Does Dr. Craig Have an Inconsistency From Nothing?
Alex J. O'Connor, aka. (The) Cosmic Skeptic, points out what he thinks might be a contradiction in Dr. Craig's view of something coming into being from nothing.
ALEX O’CONNOR: There was an inconsistency that I found which I was struggling with, or an apparent inconsistency, when I was reading your points on the kalam, and it's on this point. On the one hand you say if things can come into existence without a cause, then why wouldn't it be happening all the time? Why wouldn't a horse or an Eskimo village as you say, just pop into existence out of nothing? Why don't we observe that? Now holding that in mind, in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology you are talking about this quantum idea that quantum mechanics gives us evidence of something coming from nothing essentially, and your response to that is to say this: you say popularizers touting such theories as getting something from nothing (that is, quantum mechanics) apparently do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing, but a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws. Such models do not therefore involve a true origination ex nihilo.
DR. CRAIG: Yes.
ALEX O’CONNOR: So help me out here. You say that quantum mechanics isn't an example of something coming from nothing because it doesn't come from nothing. But then you say, well, if something could come from nothing, why wouldn't a horse pop into being? Well, my thought is that if we did observe a horse popping into being in my living room, that similarly wouldn't be out of nothing because my living room isn't nothing.
DR. CRAIG: Here we're talking about whether there's an efficient cause for that. Remember Aristotle distinguished between several different kinds of causes: efficient, material, formal, and so forth. And when I talk about “whatever begins to exist has a cause,” I'm thinking of efficient causes. There needs to be something that brings it into being. I don't think it has to have a material cause, but there does need to be at least an efficient cause that brings it into being. Now with respect to quantum mechanics, the point there is that certain popularizers of modern science like Lawrence Krauss love to say that in quantum mechanics you have theories by which the universe comes into being out of nothing, and in fact that's just not the case. You have a physical state of affairs, which is either a quantum vacuum, a field of fluctuating energy, or these are quantum physical fields described by physical laws, and these physical states of affairs can reconfigure themselves so as to produce particles or the universe, and so there definitely are causes in this case for the universe or the particles coming into being.
ALEX O’CONNOR: Yeah, Lawrence Krauss’ book A Universe From Nothing is a fantastic overview of cosmological science, but I hear this a lot of the time, too. People say, well, you know, you talk about something coming from nothing, but nothing isn't really nothing. And if that's the case then we're not talking about the same thing here. I agree with you on that point. But, yeah, it's worth bearing in mind that we're talking about two different things here, right? When a philosopher is talking about “nothing,” they mean as Aristotle said, “What rocks dream of” – they mean nothing. And so if there's some kind of quantum soup or something then that is not actually nothing.
DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Here's how I like to put it, Alex. “Nothing” (the word “nothing”), even though it's a pronoun, is not a referring term. It's not a singular term. It's a universal quantifier. It's a negative quantifier. It means “not anything.” So if I say "I had nothing for lunch," that is saying "I did not have anything for lunch.”
ALEX O’CONNOR: Because if you don't make that careful distinction and you think of nothing as something that can be spoken about, you can make arguments like in A. C. Grayling's History of Philosophy he puts forward the argument “nothing is brighter than the sun; a candle is brighter than nothing; therefore a candle is brighter than the sun.” But clearly the point being raised here is that when we talk about nothing we have to be clear that as you say, we're talking about a kind of existential qualifier. We're saying "no thing," not the existence of nothing.
DR. CRAIG: Yeah, which shows again the importance of philosophy of language in dealing with even scientific issues.