#791 Nothing Doing
July 10, 2022Hi Dr. Craig,
Thank you so much for your ministry and for all that you do for the Kingdom! I'm a pastor that leads evangelism and outreach at our church and I'm currently teaching the Kalam in an apologetics class; I also use the Kalam in evangelism conversations and greatly appreciate all the work you've done to make this argument stronger!
With regards to the first premise of the Kalam, is the objection that the "the universe began to exist without a cause" is the same as saying that "the cause of the universe IS nothing"? In other words, is calling X "nothing" is the same as saying "there is no X"? Or are those two statements actually two different objections? I ask because I'm wondering if a refutation of the second objection would also be a refutation of the first (since the statements would be identical).
Thanks so much,
Kirk
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
For those who are unfamiliar with the kalām cosmological argument, Kirk, let me state the first premise of the argument to which you refer:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
or, preferably,
1*. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning.
Your questions concerning responses to this premiss are very apt.
First: Yes, to say, "the universe began to exist without a cause" is the same as saying, "the cause of the universe IS nothing." Indeed, my first line of argument in support of the causal premiss is that it is impossible for something to come into being from nothing. Here’s what I say about the first premiss of the kalām cosmological argument in my projected Systematic Philosophical Theology:
First and foremost, the causal principle is rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing. For to come into existence without a cause of any sort is to come into being from nothing. To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused out of nothing is to quit doing serious metaphysics and to resort to magic.
Second: Yes, “calling X ‘nothing’ is the same as saying ‘there is no X’.” In saying this, you rightly discern that “nothing” is not a referring term but a negative quantifier meaning “not anything.” You thereby expose the misrepresentation of science by popularizers like Lawrence Krauss, who tells us with a straight face,
“There are a variety of forms of nothing, [and] they all have physical definitions.”
“The laws of quantum mechanics tell us that nothing is unstable.”
“70% of the dominant stuff in the universe is nothing.”
“There’s nothing there, but it has energy.”
“Nothing weighs something.”
“Nothing is almost everything.”[1]
All of these claims take the word “nothing” to be a singular term referring to something, for example, the quantum vacuum or quantum fields. These are physical realities and therefore clearly something. To call these realities nothing is at best misleading, guaranteed to confuse laypeople, and at worst a deliberate misrepresentation of science.
Properly understood, the claim “The laws of quantum mechanics tell us that nothing is unstable,” for example, means “The laws of quantum mechanics tell us that everything is stable,” which is patently false. “There’s nothing there, but it has energy” means “There is not anything there, but it has energy,” which is meaningless, since “it” has no antecedent. A statement like “Nothing weighs something” is ungrammatical nonsense. How do they get away with it?
So the person who asserts that the universe came into being without a cause is asserting that the universe came into existence from nothing, where “nothing” is not a word referring to something but a quantifier meaning “not anything.”
[1] All of these quotations are from Krauss’s videos posted on YouTube, including his Asimov Memorial “Nothing Debate” 1:20:25; American Atheists lecture 26:23; Richard Fidler interview; discussion with Richard Dawkins at Arizona State Origins Project 37min.; and Stockholm lecture 46:37.
- William Lane Craig