Checkmate in 3 moves

Not exactly. Lurking behind each and every one of Mind Over Matter's posts is his true motivation for posting here: to convince us all that God must exist.

So:

3) therefore, God must exist.

I would suggest that he grow some balls and properly contextualize his posts himself so I don't have to do it for him, but he's probably employed this strategy so there is less of a chance that he'll be moderated.

 

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Yes.
Example.
All swans are white. Incorrect Premise.

Proof: Some swans are black.

So, getting back to
"Out of nothing comes nothing".

If Physicists like Stephen Hawking are correct, then out of nothing comes everything in the Universe.

 

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How about being the Captain of the Energy Audit thread and let's see if Hawking was right!

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http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=111516
How Do they Know ours is a Zero Energy Universe?

 

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No thanks.
It's got PP on it.
I've seen enough of bumps and bubbles for one week.

 

Well some other time then. You make me smile, which is what you are here for. Moderating through humour. Keep up the good work.

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Do you really believe your power of reason has been magically produced by purposeless particles which don't even know they exist, are incapable of controlling themselves and can't even prove they have produced everything?!

 

I know what you mean. But there is a way to program particles as they really work in a computer. It took me years to figure out how to do it. It is completely none-paradoxical. I like it, and I'm very fussy about what I allow.

 

Is that you making judgement decisions for the computer? Were you thinking of you Tank program where you say you made the Tanks think? What was it really. Just from looking at it we can't tell what sort of improvement they made or why?
What was the basis of improvement? If we learn to pick ripe fruit for it tastes better, maybe we can evolve reasoning as well, for it will give better results and still be particles.
But the secret was in the programming, could the computer write the program that gave it better reasoning to write an even better program and so on?

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I made the physics for the tank. I gave it the ability to move each track individually. And I made it get points for collecting mines. That's a cheat, but interesting to watch. It notices the mines, and I didn't tell it to. It's fun.

But my Universe Generator is different. I just didn't allow a paradox in the building of it. And that's all. So building a Universe isn't an instruction at all. There is no scoring routine. So the particles don't gain anything by doing anything. They are just particles. So you just watch. There's no gravity, there's no movement, there's no heat, there's no waves. I put colour in just to make it look nice, and so you can watch.

 

Come on. This is a low blow. Obviously, there are several different definitions of "nothing," and not everyone in this thread is working with the same one.

 

I think the OP is talking about the standard logical and philosophical definition of nothingness. And he would be right, "out of nothing comes nothing" is simply axiomatic.

 

It's not that simple, because there would be no logical and philosophical definition, so its a paradox. Nobody would ever be able to utter those words.

 

Logical/Philosophical "Nothingness"

Philosophically and logically speaking, nothingness has no being. On its own it does not even have the potential to be something. "Nothing" or "nothingness" has no potential to create anything or become anything on its own. If it did, it would not be "nothing" or "nothingness" but something that has potential. Nothingness cannot become actual or be something by itself. Nothingness can only become something as a result of creation (creation ex nihilo). Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit is axiomatic on this view.
On this view, one can only say what "nothingness" is not or what it does not have.
"Nothingness" can only be abstracted from what it cannot be. It has no duration, distance, temperature, energy, place or space etc. To ask for whether nothingness has any of these attributes is simply nonsensical and illogical.
To say "nothingness occurs" is nonsensical.
To say "nothingness" has a place (e.g. is everywhere) or is empty space or space-time is nonsensical.

So there is not anything to suggest that the empty space-time of quantum mechanics or general relativity are pure "nothingness" in the philosophical sense of "nothingness". The energy of empty space-time, so-called S/PN, in quantum physics and general relativity is nonzero (see Krauss for example).

 

It MUST NOT resemble anything created from nothing.

 

Why?

 

You can state these as assumptions, but as has been noted, it is not at all clear that something cannot come spontaneously from nothing...in fact our knowledge of science requires just that.

As for the second assumption, virtual particles can and do affect the real world without every becoming actual particles. So it's not clear that potentiality is dependent on actuality unless you mean that the concept of the former is dependent on the latter...but then the concept is only relevant as a philosophical question, and not as a description of what exists. There is a small, but real, chance that some day when you go to open a door you will teleport to the other side of that door. That is a potentiality that is predicted by science. It's also predicted that the odds of it happening are so remote that in the entire history of the universe a lump of approximately you mass has almost certainly never teleported such a distance. So there is a potentiality we can predict that is very unlikely to have ever been an actuality.

I take it, though, that you are making the philosophical point. In that case I find that to be a matter of semantics only. We define potentiality by reference to an actuality, because that is the easiest way to grasp it, but if we did not exist there could still be a system that has the potential to change which has in fact never changed.

Also, you say that potentiality cannot "infinitely precede" actuality, a statement that only makes sense if time exists (and is infinite). The entire assumption then is grounded in the universe as we know it and therefore only has relevance in periods after the universe (and time) were already in existence. For anything that is not a part of and within the universe, it doesn't seem to apply at all.

As for 3, given that 2 is grounded in time, I am not sure why your "actual reality" would be timeless. But imagine it were. If it were timeless, would you expect this reality to be unchanging and in some sense are you suggesting the notion of what is often cited as the "unchanging" nature of God? I don't think the idea of an unchanging God works. That God can't so much as change his mind or interact with the world in any way, shape or form. (Any interaction would be a change as one could say that God was in one state, and then was in another...thus changed. For example, one could say as of 10,000 B.C.E. (measured on Earth), "God has never spoken to Moses." Then, later from our perspective, God speaks to Moses, and one can then say that God has spoken to Moses. Thus, a property applicable to the unchanging God has changed.

There are several ways around that, potentially (though all of them seem to require that some things about God can change), but I am curious what your thinking is.

 

Well sure when you make absolutes like that your bound to be proven incorrect.

Proof: swans are white, but in reality if we fed them shrimp they would turn pink.

That would mean nothing and everything mean the same thing! What a novel idea for the great physicists of this day to surmise!

 

If everything and nothing are the same? We live in the nothing , We ae nothing? You owe the bank nothing?
Not an easy argument to win.

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If you have nothing you give the bank nothing. If you have everything you give the doctors nothing.

If you owe someone you should pay them something so he can collect everything you owe; you will owe nothing.

Tis only a matter of our very skewed perspectives.

 

Is 'nothing' a place? Is it a thing? Is it such that something can be said to "come out" of it? Or is nothing simply the absence of this, of that, and (by conceptual extension) of everything?

Part of the problem with thinking about 'nothing' is that we can't think of anything without making it the object of our thought, and hence objectifying it. So we naturally slip into thinking of 'nothing' as if it was a particularly blank and intangible kind of something. It's probably better thought of as a boundary concept, the edge both of being and of thought itself, beyond which there is no 'other side'.

Something "coming out of nothing" sounds like a description of a causal anomaly to me, a being or event that simply appears and commences at time t=0 with no prior cause or explanation. I think that would be kind of weird, but I can't say that I'm convinced that it's impossible.

That sounds like the ancient Greek idea of plenitude. (I believe Aristotle accepted it.) It's the idea that if something is potentially possible, then it has to actually be true at some point. So anything that's possible has to actually exist somewhere in space and time.

You seem to be treating that idea as an axiom, so why should I believe it? I'm inclined to suspect that the universe contains an effectively infinite number of unrealized possibilities, most of which probably will never be actualized. Of course, the ontological nature of possibilities remains very mysterious.

I fail to see how that conclusion follows from your numbers one and two, that nothing comes from nothing and that potentiality is dependent on actuality.

What does "absolute" reality mean? 'Absolute' compared to what? Why must it be timeless?

Why can't we imagine a temporally infinite chain of causal events with no initial origin that satisfies your two conditions?

And why can't both time and being simply commence at t=0 without their having "come from" anywhere or having been caused by anything? Again, that's a big-time causal anomaly admittedly (the biggest imaginable) but it doesn't seem to be a-priori impossible. Nor does it seem to me to contradict your two axioms.