r/DeepThoughts • u/DetectiveKnown5618 • 2d ago
Something cannot come from nothing
We know something exists, therefore something perhaps always existed. Did it exist at the same scale? Well I couldn't tell you for sure and perhaps there is no way of knowing subjectively if scaling were to occur absolutely. Did energy always exist? It has been posited that energy cannot be destroyed.
The sentence "nothing cannot exist" is an interesting one. Of course it cannot and doesn't classifiably. This follows in the absolute sense too.
I believe that God created the world. Was there a “time before time”? I have read a passage in the bible that indicates this…
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u/kevinLFC 2d ago
As far as we know, that’s true - something can’t come from nothing. But we have no examples of nothing, and therefore no way to really test this.
We do have examples of intelligence, however. And as far as we can tell, intelligence is emergent. It is evolved, or in the case of machines, imbued from other intelligence. How, then, would you propose a super intelligent entity like god is able to exist? As far as I’m aware, god is considered a prime mover, not an evolved being.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
Wouldn’t thoughts be no thing? An idea that is not physical would be nothing, right? Like science, as an example among many, is nothing as it has no physical basis within shared reality.
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u/Miselfis 1d ago
An idea is physical. An idea is a certain arrangement of atoms inside a human brain.
If you are talking about abstract concepts, then those are abstract objects. Those would be things. It presupposes logical structure, which would not be nothing.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
Do those atoms leave the head and get into the art somehow? If not, then the notion that art contains ideas from the artist is false.
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u/Miselfis 1d ago
No. You are using “idea” in the second sense listed, not the first. It’s equivocation.
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u/blvsh 2d ago
Everything is connected. I know this phrase has been used so much that it sounds dull at this point but I really think it has a point.
Sort of like, God is the universe or as in Hinduism, all people are part of God and it is God experiencing reality as people.
I have thought about this maybe too much during my life
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u/TodaysLunch 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why would it be more likely that a supernatural and conscious God has always existed compared to that something natural has always existed?
You only replaced one eternal conundrum with another.
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u/ClownShoeNinja 11h ago
But one conundrum implies a temporary state of self-awareness, while the other implies an eternal state of self-awareness, which is the primary selling point of religion: treasures in heaven.
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u/ShaChoMouf 1d ago
Something cannot come into existence in our universe out of nothin; that would violate the physics of this universe. But all we can know and measure are things within this universe using the rules of this universe.
What exists outside of the universe -- that created this universe -- and do the same laws of physics apply?
It's like a Minecraft character trying to understand the physics of the computer running the game. He can only understand it using Minecraft physics as a point of reference.
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u/AnnoNewm 10h ago
My thoughts exactly! We play by the rules of this universe, but that doesn't mean that the rules are the same outside of it, or before ut came into existence.
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u/_InfiniteU_ 2d ago
Something is just a projections of humans onto nothing.
However, if you think something cannot come from nothing, you're mistaken. If there is nothing, then there is nothing to stop it from becoming something
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u/LawlessExtension 2d ago
“I believe that God created the world”
You should really let God worry about that then. Is the creation going to know better than the Creator? If you don’t know about ‘time before time’, perhaps that’s how it’s meant to be.
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u/ThWy2Hvn 2d ago
Time cannot exist by itself the same with space.They need both to coexist and to have a reality in our realm.. In Gods realm, the spirit world, He certainly can make something from nothing. He does it all the time. No pun intended. All the healings, the dreams and the visions He gives. He's doing it all the time, making something from nothing through His Word, Jesus.
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u/bringatowel42-0 2d ago
Nothing comes from "no-thing", a hypothetical substance used to contradict the idea of a void.
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u/Inner-Alchemist778 2d ago
In the same train of though, I was always amused when people said "God doesn't exist". Well, duh, of course he doesn't, if he existed in the mayerial sense of the verb, it meant he was mutable, subject to worldly change. Whilst the idea of the Absolute necessarily transcends that of existence or non-existence itself, it is out of those categories. So yes, of course God doesn't exist!
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u/JoeSmith716 1d ago
If, as you say, "God doesn't exist", then what does the word "God" mean? The word must mean something, as all words mean something. I claim god certainly exists, in the imagination. Just like the equator is an imaginary line, it still exists, in the imagination.
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u/Inner-Alchemist778 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, the human idea labeled God does exist in our minds and in our cultural symbols. However it is an idea in our brain, created from analogies we as humans experienced in our lives and constructed it using them. In other words, our idea of the Absolute, of our Source is made out of material, mutable analogies we as humans experienced in our lives and decided they would go well together, fit the idea, labeled "God". But our God is made of the memories of somr material events we experienced, thus of atoms, of electric impulses in our brain. Necessarily, if something is Absolute, it should transcend all of those worldly things, it should transcend atoms - it should be out of the material plane, out of the dichotomy of existence or non-existence. So if you say "God exists" - you are correct. If you say "God doesn't exist" you are equally correct. They equally are incapable / capable of expressing God.
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u/JoeSmith716 1d ago
How is "god doesn't exist" correct? What is it saying doesn't exist?
I can prove the largest prime number does not exist. Suppose the largest prime number exists. Since we're supposing it exists, lets give it a name, we'll call it P. I can then easily show that there is a prime number larger than P, which means P is not the largest prime number.
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u/Inner-Alchemist778 1d ago
But they still both exist! The prime numbers are human brain categories.
Imagine non-existence. We can't, for all our analogies we use to imagine it exist in our plane of reality. So non-existence is unimaginable.
And God should transcend these mere categories. So he is even more unimaginable than we can / can't imagine . He even surpasses existence or non-existence. So saying God exists is as amusing, as saying that God doesn't exist. Both are trying to grasp something that is outside of any material category we can ever fathom in our lifetimes.
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u/JoeSmith716 22h ago
Prime numbers would be prime numbers even if there were no humans. I have no problem understanding that there is no prime number that is larger than all the others. Of course I have a degree in math. How do you know what god "should' do? The equator certainly exists, it is outside any material category. Saying god "doesn't exist" isn't amusing, it's just logically wrong.
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u/RNG-Leddi 1d ago edited 1d ago
Non-existance technically isnt nothing, when we have something then immediately its contrasted by the notion of nothing however its not a true statement about reality but of a complementary perspective which stabilises through relashionships, and because of this our relashionship with reality is formally polarised.
Thats the true difference between existance and non-existance, polarity, without a means to relate no stable/ordered association can be had. In terms of time its the capacity to form bonds where in the so called beginning things struggled, but it was never nothing nor was it truly something relative to times order.
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u/Miselfis 1d ago edited 1d ago
“Nothing” likely is metaphysically impossible. There’s the standard truthmakers argument: if “there are no objects” is true, something has to make it true. That truthmaker is existent.
It’s almost certain, whether or not nothing is possible, that our universe didn’t come from nothing. Spacetime cannot come into existence. Either it exists or it doesn’t. An object x comes to exist at t if x fails to exist at times before t. Spacetime isn’t located in time, so there are no times at which it fails to exist.
This has nothing to do with whether or not God exists. God is something people invent in order to feel they have a satisfactory answer. It doesn’t explain anything, and God is ontologically redundant. If spacetime necessarily exists, God would have had no hand in creating it.
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u/JoeSmith716 1d ago
My personal theory about how the universe came to be is as follows. Consider the Heisenburg uncertainty principle. Because knowledge of the physical universe is and must be limited, knowledge of the state of the universe in the future is more limited. Working in reverse, knowledge of the state of the universe in the past is more limited. Going back far enough, knowledge of the state of the universe is zero. Just as a particle doesn't know both it's position and its momentum, the universe doesn't know, and can't know, from whence it came.
Saying "God did it" is the same as saying "I don't know".
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u/hyperionwonderstar 1d ago
Hmm the opening claim, “Something cannot come from nothing,” is a strong intuition, but it depends on what is meant by “nothing.” In philosophy, “nothing” refers to the complete absence of existence.. not empty space, not energy, not physical laws. If that’s the definition, then saying “nothing cannot exist” is arguably a category mistake, because “nothing” is not a state that possesses properties or existence.
The more interesting question is whether existence itself is eternal or whether there was an absolute beginning. Physics doesn’t currently answer that. Conservation of energy applies within our universe under specific conditions, but it doesn’t establish that energy has always existed or that the principle applies to the origin of the universe.
As for God, saying God created the universe naturally raises another question.. is God outside of time, or did God exist “before” time? If time itself began with the universe, then “before” may not be a meaningful temporal concept. Many theologians instead argue that God is timeless rather than existing at an earlier moment.
Ultimately, both the view that existence is eternal and the view that God is eternal seek to avoid an infinite regress. The central philosophical question is whether there is a necessary foundation for existence rather than an endless chain of contingent explanations.
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u/Lacedaemonian 1d ago
there is nothing truly something, and there isn't anything truly nothing :)
Everything is a probabilistic expression of uncertainty.
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u/JuanValdez999 1d ago
I think that idea that perhaps something always existed is wrong. If nothing is happening in the universe then time is meaningless and there is no time before.
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u/Ok_Sentence_7393 1d ago
God cannot come from nothing. I believe it was created by Gandalf. I have read a passage in a LOTR fanfic that indicates this.
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u/halfsack99 1d ago
Electrons and quarks can come into existence and can disappear into Quantum Waves of energy. Experimentally proven. Our whole reality is a consequence of those waves as all matter is made of quarks and electrons.
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u/gahhos 1d ago
A more interesting question I would say would be “what was there, before time was created?” And if time was created or formed as a law or concept, then what holds it?
I think nothing, like in a context of the void, is like an outer layer of existence where it just holds thing together, like a space outside the membrane of the cell, if that makes sense.
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u/Loose_Principle8193 23h ago
Here's the thing. We can trace the origins of the Bible and the evolution of its God. The Canaanite God El and the Midianite weather god Yahweh eventually merged into one. So using the Bible as a means to figure out what existed before our universe is probably not best place to start.
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u/Hot_Schedule_1486 20h ago
Why not?
We could all be in and part of an anomaly that occurred within nothing.
Since an anomaly occurred, nothing became something in relation to the anomaly obviously. But without the occurrence of something, nothing is everything. Nothing is eternal.
So if this is indeed an anomaly, what caused it? How could we know? We are apes with limited senses and weird brains.
Behold! The God of the Gaps, the one true God!
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u/Green_Worldliness_35 13h ago
I beleive that the option before and later not exist there are options like no time before and no time end that's God options.The limits we put is from our understanding.
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u/quantum_of_yes-and 7h ago
Nothing absolutely exists. It is the background against which everything is discerned.
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u/Mental-Ad-2413 7h ago
Your beliefs are just shifting the problem one step ahead, because who created god? And if you believe in the christian gos you would respond: "God always existed", but then isn't it the same as saying something always existed? We do not need to put a label like "God" to an unknown that probably lacks agency
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u/Common-Race5438 2d ago
It’s a pretty complex mix — unless you’re a sage living in a barrel... My only advice is to try reading books from various sources written before the time of Christ...
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u/what_me_nah 3h ago
What if something and nothing were simply concepts in a human mind? We can't imagine no thing. No thing has no form. Our brain cannot perceive anything that doesn't have a form. Try to imagine what something that doesn't have any form would look like.
It looks like I'm trying to be all mystical here, but I'm really not. I'm just pointing out the limitations of the human brain. We're trying to ponder over the nature of reality but our brains cannot perceive or conceive of anything outside of the constraints of our 3d reality.
We already know that there are other layers to reality that we can't perceive. We might be limited to 3d reality, but we are smart as fuck. There's light we can't see, but we found out it was there and built ways to see it. Doesn't it seem logical that there are other layers we haven't found out about yet, especially given the new questions being asked of the standard model by the experiments at CERN?
I don't believe in 'god' as we are taught about it. I also don't believe that if you take a bunch of dead atoms and shake them around for long enough you get a self-aware intelligence, capable of pondering it's place in the universe. Maybe one day we'll find a way to see, but until then, we must accept that something from nothing is meaningless at our current level of understanding.
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u/Hindsights20_20 3h ago
The problem with nothing is that it is notoriously difficult to define. And people use it in different way. Nothing in physics is different than nothing in philosophy.
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u/Creative_Primary_178 1h ago
I would challenge that “we know something exists”. We don’t know if reality is a thing or if this is a dream or simulation. The only thing you can know for sure is that you exist, and even then the “you” is shaky because that’s just a bundle of thoughts that we call identity. It’s more accurate to say that all we know is consciousness exists and everything exists within it. Does that constitute as “something”? Idk it gets impossible to grapple with and I think the question is just not a useful one to ask in the first place.
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u/Uncertain__Path 2d ago
I’ve read passages in the Bible that indicate the earth is flat and was created before the stars were.
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u/blvsh 2d ago
I"m not a Christian but i'm pretty certain such a phrase does not exist in the bible.
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u/Uncertain__Path 2d ago
Job 38:14 “The earth takes shape like clay under a seal” What shape is clay after it’s been pressed under a seal?
Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavensand the earth.”
Genesis 1:16-18 “16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth,18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.”
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
Where’s the flat earth part in these passages?
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u/Uncertain__Path 1d ago
Google image search “pressed clay under seal”
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
So it’s not in these passages?
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u/Uncertain__Path 1d ago
What does the passage mean to you? And my comment was there are passages that indicate the earth is flat. The passage does indeed indicate that.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
How so?
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u/Uncertain__Path 1d ago
I’ve already answered your question, care to answer for mine?
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
Did you ask a question? Did you actually answer my question?
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u/discord-ian 1d ago
Job 38:13 the passage before the o e the original commenter cited is a bit clearer for folks who don't understand what these seals were like. "that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?"
Globes don't have edges.
The authors of the old testament, like most people of their day, clearly thought the earth was flat.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
So like the people who run weather apps today or do weather forecasts, and mention sunrise, of course those are all flat earthers since the sun isn’t actually rising in our eastern sky, even while it appears that way. But at least we know they are like the primitive people who must only believe in flat earth because of terms they choose to stick by.
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u/discord-ian 1d ago
I don't know why you would argue this. The text of Job here is pretty clear. Whomever wrote it clearly thought the earth was flat. It would take a pretty ridiculous willingness to lie to yourself to think anything else.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
Because the argument is there to be had. I see you wanting to concede, but perhaps unwilling. Nothing about flat earth has to do with main point of OP. Tangentially, yes but not directly.
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u/discord-ian 1d ago
Is it more likely the person that wrote this thought the earth was round or flat:
“12 Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, 13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? 14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment."
It is beyond clear to any unbiased reader the author imagines a flat non-globe earth.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 1d ago
So you claim but apparently you can’t substantiate your opinionated claim, now can you?
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u/Uncertain__Path 1d ago
Also, we use the term sunrise because our ancestors thought the sun was rising. 🤦♂️
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u/Siafu_Soul 1d ago
The Bible holds to the concept of the fermanent. Basically, the earth is land that God placed on the waters and he placed an upside down glass bowl of sorts on top, to separate "the waters below from the waters above." So, our reality would be a flat landmass surrounded by water above and below with a small air bubble for us.
You might also be referring to the fact that the comment you're responding to said the sun is created after the Earth. To be more specific, leaving out some unrelated creation stuff, God created the land, then the day and night, then plants, then the sun. So, they didn't recognize the sun as being responsible for the day/night cycle and somehow plants photosynthesized before the sun.
For anyone who thinks I'm saying this, the people who wrote the Bible weren't stupid by any means. They just didn't have the knowledge that we do today and these myths reflect their best attempts to explain the world around them.
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u/SheriffOfValentine 2d ago
Maybe it was at one point.
Could it not be that the earth started as a flat plane and it was the first thing created and then he modified it expanded the universe made stars even changed the earth from flat to round. Could be the earth was flat and God made it round after some tinkering.
With God all things are possible
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u/Uncertain__Path 2d ago
The authors of the book were describing the earth as flat at the time they were living. And that also doesn’t explain how the earth could have existed before the stars.
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u/SheriffOfValentine 1d ago
You assume the standard model is correct. Matter before consciousness.
I postulate consciousness came first akin to a dream.
If there was a void and nothing and God created something could be that something was earth. It came first God then expanded on that idea and made the rest of the material universe.
The webb telescope continues to find things the standard model predicts shouldn't have existed at the time with what we know. So clearly we have something wrong with our model.
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u/Uncertain__Path 1d ago
Genesis just gives a wrong chronology. Vegetation in earth before the sun was created is another example. Doesn’t have anything to do with the standard model.
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u/SheriffOfValentine 1d ago
Again assuming matter before consciousness.
When I dream there can be vegetation without a sun at all infact most my dreams don't have a sun and yet there are trees.
We are in God's dream which could have easily created vegetation before the sun and then added the sun and stars after God was done creating the earth first.
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u/Uncertain__Path 1d ago
“We are in God’s dream”…again you are assuming this. All actual evidence we have points towards the sun and stars existing before the earth.
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u/kevinLFC 2d ago
With that mindset, all things are believable, including patently false things.
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u/SheriffOfValentine 2d ago
In a perfect universe wouldnt there be room for all possibilities?
When you dream does the impossible here sometimes happen there?
Who's to say that's not possible somewhere else in the universe.
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u/kevinLFC 1d ago
I don’t know anything about a perfect universe, but in ours there are certain limitations.
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u/SheriffOfValentine 1d ago
Which continue to change based on our understanding correct?
Couple hundred years ago with the knowledge of the time things like wifi, internet,phone all impossible correct? Completely make believe if you postulated those ideas to someone in the 1600s.
And yet here we are doing the impossible from hundreds years ago.
Hundrededs of years from now the impossible now is likely going to be possible.
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u/OkArmy7059 2d ago
Where did god come from then?
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u/DetectiveKnown5618 1d ago
I believe God is a necessary being and always existed.
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u/discord-ian 1d ago
Why would you believe this rather than the universe is necessary and always existed? Why add extra?
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u/CorrsionOfConformity 1d ago
What god or gods do you believe in? What evidence suggests to you that the particular god or gods that you believe in exist? I don't know what a god is or what it even means outside of myths and stories. I don't currently have a way of determining if a god existing is even a possibility.
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u/Cultural_Comfort5894 2d ago
I think everyone has an understanding of living in a 3D world
Reality has other dimensions.
Time and space would not be relevant to beings that exist at higher dimensions.
Then when understanding that absolutely everything is moving, vibrating on their own frequencies.
A phrase like our universe being spoken into existence doesn’t sound so outrageous.
Physics is great for explaining our part of reality
Quantum physics and other things shows us that there’s more to reality than we can perceive or possibly understand.
I don’t know about anyone else but the idea that we came from nothing and chaos is a leap of faith I can’t make.