nihilo. Lo, behold, now something exists!”
But does this make sense? Believers use the word “spirit” as if it were a substance or force that has the power to create matter,22 or to manipulate matter, which means that “spirit” must have some material property in order to interface with natural objects. In order to have an effect, a spirit has to be something. If by something we mean not nothing, and by nothing we mean not something (the law of excluded middle), then there is no halfway house. A spirit, whatever it is, must be either something or nothing. If it is not something, it is nothing.
By the way, if God is defined as “a spirit,” then spirit is something that God is made of. So spirit is not God. It is something more basic, otherwise God could not be “a spirit.”
Some believers will reply that a spirit is indeed “something,” but it is not “something natural.” The question “can something come from nothing?” really means “can something natural come from nothing?” The supernatural or spiritual realm (which they have conjured out of nothing) is exempt from the question, they insist. Their three states of existence really are: nothing, nature, and spirit. We are natural creatures asking a natural question—a question about the entire notion and existence of “natural”—and the only sensible answer, they claim, must come from outside nature. Every question has a frame of reference, and the answer must come from within the frame, outside of the object in question. The explanation of one thing can’t be the same as the thing itself, so the source of nature can’t be nature. It has to be something else, other-natural, supernatural, spiritual, they insist. (Of course, these same people concede that the explanation of at least one thing—God—can be the same as the thing itself.)
But they are just chasing their tails. The argument begs the question, assuming the very thing it is trying to prove. When we use the terms as they define them, notice how the conclusion loops around and shows its face (or its tail), barely masked in the premises: “Nothing that is not supernatural can come from nothing. Something that is not supernatural exists. Therefore something that is not supernatural must have come from something else, and the only other place it could have come from is the supernatural. This proves that the supernatural exists!” Since the supernatural world is the very thing they are trying to prove, inserting that conclusion into their premises is circular logic. They should establish the existence of the supernatural world before they use it in an argument.
If it is true that nothing comes from nothing—that something cannot come from nothing, that something has to come from something—then a god, being something, had to come from something else. If a god came from nothing, then it can’t be said that nothing comes from nothing. If a god did it, why can’t a universe? They are both something.
If nothing comes from nothing, and if God came from nothing, then God is nothing.
Most believers insist that that is equivocating. We can’t compare God and the universe like that. God is a special case: he is great and personal and powerful and, unlike the impersonal lifeless universe, he has the ability to create himself. But how does that help their argument? If they say that “nothing comes from nothing” really means “nothing except God-who-is-great comes from nothing,” well there you go. They are back to question begging, inserting the conclusion into the premise. What could be a clearer example of circular logic? If you already believe in a god before you make the argument, then you don’t need the argument at all. It should be discarded. If believers agree that they don’t need the argument, but think that we atheists do—as a tool of evangelism—then they still need to convince us to embrace their “except God” qualification before we can get the argument off the ground, and if we did, we wouldn’t need the argument because we would no longer be atheists. “Nothing comes from nothing” might be useful to theologians, philosophers, and songwriters, but it would no longer have value as an argument to convince those of us with a “wicked childhood” to change our minds and believe in God.
If a god can answer the question “why am I here?” with “just because,” then so can we.
When I was a preacher I would have thought the previous sentence was utter foolishness, maybe even blasphemous. How can we compare ourselves with God? God is so much bigger, I believed. We are puny contingent beings. We are limited. We have good reason to ask “why am I here?” God does not. He is not dependent on anything. We are born and we die; God does neither. He is the Creator. He is all-powerful. The king does not ask “who is above me?” God is “I am that I am” who needs no explanation.
But when believers say God is “big” and “powerful,” what do they mean? Those are words of dimension, force, and time. Can the word “big” mean something without measuring along dimensions? Can the word “power” be understood without plotting work across a span of time? If God is truly outside those dimensions, then what does it matter if he is called “big” and “powerful”? Those words have no meaning outside of the natural world, if it is possible to be “outside” of the natural world. Or if they do have a meaning outside the natural world, they have no meaning to us. We may as well say “God is bliphish and pomthical.” God talk is nonsensical. He is the holy iDot.
If God is truly outside of somethingness, he is nothing at all.
If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible.
—Joel Osteen23
The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.
—Delos McKown24
But maybe we atheists are still missing something. Perhaps believers have tapped into a special reality, or have a different way of tapping into reality that I am unable to perceive. The spiritual world might indeed exist in spite of our lack of comprehension or imagination. If so, believers need to define their terms so that we blind skeptics can understand what those with superior vision are talking about.
When believers claim that a spirit caused something to come from nothing, what do they mean by “spirit”? What does “spirit exists” mean? Dealing with real entities, not abstract concepts, to exist means to occupy space and time. “To occupy” means that matter and/or energy takes up some amount of space and time, so if a spirit truly exists, it must be a substance or force in space and time.
In the Book of Acts, the early Christians were “filled with the spirit,” which came to them as “tongues of fire.”25 I doubt that happened, but the storyteller or mythmaker is informing us that those proto-Christians were initially lacking something that then came to them from somewhere else. It “filled” them up. In this story, Jesus had promised his followers that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,” which means that they did not have this “spirit” until the Day of Pentecost when a tongue-shaped flame came zooming into them, causing them to speak in different languages. (Babbling iDots.) But notice that this surgical strike from outer space targeted only believers and left the bodies of non-Christians alone. There was no collateral damage. The bible certainly treats “spirit” as if it has locality, as something that occupies space and time, attaching itself to a body. If you can have it and I can’t, then it is there and not here. Other religious traditions seem to hold a similar concept. Even those religions that claim spirit is everywhere and you have to tune into it, like a radio receiver, still mainly consider that each person perceives its own special portion of spirit. Most believers think that when they go to heaven their spirits will be distinct from each other, not just some huge amorphous blob of ether. Christians think they are going to meet Grandma in the afterlife. Here on earth, they say, a person’s “spirit” follows their body around, and (usually) stays out of other bodies. So a spirit must be something—somewhere.
When we say that something exists, we mean it can be measured. It occupies so many units of the three dimensions during so many units of time. It can be staked out, clocked, and weighed. If it can’t be measured, then we can’t say it exists. We might say it exists as a concept, not in reality—like the average number of children—but that is equivocating, confusing two different usages of “exist.” However, since a concept is a function of a physical brain, we could play a game and say that a “spirit exists” in the group of neurons that are temporarily firing while that concept is being represented. We could count the neurons involved and thereby weigh a “spirit,” or rather the weight of the neurons used to form the concept of spirit. But all concepts would weigh virtually the same, just as the recipes for angel food cake and German chocolate cake (or anything else) weigh the same, or like photographs of a violet and a volcano weigh the same. This is not what believers mean when they say “spirit exists.” Years ago the famous ether used to “exist” in many brains, but after Einstein, nobody thinks it is real. Notice that “spiritual” and “ethereal” are synonyms.
During my very first visit to Australia—in fact, my very first day, the morning after I arrived in Sydney in March 2010—I debated Cardinal George Pell at MacQuarie University on the topic of “Without God, We Are Nothing.” Pell was the Archbishop of Sydney. Today he is Number 3 at the Vatican, as the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, Pope Francis’s new finance ministry. If anyone is an expert in the faith, it would be “His Eminence Cardinal Pell.” (I couldn’t bring myself to use that title: he called me “Dan,” so I called him “George.”) During the debate, he used the word “spirit” and “spiritual” a number of times, so during cross examination, I asked him this question:
Dan: Can you define for us, using positive terms, what is a “spirit,” and how that would differ from nothing at all?
George: I just said that I can’t define “God,” but I can say something useful about “spirit.” I believe in the reality of love. I believe it’s a spiritual quality. I believe honor is something that is real. Disgrace is real. Forgiveness is real. Something spiritual is invisible, but sometimes it can be very powerful. The love of a husband and wife, the love between parents and children, they are probably the most important realities in many people’s lives. They are spiritual realities.
Dan: Let me follow up. I can define all of those things, like love, family, and feelings, in purely natural terms, as functions of an organism. But why were you not begging the question by saying that the definition of “spiritual” is love, which is spiritual? I want to know what it is. Does it occupy space? Does it occupy time? Does it have a weight? Can you measure it along a dimension? How would you know that your “spirit” is not just a concept as opposed to an actually existing thing in reality?
George: Well, you can’t measure a spirit. It is certainly not material. But the examples that I have given are very real and very powerful. Once there was an Australian poet who said that sometimes people can be at a concert and be like dogs at a concert. They hear every sound but have got no understanding of the music, because the music is something that is spiritual and beautiful and real. They can’t be reduced. They are connected with physical activities, but they can’t be reduced to those physical activities.
So I’m a dog, but I take that as a compliment. Notice that Pell said “spirit” is immaterial and invisible and can’t be measured, but it has power. Does he not know that power is measured materially? He sidestepped telling us what a “spirit” actually is. When believers are asked to define what “spirit” actually is—not to list synonyms like ghost, vision, or poltergeist; or attitudes like enthusiasm, love, emotion, or determination; but to describe the actual substance of the entity—they always define it by what it is not: intangible, noncorporeal, immaterial, ineffable, non-natural. (They might even say “the spirit is the ethereal essence.”) They never tell us anything positive. How big is it? How much does it weigh? What is its surface and how does it stay within those boundaries? What is its opacity? If they can’t give us a measurable definition, then they are giving us nothing but a couple of syllables of sound. They tell us that this … thing … blah blah … ether … this word without a definition exists outside of space and time, and is in fact the very … thing … blah blah … that possesses power to create something from nothing. They tell us that supernatural entities cannot be described in natural terms. Even though the rest of us can’t coherently hold the word in our heads, somehow they know that “it” exists. When I say that something that cannot be measured cannot exist, they respond that there is another way something can exist: outside of space and time.
So who is equivocating? To say that something cannot come from nothing unless spirit makes it happen is to say nothing at all. “Something” is a measurable entity; “spirit” is not. To say that “existence as we understand it exists as we don’t” is incoherent.
Here is a little poem I wrote for Steven Pinker, after hearing one of his talks, that I might set to music:
F-WORDS
Mystery and Ecstasy and other treble-clef words
Hint that what is Spiritual is truly inexpressible,
But the fact that Fable, Faith, and Fantasy are F-words
Shows that what is Mystical is not at all ineffable.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
—The Wizard of Oz
Even if spirit does exist in some unknowable way—in spite of my impertinence in asking for a definition—what do believers mean when they say it is “outside” of nature? Exactly where is that? If a spirit is outside of nature, it still must be somewhere, in a region “beyond.” And that is still a place. Something might indeed be outside our own observable universe in the wider cosmos, but how can anything be outside of nature? Universes within the multiverse would certainly be outside of each other, but they would still be part of the natural cosmos. If we don’t have a coherent definition of “outside of nature,” then it is meaningless to suggest that that is where the spirit or supernatural exists.
Some think that to be outside of nature is to be in another dimension. But that is incoherent. Dimensions are used to measure natural things. Dimensions are what we mean when we say something is natural: the object occupies space and time, which are charted in four dimensions, at least. The amounts of space and time that an object occupies are measured along those dimensions compared to other objects, or the distance between other objects, which give us units of measurement. If there are more than four dimensions, and there indeed may be (especially if some form of string theory or M-theory is correct), then what is measured along those additional dimensions would also be natural. Dimensions are not things. Dimensions are not places or regions or realms we can visit. Dimensions are not outside or inside of each other: they are frames of reference that give the words “there,” “region,” “outside,” and “before” the meanings that they have. They are conceptual and mathematical frames of reference that we use to measure whether one thing is inside or outside of another. If you are currently outside of my house, you are still in four dimensions (at least). Since “outside” is determined by locating an object at dimensional coordinates not contained by the space/time occupied by another object, the word cannot apply to anything other than nature itself, by definition. To say a spirit is “outside of nature” is to say it is “outside of outside,” treating a dimension itself as if it were a thing being measured along that dimension.
It makes no sense to talk of measuring a dimension. “How high is height?” and “how wide is width?” are incoherent questions. No matter what units you use, the answer is always infinite, which is no answer at all.
Time is a dimension. To say that God is outside of time is to say “God is never.” Until believers clarify their words, it is meaningless to say that a spirit is outside of nature. “Somewhere, over the rainbow” is still somewhere.26
Dividing by zero is the closest thing there is to arithmetic blasphemy.
—William Dunham27
“Can something come from nothing?” might be unanswerable because it is unaskable. Logically, mathematically unaskable.
Think of it as division. The basic idea of “come from,” as we saw, breaks an object down into smaller parts. A house “comes from” lumber, bricks, mortar, nails—trees, clay, iron—and so on. It can be divided into smaller units that add up, or multiply (because multiplication is merely successive addition) to a final product. A house (h) made of 4,000 bricks (b) could be shown as “h=4,000b” or “b=h/4,000.” Almost everything can be said to be composed of (divided by) atoms that originated somewhere else. A simple rock is made of elements that were cooked up inside a star, and those elements migrated by gravity from somewhere else. An airplane and an asteroid are made of (divided by) the elements that multiply (add) to make the final product. We could break it down further into subatomic particles, but we are still breaking it down. Even in cases where it looks like something came from something larger than itself, such as a statue carved out of a chunk of marble or a thermos filled with water from a lake, those larger sources are themselves composed of the same smaller elements.
Someday, if we do find something that is not broken down into other parts—the Prime Particle, let’s say—we will say that it is divided by itself, and stop there. (That’s what the word “atom” means: “not cut or divided,” though we quickly learned that we applied the term prematurely to a group of what we now have to call “subatomic particles,” so an atom is not really an “atom” at all.) Someone might wonder if that Prime Particle could be further subdivided, but that would increase the denominator, not decrease it. It would never be less than one. (Dividing by less than one makes a number larger, not smaller.) We would never ask of anything, “Can it be broken down into zero parts?” By definition, the number of parts of an object must be greater than zero, and greater than one. If it is one, then it has no parts.
Division by zero is one of those mathematical impossibilities that lead equations to absurdities and cause computers to crash. On its face, asking if twelve can be divided by zero looks like an honest question: “What is 12/0?” But logically, mathematically, it is incoherent. Such a question is not just illegal: it is not allowed because it is not possible. It has no comprehensible answer. This is easy to prove. When you divide one number by another you can check your result by multiplying it by the original divisor. To prove that 12/4=3, you simply multiply 3x4=12. That is logical because division is just reverse multiplication, which is addition. It is really no different from saying that 12-4=8 can be confirmed by 8+4=12. But how would you confirm the answer to 12/0? If you think 12/0=0, then check it out: you get 0x0=0, not 0x0=12. There is no way to get back to your original number. If you think the answer is one, then 12/0 is equal to 12/12, which is illogical, and still checks out to zero when you multiply. If you think the answer is infinity, you still don’t get back to 12 because infinity times zero is zero. The only way to get a number back to itself is to divide by one: 12/1=12, which checks to 12×1=12. That’s just another way of saying something is what it is.
Computer programmers know that a system will crash if an attempt is made to divide by zero, so a specific check for that danger has to be hard-coded into the software. When computers are asked to divide by zero, the calculation is not made; it is sidestepped. No answer is given. No answer is possible. Some systems handle it gracefully with an alert, and others simply stop. (Try it on your calculator to see what happens.) If the programmers don’t guard against it, the system will go crazy. Notice that the result of trying to divide by zero is not “nothing.” That would be saying it is zero. The result is no answer at all. It is utter meaninglessness.
Now follow this: asking if something can come from nothing is just like asking if it can be divided by zero. You can’t say yes, no, or maybe. “What is s/0?” Don’t even try to reply. It is not a valid question.
The reason we cannot divide by zero—the reason it is a nonsensical question—is because “divide” means to “share.” It’s where we get the phrase “divvy up.” How can three children share twelve cookies? By giving four cookies to each child. But if you don’t have any children who want the cookies, then it makes no sense to talk about sharing the cookies. You can only share (divide) when you have a positive nonzero number of divisors (children). If the number of numerators (cookies) is negative, we are talking about sharing a debt, which is the same thing in obverse. If the number is zero, we can’t talk about sharing at all. We wouldn’t ask, “How can no children share twelve cookies?” They can’t because they don’t exist. Division becomes meaningless. Although dividing (sharing) and “coming from” are not identically parallel concepts, they both require a nonzero divisor. A computer function called “Share(),” for example, might accept any numerical parameter, including zero, but inside the function it better trap the zero or it will crash. Most programmers know that it is better to trap the mistake before it even gets into the function. Don’t even go there. Sharing doesn’t work with zero. You wouldn’t say “the cookies are shared by zero children,” you would say “the cookies are not shared at all.” In the same way, we would not say “something comes from nothing,” we would say “something does not come from anything at all.” It completely turns things upside down when we change “not come from anything” to “come from nothing.” It turns nothing into something, which is why you can’t divide by zero. When we say “something comes from nothing,” we mean it doesn’t come from anything, not that it actually comes from nothing. It doesn’t have to come from anything. It divides by one. It simply exists on its own.
Some believers might think this actually makes their case because it proves that something cannot have come from nothing, but that is the point. It “comes from nothing” not in the sense that “nothing” is its source, but in the sense that it doesn’t come from anything at all, in the same sense that the cookies are not shared by zero children, but are not shared at all. It’s not that something can or cannot come from nothing; it’s that the question is bogus. A nonsensical question can’t be the basis for any conclusion. It is true that we can’t divide by zero, and can’t even try, but we can divide by one. This means that although “can something come from nothing?” is incoherent and should not be asked, “can something come from something?” is quite valid, and has the possible result that “something” is its own answer. Ultimately, when the cause or source of the cosmos gets down to the simplest brute fact—when the divisor finally shrinks to one—the question will be “what is something divided by one?” The answer will be “itself.” Since believers think “God divided by one” is a valid question while “God divided by zero” is not, why do they not allow me to think the same of the cosmos?
There actually is a sneaky way to do an end run and “divide by zero” without causing a crash, and that is to divide zero by itself. This is a trick because we can’t actually divide by zero, and would never need to, but based on the axiom that any number divided by itself (n/n) is 1, we might logically (not mathematically) conclude that 0/0=1. This checks out because 1x0=0. So if 0/0=1, then “nothing from nothing” equals something. Something from nothing. If nothing truly existed (0/0), it would be something.
This is not a useless trick. The imaginary number i does not exist in reality. It is the square root of -1, which is impossible and incoherent. However, it can appear in an equation if it cancels itself out, such as in an oscillating electrical formula where the concept (not a real-world measurement) balances and disappears. The term “i/i” contains elements that make no sense on their own, but is useful precisely because it resolves to 1.
Since we do have evidence of the cosmos, and no evidence or coherent definition of a spirit, then which is more likely to be the numerator when the denominator gets to one? Which is more likely—the known cosmos or the unknown god—to be the something that doesn’t have to come from anything?
No one has ever seen God.
—John 1:18
Many of my debate opponents agree with me that there is actually no evidence for a god. If there were, we would not be having the debate. No one would be asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” because there would be better ways to argue. If there were truly evidence for a god, they would put it on the table. By now someone should have won the Nobel Prize for pointing out such evidence.
A few debate opponents actually do try to offer evidence: fulfilled prophecy, biblical foreknowledge of modern scientific findings, historical and contemporary miracles, “changed lives,” answers to prayer, and the resurrection of Jesus. But if we scratch beneath the surface, as I have done in Godless and in Losing Faith in Faith, and many others have done elsewhere, these are easily dismissed. Since there is no real evidence, most debaters resort to “how do you explain that?” arguments, which are just various examples of the god of the gaps. They give evidence for current gaps or disagreements in scientific knowledge—such as the origin of the first living cell or replicating molecule, or the cause of the Big Bang, or the low likelihood of the initial physical constants possessing the precise values to allow for a universe with life,28 or the astronomically low odds of an amino acid forming by blind chance, or the supposed inexplicability of what appear to be “irreducibly complex” features of the cell—curiously ignoring the fact that those gaps are what drive science (and some of those gaps are already closed)—but they never offer evidence for the god itself that supposedly closes those gaps. Evidence for a gap is not evidence for a god. They simply assert that their god hypothesis (or presupposition, as some theists honestly phrase it) is the best explanation for our current lack of knowledge. This is an argument from ignorance, not evidence.
Granting the lack of evidence, some believers come back with the brilliant parry: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” So there! Since we atheists cannot absolutely prove that their supernatural god does not exist, they can pretend to be justified in maintaining their belief in what might be true, what is true to them by faith or presupposition. But, then, since no one can prove to me that leprechauns do not exist, can I assert that they do? Look at a box of Lucky Charms! If the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, can you argue that I should stop believing in leprechauns? Of course you can. The absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it is certainly evidence of absence. Absence is not a thing, but evidence of absence definitely is a thing. You can hold it in your hand.
Suppose during one of my debates—perhaps while we are discussing evidence—one of the organizers were to rush to the stage and announce that there was a bomb threat, advising us all to exit the building. We would hurry outside, a safe distance from the building, waiting while the police and experts do their job. After a while, suppose that the authorities announce it was just a hoax, that a thorough search of the building had been conducted and no bomb was found. They tell us it is now safe to enter the building. Would you go back in? I probably would. I think most of us would go back. We would have little fear because we would possess the assurance of the bomb experts that the building is clean.
But what would we actually have? Do we have proof that the bomb does not exist? No. But we do have evidence that the bomb does not exist. We have the results of the search. I presume that the experts would have moved methodically from room to room, opening drawers, boxes, and closets, looking in trash cans, under desks, behind curtains and vents, etc., applying their experience and training. Perhaps they used dogs to sniff for explosives, or that special tape that picks up minute particles of chemicals. I suppose they would produce a diagram or chart of the entire building and check off each location searched. When finished, that chart, indicating an absence of evidence, would be evidence of absence. You could hold it in your hand. It would be enough to convince you and me to go back into the building. It is not proof, but absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.
If something truly does not exist, the only possible evidence for its nonexistence would be the absence of evidence for its existence where we should expect it to be. Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion that “a universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one.” So far, conducting a comprehensive scientific search of the structure of the universe—certainly more thorough than any bomb squad—the chart has come up empty. We have evidence that God does not exist. We don’t have proof, but it is safe to go back in the building.
Why are theists free to say leprechauns do not exist but atheists are not free to say the same about God? Well, because they believe in God and not in leprechauns. When Anselm concluded his famous ontological argument, thinking he had neatly proven the existence of God using mere words (which truly is something from nothing), he couldn’t resist making a prayer with a jab at us nonbelievers: “Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalms 14:1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that you do exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool?”29 If anybody was dull, it was Anselm. I won’t call him a fool, though he was certainly rude in spite of his intelligence. I think most believers are kinder than Anselm and would never stoop to name-calling or hurl insults, like the bible does, in order to belittle opposition or score a rhetorical point against atheists. I think most honest believers who truly wrestle with definitions and assumptions can admit that we atheists are just as committed to clarity as they claim to be. We disagree, but disagreement is not a crime. If more believers would respect the motives of atheists, wouldn’t that be something, from nothing?