Nothingness Reificated

Theists often like to talk about nothingness as if it were some actual thing. They say that God created everything in the universe out of nothing, and that it is impossible for man (or any non-god, for that matter) to create something from nothing.

Fellow blogger Unbeguiled wrote a blog post about this, and I think it's important to both continue the discussion and lay down my own thoughts about nothingness.

I think that I am thinking, therefore I know that something exists. I can be reasonably certain that objective reality exists, but I can be absolutely certain that something exists. You, dear reader, can be absolutely certain of the same thing - that something exists. This is the ultimate reduction, and the ultimate conservative view on the state of reality. Whatever reality is, it certainly is something.

We know that there is something, but even this we must question. We ask: "why is there something rather than nothing?" - as if nothingness were some kind of possible state of affairs. The answer, really, is that there has to be. Nothingness is not a possible state of affairs because the very act of making it a state of affairs makes it something other than nothing. Nothingness cannot be a natural state of affairs preceding somethingness.

One could, potentially, conceive of a type of nothingness - perhaps it is a physical system possessing no properties. As long as we don't play word games and insist that a physical system possessing no properties is a property and thus not nothing, we can do it. We can imagine (abstractly) that one might remove all particles and non-particulate energy from some region of space.  Victor Stenger wrote:

This suggests a more precise definition of nothing. Nothing is a state that is the simplest of all conceivable states. It has no mass, no energy, no space, no time, no spin, no bosons, no fermions-nothing.

The problem, of course, is that this kind of nothing is unnatural and unstable. A further problem is that this reificates nothingness - gives real properties to an abstraction.

Nothingness is an abstraction - it does not exist except as a mental construction. Merely asking one to describe nothing is a reification. How is it possible for an abstract state of affairs to be more natural than a real state of affairs -  since we know in our most conservative view that something exists, how can we think that this is somehow a state of affairs which needs an explanation? I am not obligated to explain why somethingness is more real than an abstract idea. It would be akin to asking me what time it is on the moon.

They told us that there was nothing
to be proud of. Others said
there was nothing to keep us from
thinking twice, if we send
thousands to their deaths. Then
for them, nothing is left.

Nothing to keep the flowers from growing
between their fingers, torn from wrists,
torn from sleeves. All those bombs
to end a war. That is nothing too.
if justice prevails.

All those universes we used to call stars
with no sign of life — nothing — and all
the masses of whirling particles
we cannot see, cannot name so we
call them space and call it nothing.

Yet we can not tell you what
this nothing is or why a void
should have no value.

Whenever I talk about fallacies, I like to point out not just the fallacies that theists use, but the fallacies that atheists use. One such example of reification by atheists is to say: Religion attempts to suppress critical thinking and therefore causes immorality.

Religion does no such thing - religion is a (very loose) collection of people, beliefs and practices. No human-created belief system can attempt to suppress anything. Certain religious doctrines are seen as problematic by many people, but religion is not a person. This is, of course, metaphorical, but it is taking the metaphor too far when abstractions are given concrete attributes they are incapable of possessing. 

I think that sub-intuitively, we now that nothingness is not a possible state of affairs. Nothingnessis a confusing abstraction that is difficult to talk about and literally un-imaginable. This is true for both the theist and non-theist position. This is the crux of many arguments between theists and non-theists, when one assumes that the other believes nothingness is a possible state of affairs. Theists confuse the godless cosmological position as a position in which people believe something was caused by nothing. For example, in this funny little internet poster:

 Atheism is poked at in this image for believing that the universe arose from nothing. It might be true that some atheists believe this, and for that they deserve a swift smack. The origins of the universe, in short, are:

1. Singularity: the mass of the visible universe is in a state of collapse. All of the mass of the visible universe is still there,

2. Something caused the singularity to cease being a singularity, which cause rapid expansion of the unified forces of the universe into separate forces: gravity, EM, nuclear forces, time, etc.

Cosmologists do not know exactly what this something was, but that does not imply cosmologists postulate that it wasn't something. Saying that cosmologists don't know what exactly caused the universe to stop being singular is not the same thing as saying that expansion happened with no cause. The reason cosmologists don't know is due to the fact that we have no evidence to lead us to a conclusion. but cosmologists do not posit that nothing was ever a universal state of affairs.

Of course, theists think that God is the potential answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?". The answer, of course, is that God has always existed. But this does not answer the question at all - God certainly is something. By positing that there is no state of affairs of nothingness because God has always existed and God certainly is something, theists negate the possibility of nothingness as a state of affairs. If we desired, we could ask the theist why there is god rather than nothing - but really, the question hasn't changed. The point is that theists don't see nothingness as a possible state of affairs either.

So the theist and nontheist have the same answer to the question, and the answer is that it is not possible for nothing to be a state of affairs.To the theist, the reason nothigness is not possible is because God has always existed. to the non-theist, nothingness is not possible because it is not meaningful to speak of nothingness as a possible state of affairs. We do not need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing because nothingness is a mere abstraction, and this particular abstraction cannot be a state of affairs - it is absurd to think it can. In fact, it is absurd to call nothingness an "it" in the first place. It's not.