Questions on Being and Nothingness

KEVIN HARRIS:

Dear Dr. Craig, I’m a Christian and I’m trying to hold together faith in God. Anyway, the question is: is it even possible for nothing to exist? Because if we got rid of this universe, wouldn’t there just be some sort of void? I would really like your help on this. I plan on doing philosophy as I go to college in January. I'm just trying to hold my faith together and learn and grow in Christ.

There are a couple of things going on here but not only his question about nothingness and is it even possible for nothing to exist, but he also seems to be struggling a little bit.

DR. CRAIG: I noticed that, and I wonder why. He doesn't seem to let on as to what it is that is causing him difficulty. The language of holding on rather than flourishing is disturbing.

KEVIN HARRIS: I just know in my past – in my walk with the Lord – that sometimes I felt like I was on hold in my 20s and 30s until I get a certain question answered. I don't feel like I can keep going with the vigor in my relationship with the Lord until I get this issue settled. God has always been very gracious to me. I have gotten the answers. Not that I know it all, but to my satisfaction my disturbing questions God has graciously given me resources and insight to the point that I could move on. But this does seem from this college student something that kind of has him on hold a little bit.

DR. CRAIG: Right, and that's unfortunate because I don't think everyone is as fortunate as you are. I think many times Christians will not be able to receive the answers to their questions because perhaps they're geographically isolated like someone in Siberia or in the Sudan where they just don't have the resources to get answers. Therefore I think that the key to successful Christian living is not having all your questions answered. It's learning how to live victoriously with unanswered questions. It's important not to let these sort of unanswered questions put our faith on hold. We need to realize that as finite persons we're not going to have all of the answers, but we have good grounds for believing what we believe and we move on in the hopes that as we further read and explore we will find more answers.

KEVIN HARRIS: What is his problem he has with, “Is it even possible for nothing to exist?”

DR. CRAIG: I think what's odd about this question is that the theist (at least if he's of a Leibnizian sort) agrees with the questioner that it's impossible that nothing exists. That is exactly Leibniz's point! There must be a logically necessary being or a metaphysically necessary being which is the reason why anything at all exists. The heart of the Leibnizian version of the cosmological argument is that there is a metaphysically necessary being which is the sufficient reason for the existence of everything else. So I actually agree with him that it's impossible for nothing to exist. There is no possible world in which nothing exists. God exists in every possible world and is a metaphysically necessary being.

KEVIN HARRIS: Prior to the Big Bang (notice I said “prior” because it's kind of difficult to say “before” the Big Bang) was there some sort of just void? There was no space and no time.

DR. CRAIG: And that may be the source of his difficulty. When one says “prior to” one has to mean explanatorily prior not chronologically prior. When we say there was nothing before the Big Bang, what we mean is there was not anything before the Big Bang. We don't mean that there was something before the Big Bang and it was nothing. That would be a source of confusion. Rather what one negates is the whole sentence. You negate the sentence, “There was something before the Big Bang.” It is false that there was something before the Big Bang. So it may be that he's simply being misled by the use of the word “nothing” as a substantive, as a common noun, thinking that “nothing” must refer to something (some sort of a void) and that's not in fact the case any more than, say, the pronoun “nobody” refers to somebody. It means it's not anybody. Similarly it's not anything prior to the Big Bang. In saying that the universe began to exist and was preceded by nothing one means the universe began to exist and there was not anything prior to its beginning. We have to be very careful or we can very easily be tricked by words. Our language can often mislead us. There's this wonderful incident in The Odyssey; I think of Homer where you remember Ulysses confronts the Cyclops and the Cyclops says, “What is your name?” and he says, “My name is nobody.” Thereafter he blinds the Cyclops, and the other Cyclops ask him, “Who's attacking you? Who's injured you?” He says, “Nobody has injured me! Nobody has put my eye out!” And they said, “Well then why are you so disturbed if nobody's done anything to you?” Well, you can see there Homer is making fun of the way in which this word “nobody” can be taken to mean somebody who is named nobody. And similarly this reader I think is thinking of nothing as being something which is nothing, and that's not the way the word is to be used. It's a negative term. You've got to be very careful that you understand the word “prior” to mean “explanatorily prior” or “causally prior,” not chronologically or temporally prior. I would say that God is not chronologically prior to the Big Bang. He's not temporarily prior to the Big Bang. He's explanatorily or causally prior to the Big Bang. Material reality comes into being at the Big Bang so it's obviously not causally or explanatorily prior to itself. It is contingent – brought into existence by God. So God has a sort of causal and explanatory priority to the universe, but not a temporal priority.

KEVIN HARRIS: We've spent plenty of podcast time defining what you mean by “nothing.”

DR. CRAIG: Yes, and it's so critical. If you use the word “nothing” as a singular term referring to something then it is incoherent. It makes no sense at all, and it has been the source of puns and jokes since time immemorial. Properly understood the term “nothing” is not a term of reference; rather it is a quantifier word. It is a term of universal negation which simply means “not anything.” There's a whole series of quantifier words of negation in English like this. For example, “no one” means not anyone. “No place” means not any place. “Never” means not ever. Used as a quantifier word it's unobjectionable. To say that something cannot come into being from nothing means that it's impossible that something should come into being not from anything – that something can only come into being from something else that already exists. So as long as we understand the word “nothing” properly in the way philosophical logicians use it (namely as a universal term of negation) there's no problem whatsoever in its coherence or its use.

KEVIN HARRIS: The crux of his question are the last few sentences. He said let's just assume then that nothing is an impossible concept and that it is impossible for nothing to be at all and things like this. He said even if that were true would this then defeat the kalam's first premise?

DR. CRAIG: No, because the support for the first premise doesn't refer to “nothing” in terms of being a term of reference. It's merely a universal quantifier of a negation. It is to say that the universe came into being but only from something. There had to be something which brought the universe into being. It could not have come from not anything.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. This next question is also from the United States. It says,

Hi, Dr. Craig. Can there be a possible world where nothing exists? If so wouldn't that mean a necessary being would not exist in such a world either and therefore not truly necessary? On such a view a world of non-being is possible. However if a necessary being exists then there should be no possible world where it does not exist meaning a world of non-being is impossible. How do we square these two things?

DR. CRAIG: I agree with Kumar that there is no possible world where nothing exists. A possible world in which there is nothing (that is to say, not anything) is an impossibility because God is a metaphysically necessary being and therefore he exists in all possible worlds. So the answer to Leibniz's question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is, as Leibniz saw, that there is a metaphysically necessary being that exists and therefore it is impossible that there be nothing – that there not be anything. Could there be a possible world where not anything exists? No. In every possible world something exists, namely at least God who is metaphysically necessary. As Leibniz says when we ask why is there something rather than nothing it's because there is a metaphysically necessary being and therefore the existence of nothing is impossible. It's impossible that there should not be anything.

KEVIN HARRIS:

Dear Dr. Craig, if the kalam cosmological argument succeeds in proving the universe has a cause, it follows by logical inference that the cause must be immaterial, timeless, spaceless since matter, time, and space came into being with the universe. Immateriality, non-spatiality, and timelessness are negative descriptors that describe the absence of some positive reality, not the presence of a positive reality (similar to darkness being the absence of light and cold being the absence of heat). They describe what is not, not what is. Why then should we attribute these descriptors to the cause of the universe as if they were properties had by that cause and describing the nature of that cause? They only tell us what the cause is not like, not what it is like.

Is looking at something's negative attributes inappropriate?

DR. CRAIG: Not at all in this case because we've already made a positive existential conclusion, namely that a cause of the universe exists. So we're not just talking about nothingness here. We're talking about an entity that actually exists – a cause of the universe – and then to add the additional information that is provided by these negative descriptions that this cause is itself uncaused, that it is timeless (it doesn't exist in time), that it is spaceless and therefore transcends the universe are very informative descriptions. These are valuable insights into the nature of this causal entity that brought about the universe. So the fact that these properties in and of themselves are negative in that they tell us that it's uncaused, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial is in no way to diminish their importance. This is enormously informative to learn that the cause of the universe (this positive existential reality) doesn't exist in time and space and is immaterial and itself uncaused. That's very important.

KEVIN HARRIS: It serves as further description.

DR. CRAIG: Right. It informs us a great deal about what kind of an entity we're talking about to learn these things.

KEVIN HARRIS: So it'd be okay to say, “This is Joe, and he is a carpenter but he's not a Presbyterian.”

DR. CRAIG: Right. That would tell you something more about him. Or suppose you said, “This is Joe, and he's penniless and uneducated.” Those would be negative properties but you'd learn a lot more about Joe.

KEVIN HARRIS: This questioner goes on to say,

More importantly, if this has no positive ontology it calls into question the ontic status of the purported cause of the universe. After all, what is the ontological difference between some entity X that is immaterial, spaceless and timeless and absolutely nothing at all?

DR. CRAIG: Well, very simply the first one can be the cause of the universe and the second one can't be the cause of anything because nothingness has no causal powers. It has no properties at all. So we’ve already answered the question, “What is the difference between this being and nothingness?” When you make the inference, “Therefore there exists a cause of the universe,” that is an existential affirmation. Therefore already (if you knew nothing else) this is differentiated from a state of nothingness.^[1]