The Universe Came Out Of Nothing: True Or False?

            Big Bang Cosmology is the most widely accepted explanation for the beginning of our universe. However, some atheists claim that our universe came out of nothing and that quantum mechanics provides an explanation for the same.

Did Our Universe Come Out Of Nothing?

            Atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss’ book A Universe from Nothing (published in 2012) posits science’s explanation for the origin of our universe from nothing and that God is unnecessary to understand the origin of our universe.

            Krauss’ posits the origin of the universe from nothing, “…we're now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing.”¹ He goes on to add, “I don't think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen…We don't know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might.

            But I am certainly claiming a lot more than just that. That it's possible to create particles from no particles is remarkable—that you can do that with impunity, without violating the conservation of energy and all that, is a remarkable thing.”²

            So Krauss’ claim is two-fold:

            1. It is possible to create particles from nothing. (Hence, he alludes to a beginning of our universe from nothing.)

            2. However, physics has not definitively shown how something could come from nothing.

            At the outset, these claims seem to contradict each other.

            If we were to combine both these statements into one, then this is what we understand of Krauss’ claim: We could suppose that our universe came from nothing because it is theoretically possible, and physics does explain how particles could be created from nothing. But physics has not definitively shown how something could come from nothing. 

            So my conclusion as a layman is: until physics definitively shows how something can come from nothing, I will still believe that something cannot come from nothing. Hence, our universe could not have come from nothing.

Quantum Mechanics Does Not Explain The Origin Of Universe From Nothing

            Interestingly, some scientists claim that the nothing that Krauss speaks of is not literally nothing!

            David Albert is a theoretical physicist who has written a book, along with numerous articles on quantum mechanics. He claims that the term nothing does not mean literally nothing, “Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right…And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. …”³

            Another prominent scientist, George Ellis considered as one of the leading theorists in cosmology, who has authored a book on quantum theory quashes Krauss when he was asked whether Krauss was right to claim that physics has solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing:⁴

Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.

            So science is yet to definitively prove that our universe came out of nothing.

            Lawrence Krauss’s book was published in 2012. Can we be sure that science is yet to definitively prove that our universe came from nothing?

            Dr. William Lane Craig in November 2018, while answering a question Did the Universe Begin with Nothing? affirms the necessity for a cause for the beginning of our universe: [Emphasis mine]⁵

According to the Big Bang theory, the universe did not begin with nothing in the sense that at first there was nothing and then the universe came into being. Here a little philosophy of language is helpful:  The word “nothing” is not a singular term referring to something. Rather it is a quantifier, a term of universal negation, just like “nobody,” “nowhere,” “no one,” etc.  It means “not anything.”

So when cosmologists say that there was nothing prior to the Big Bang, they do NOT mean that there was something prior to it, and that was a state of nothingness. Rather they mean that there was not anything prior to the Big Bang.

So time and the universe start with the first physical state of affairs, before which there was not anything. This is, in fact, the view that you quite rightly want to affirm. The question is, what is causally (not temporally) prior to that first physical state? I have in my published work given reasons why it is not plausible that that first physical state came to be uncaused.

In saying that the universe came into being at the first moment of its existence, I am not presupposing a prior state of nothing but rather affirming that the fact of the universe’s beginning to exist is a tensed fact…on a tensed theory of time, according to which temporal becoming is real, the need for a cause of the first state of the universe becomes, I think, patent because that is the moment at which the universe comes into being.

            Furthermore in 2019, Dr. Craig in response to a question What Is the Universe Expanding into? affirms that the atheist ought to explain how the universe came into being without a cause. Thus he implies that the atheist scientists are still clueless about defending the notion that our universe came into being from nothing:⁶

According the (sic) Big Bang theory, the universe is not expanding into anything…So as you trace the expansion back in time, you eventually come to a place where all distances shrink to zero, and space disappears (or begins to exist). It’s not that the universe disappears at that point, and the empty space in which it was expanding is still there. No, there is nothing prior to that point because it is space itself which is expanding. Just as there is not anything prior to the universe’s beginning, so there is not anything into which it is expanding. The difficulty for the atheist, then, is to explain how the universe could come into existence without a cause.

Endnotes:

¹https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/

²Ibid.

³https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html

⁴https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-falsification-free-will/

⁵https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/did-the-universe-begin-with-nothing/

⁶https://www.reasonablefaith.org/question-answer/P600/what-is-the-universe-expanding-into/

Websites last accessed on 5^th June 2020.