Micah said: Where is the evidence of nothing?...the belief that something comes from nothing is based on the false premise that nothing existed.
Craig replied: Basically there are only 2 choices: a) the universe always existed or b) it came into existence from nothing. We have no better evidence for a) than for b). dmb says: I'm with Micah here. "Nothing" is a concept that works perfectly well on a everyday, practical level. I have "nothing" in my pocket. He went fishing and caught "nothing". It is simply the opposite of something. And on that level, we know perfectly well what "nothing" actually means in experience. It is quite another thing to imagine that the universe does not exist or to imagine the total absence of everything. And Craig's "only 2 choices" is another matter too, one that strikes me as a theological construction. I mean, why couldn't the universe come into existence from something rather than nothing? And in terms of physics and cosmology, does the word "always" have any meaning? I think not. But even if those really were our only choices, we simply can't know and it makes no practical difference one way or the other. Did the man ever get around the squirrel? Was there ever "nothing" at all? And what would that be like for the real estate market? I think this is the poster-child of fake philosophical problems. Its a case of taking abstract ideas and posing questions about them as if they were actual realities separate and distinct from the concrete experience from which these abstractions are drawn. I'd like to add that "nothingness" has another meaning that doesn't suffer from these fallacies and which is more compatible with the MOQ. In this sense, nothingness is actually quite something. It refers to an undifferentiated whole, an experience in which reality is not divided into distinct entities. It is the experience of "no-thing-ness". It is that one hemisphere of the brain left still working after what's-her-name's stoke, when she experienced "nirvana". This is why the mystics talk about unity and union and being one with everything. In that sense, nothing is the One. Again, this describes a category of experience not a metaphysical entity or some other reality above and beyond the experience itself. That's what I mean by saying this kind of "nothing" is really something. And just for the record, I do have something in my pocket. I can't say what's in there, of course, without bringing up a whole lot of complicated theological questions. And telling you which pocket holds the item (or items) would entail some radical metaphysical speculations, naturally. But I can tell you that I'm gonna smoke some of it, thereby converting it into a sort of nothingness. _________________________________________________________________ The other season of giving begins 6/24/08. Check out the i’m Talkathon. http://www.imtalkathon.com?source=TXT_EML_WLH_SeasonOfGiving Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
