What is Nothing?

Transcript What is Nothing?

[Before the discussion starts, an interview with a leader of Reasonable Faith is conducted. The actual podcast discussion, and this transcript, picks up at the 15 minute 8 second mark.]

Kevin Harris: Let’s get to some questions, Dr. Craig, and we get a lot of them at ReasonableFaith.org.

Well, there are a couple of things going on here. Not only his question about nothingness and is it even possible for nothing to exist, but he also seems to be struggling a little bit.

Dr. Craig: I noticed that, and I wonder why. He doesn’t seem to let on as to what it is that is causing him difficulty. The language of holding on rather than flourishing is disturbing.

Kevin Harris: I just know in my past, in my walk with the Lord, that sometimes I felt like I was on hold. In my 20s and 30s, until I get a certain question answered, “You know what? I don’t think I can keep going with the vigor in my relationship with the Lord until I get this issue settled.” God has always been very gracious to me, Bill. I have gotten the answers, not that I know it all, but to my satisfaction my disturbing questions God has graciously given me resources and insight to the point that I could move on. But this does seem like, from this college student, something that kind of has him on hold a little bit.

Dr. Craig: Right, and that is unfortunate because I don’t think everyone is as fortunate as you are, Kevin. I think many times Christians will not be able to receive the answers to their questions because perhaps they are geographically isolated – think of someone in Siberia or in the Sudan – where they just don’t have the resources to get answers. Therefore, I think that the key to successful Christian living is not having all your questions answered; it is learning how to live victoriously with unanswered questions. So it is important not to let these sort of unanswered questions put our faith on hold. We need to realize that as finite persons we are not going to have all of the answers, but we have good grounds for believing what we believe and we move on in the hopes that as we further read and explore we will find more answers.

Kevin Harris: So what is his problem he has? Is it even possible for nothing to exist?

Dr. Craig: Well, I think what is odd about this question, Kevin, is that the theist (at least if he is of a Leibnizian sort) agrees with the questioner that it is impossible that nothing exists. That is exactly Leibniz’s point. There must be a logically necessary being, or a metaphysically necessary being, which is the reason why anything at all exists. So the heart of the Leibnizian version of the cosmological argument is that there is a metaphysically necessary being which is the sufficient reason for the existence of everything else. So I actually agree with him that it is impossible for nothing to exist. There is no possible world in which nothing exists. God exists in every possible world and is a metaphysically necessary being.

Kevin Harris: Prior to the Big Bang (notice I said prior because it is kind of difficult to say before the Big Bang) was there some sort of just void? There was no space, no time.

Dr. Craig: That may be the source of his difficulty. When one says “prior to” one has to mean explanatorily prior, not chronologically prior. When we say there was nothing before the Big Bang, what we mean is there was not anything before the Big Bang. We don’t mean that there was something before the Big Bang and it was nothing. That would be a source of confusion. Rather, what one negates is the whole sentence – you negate the sentence “There was something before the Big Bang.” It is false that there was something before the Big Bang. So it may be that he is simply being misled by the use of the word “nothing” as a substantive, as a noun, as a common noun, thinking that nothing must refer to something – some sort of a void. And that is not, in fact, the case anymore than say the pronoun nobody refers to somebody. It means it is not anybody. Similarly, it is not anything prior to the Big Bang. So in saying that the universe began to exist and was preceded by nothing, one means the universe began to exist and there was not anything prior to its beginning. [1]

Kevin Harris: It is difficult sometimes to really crank that down as to what we mean by nothing. We can say there is nothing in the room which means there is a room with no furniture, no fixtures, or anything like that. It can also mean just an absolute absence of anything. So when we say nothing, sometimes we have to really get our definitions straight, don’t we?

Dr. Craig: Right, we have to be very careful or we can very easily be tricked by words. Our language can often misled us. There is this wonderful incident in the Odyssey of Homer where you remember Ulysses confronts the Cyclops and the Cyclops says, “What is your name?” and he says “My name is nobody.” Thereafter, he blinds the Cyclops and the other Cyclopses ask him, “Who is attacking you? Who has injured you?” And he says, “Nobody has injured me! Nobody has put my eye out!” And they say, “Well then why are you so disturbed if nobody has done anything to you?” Well, you can see there Homer is making fun of the way in which this word “nobody” can be taken to mean somebody who is named “nobody.” Similarly, this reader, I think, is thinking of nothing as being something which is nothing. And that is not the way the word is to be used. It is a negative term.

Kevin Harris: I think another example is quite often when we say there was nothing prior to the Big Bang, but God was there. Isn’t God something? What we would, I guess, try to fine tune that to is that there was nothing material or spatial or time prior to that.

Dr. Craig: Again, you’ve got to be very careful that you understand the word “prior” to mean “explanatorily prior” or “causally prior” not “chronologically” or “temporally prior.” I would say that God is not chronologically prior to the Big Bang. He is not temporally prior to the Big Bang. He is explanatorily or causally prior to the Big Bang. Material reality comes into being at the Big Bang, so it is obviously not causally or explanatorily prior to itself. It is contingent, brought into existence, by God. So God has a sort of causal and explanatory priority to the universe but not a temporal priority.

Kevin Harris: Here is another question, Dr. Craig. He says,

Bill, in a nutshell, he is asking, “How do you answer the charge that Christianity is just a white man’s, or has become a white man’s, religion?

Dr. Craig: I would say that anyone who is aware of the demographics of Christianity today and its growth will see that that impression is just completely mistaken. In fact, Christianity is not a white man’s religion. In 1989 the number of Christians in Asia exceeded the number of Christians in North America. By 1991 the number of Christians in Asia exceeded the number of Christians in the entire Western world. So if anything, Christianity is today an oriental religion. It is primarily Asian. It is Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and Indian. It turns out that the Caucasian branch of Christendom will be merely the initial segment that God used in Western Europe to spawn the worldwide missionary movement that carried the Gospel throughout the world, and that in the end it will be just a tiny fragment of Christendom that is Caucasian. The overwhelming majority of Christians today are black and oriental.

Kevin Harris: Bill, do you have any insight as to whether Christianity really is declining in the Western world?

Dr. Craig: My understanding of the demographics is that in the West the growth rates of Christianity, or at least evangelical Christianity, are basically flat. We are not losing. We are holding our own. There is a slight increase in the United States, praise the Lord, but in the Western world in general, because of the precipitous declines in Western Europe, Christianity is basically flat lining in the Western world. It is in the third world – in Latin America, Africa, and Asia – that Christianity is growing at well over twice the growth of the world’s population. [2] It is far outstripping the increase in the world’s population in these non-Western countries. So it is becoming increasingly non-Western and non-Caucasian in its nature.

Kevin Harris: This brings up a question about American evangelicalism and America’s attitude toward religion in general. It seems like there is kind of what I called an adolescent rebellion that took place in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and that is, “You know, we can’t have that stodgy old religion from our parents and grandparents. We need to look for insight into other options.” An embrace of the East and Eastern mysticism began.

Dr. Craig: It certainly did begin, didn’t it, in the 60s?

Kevin Harris: Pop culture led to the New Age movement which is kind of an embrace of Eastern mysticism. Pop culture kind of played up on that as being the rebellious black sheep of the family saying if you really want to get insight then you really need to go to the oriental man down the street – the Karate Kid – because they hold to the path to life and your grandpa, the deacon at the church, he doesn’t know much. So perhaps that has also led to a notion that Christianity is a stodgy old white man’s religion when nothing could be further from the truth. It certainly didn’t start that way.

Dr. Craig: That’s a good point. It didn’t start that way. We need to understand that Christianity is birthed out of Judaism and it is a Middle Eastern religion which spread throughout the world, into China and into North Africa as well as into Europe. But it was in Europe that of course Western civilization flourished and then had the financial resources for carrying the Gospel to the rest of the world. Today if you visit China for example, as I have with the Society of Christian Philosophers, it is remarkable what Chinese academics themselves are saying. As part of the outreach of the Society of Christian Philosophers, we’ve been meeting jointly with professors of philosophy at top universities in China and talking about philosophical issues. What has stunned us is to hear the Chinese academics themselves saying to us that China needs a new philosophical foundation for its morality and for its culture if it is to go forward into the 21^st century. At the last conference I was at at Foo Dung University in Shanghai, one of the Chinese philosophers said Confucianism is basically dead, it cannot be revived. He said there is no other religion other than Christianity which has a chance of serving as a foundation for the moral fabric of Chinese society. He said what we need to recognize today is that Christianity is not a foreign religion. He said Christianity in China is a flourishing indigenous Chinese religion and we need to embrace it as such. Well, we were just blown away by this sort of admission on the part of this Chinese academic and this embrace of Christianity as an indigenous Chinese faith.

Kevin Harris: Wow. Bottom line is Christ came for everyone.

Dr. Craig: Yes. And before the throne, it says in the book of Revelation, it says there will be people from every tongue, and tribe, and nation, and people giving praise to the Lamb and to God. [3]