In May philosopher Alex Malpass will debate William Lane Craig on the Kalam Cosmological Argument for God, and in preparation he is running a weekly series at Thoughtology on every argument there is for or against every premise of the KCA. It’s looking like a great series so far (you can start with Kalam Debate Prep 1). Those who like to spend way more time diving the analytical semantics of the KCA than is usually healthy will love this. Highly recommended. It adds to my own brief Conclusively Ending the Kalam Cosmological Argument. And to all that you can add Phil Harper’s videos I’ve recommended before (Physicists & Philosophers Debunk the Kalam Cosmological Argument and Physicists and Philosophers Strike Back).
Malpass might not agree with all my takes. But so far he is covering things I have pointed out before, and with useful reference to the academic literature at every turn, as well as a patient, methodical discussion that really clarifies things. Which includes a point that inspired me to write this article (in circa 5,000 words), because one of my arguments did come up, from someone who asked him about it. Malpass didn’t have time to describe or analyze my argument, he only says that he thinks he has a better way to tackle the same point—and in the context of a debate, he’s right. I’ve used exactly his preferred tack in debates myself.
But digressing on the point Malpass didn’t go into is warranted here, because I think people could benefit from a short, to-the-point explanation of what it is, and why I think it’s important and useful outside clocked debates. Though I used it as an effective point of debate in my destruction of Michael Jones’s cosmological argument last year, I organized my entire debate around developing that, and for the productive reasons I will explain here. And that wouldn’t be apt for what Malpass is aiming for in his debate. I think his own tack will work fine and is worth developing there precisely to see how Craig handles it (or fails to).
Say What Now?
Okay. So, what are we talking about here? In his opening video Malpass examines the Argument from Intuition for the first premise of the KCA, that “everything that begins to exist has a cause.” And his last point about that is the Reification Fallacy, which in this context comes down to the claim that theists are illicitly “reifying” nothingness as a state of affairs—as (ironically) a “thing,” from which (then) nothing could arise.
Malpass prefers to come at this by kicking the legs out from under the fallacy itself: that it simply is illegitimate to insist that “nothing” is even a “thing” at all so as to produce their intuition in the first place. He does not mean that there was no beginning “before which there was nothing” (that’s premise two, and he will give some apt defeaters for that premise in a future video), but that even if there was, the theist’s intuition still fails. Because the idea that a nothing could never be followed by an uncaused something reifies “nothing” into a “something” with predictive powers or properties. And that makes it too much of a something to properly count as “nothing” in the sense they require.
In other words, if nothing is not a “thing” (if it is not even “a state of affairs”), then you cannot say things like “from nothing only nothing comes,” as that entails “nothing” predicts a sequence of events (that “the nothing” will not change, and will thus remain forever nothing). But if there is not even nothing, then there is nothing that can entail or predict any sequence of events. For example, a Kalamer might say “a state of nothing, qua ‘nothing’, contains no potentials, but an uncaused something popping into existence would only be possible if the state of nothing had the potential to do that, to suddenly change into something else—but it doesn’t; so it can’t.”
Malpass responds to this by saying that “nothing” is not a thing or state of affairs that can have any such power or consequence. It is literally nothing, and therefore can’t even “lack” the potential to change—because there is no “nothing” when there is no thing. Therefore (literally and figuratively) nothing is changing. All that exists is simply the first thing, which just exists when it does. There is nothing before that—not even a “state of nothing,” just as there is no north of the North Pole, “from which” one might fire a bullet at you, say, or “that which” can have properties like “lacking any potential to allow or produce something at the North Pole.” There being nothing north of the North Pole can have nothing at all to do with what can or can’t be at the North Pole. The theist’s intuition is therefore incoherent and thus unsuccessful in grounding their point. It just circularly presumes the premise that things can’t just “happen.” But what if they can? That’s what we are supposed to be debating.
The rebuttal then might be that if things can just “happen,” then bunnies and big bangs could just “happen,” and we would see that. My preferred approach answers that objection differently. But Malpass could answer it (as I also have) with permutative probability, as in quantum mechanics: why we don’t see that is the same reason you don’t ever quantum tunnel through your chair when you’re having lunch, even though QM does entail that’s possible. Because you actually see this all the time: spontaneous virtual particles are constantly just “hapenning,” and this actually causes things like the electromagnetic force to work the way we observe, but these are vastly more probable events, and at such small scales you can’t “see” them (other than through their effects). Whole rabbits popping out of hats are going to be vastly less common, and that’s why we don’t see that. I already explained this to Andrew Loke, albeit to no avail (because he’s not the brightest bulb). But the point is correct. If there is a continuous “things can just happen” property of reality, it will eventually spontaneously create whole worlds like ours, over and over. We just won’t see that because the cosmic die-roll needed sets its frequency at once every gazillion years. Same with rabbits. (And no, this does not allow theists to claim we’d all then be Boltzmann Brains.)
So the problem Malpass is pointing out remains. The theist is illicitly assuming that “uncaused origination ex nihilo” entails there is, first, “nothing” and then “there is something,” as if these are two points on a timeline, one transforming into or being replaced by the other. But that attributes too much substance to nothing. If there really is nothing, there is nothing there. So there isn’t a point on any timeline where there is “nothing.” No thing (not even a nothing) is transforming into or is replaced by another. There is just “a thing begins.” And that’s that. There is nothing before that that can have any properties capable of preventing that happening, or that could dictate what should happen—such as (for example) mandating that the first thing have a cause. There isn’t anything around to make or stop that being the case. Just as there isn’t anything around that “has” or “lacks” the potential to change. There isn’t anything around to change. And therefore the Kalamer’s intuition is void. They cannot say that there is some “thing” they call “nothing” that “lacks” the potential to change and thereby it “prevents” something from coming into existence uncaused.
Therefore, Premise 1, that everything that begins has a cause, cannot be established by this intuition. Malpass will address other arguments for Premise 1 in future videos. But this one is pretty much dusted.
This is the Other Problem of Nothing, in contrast to my original Problem with Nothing, which is to trace out what happens when we grant the theist’s reification of nothing (it doesn’t go well for them either). Both approaches are adequate to refute Premise 1 of the Kalam. But this one is easier. If Malpass gets hit with any similar argument in his debate I expect he will take his preferred tack and argue that you can’t establish that “if” there was a first thing (and thus a first moment of time) that anything even existed before that to dictate whether that thing could happen or not. Malpass uses Russell’s Denotation Argument to get there, and I think it will definitely stymie Craig.
But What If We Went the Other Way?
That’s all great. And Malpass explains it all well in his first video. But what I want to do is choose the other adventure, and explain why that has its uses too. The reason I became interested in the Argument from Nothing (or AFN, which presumes “nothing” is enough of a thing to have any consequences at all) is that it has surprising logical consequences that are of use for developing a proper naturalist metaphysics. Yes, it also “happens” to refute the KCA. But that’s not my actual reason for developing it.
It is still true that there are clever ways to use the AFN to defeat the KCA, which expose the Stalking Horse fallacy in Premise 1. A “stalking horse” refers to a hunter approaching their quarry by hiding behind their horse, as animals will be less spooked by a horse creeping up on them than by a predator doing so. It’s like getting the grass you’re hiding in to walk up with you. In the context of the KCA, the analogy is that theists are assuming way more unproven ad hoc things to get Premise 1 than are required to deny it, and are thus kind of “hiding behind their horse,” as it were, and in a way that lets naturalists to do the same thing right back at them.
After all, if a theist can sneak up to Premise 1 behind a bunch of unstated assumptions they haven’t actually defended much less proved, then a naturalist gets to sneak up behind their own horse of comparable assumptions. For example, if they get to just “assume” there is an unexplained disembodied superhero before there is even a universe for it to exist in, just to get to the KCA, then the naturalist gets to just “assume” there is a simple unexplained quantum potential before there is even a universe for it to exist in. And, boom! The KCA collapses. It then gets hijacked into an argument for a simple quantum potential, with no juice left to get a god in there instead. After all, who needs that complex mess, when you can replace it with something vastly simpler and backed by vastly more precedent?
But my interest in the Argument from Nothing is bigger than that. One thing I am rather tired of is theists hijacking every conversation, and compelling all philosophy to be about them and their tinfoil hat. They’re sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Naturalists should be doing philosophy, including their own metaphysics, wholly without any reference to or care about theism. I don’t actually give a shit about their weird flat-earthy cosmological theories. I want to explore naturalist cosmology. I want to come up with current “best guess” answers for why there is something rather than nothing, and why this something rather than something else, and where it all came from (or whether it’s always been around), and what grounds it all, making it what it is and keeping it going. I don’t care what theists go on about. God is just a bunch of woo balderdash and thus a theory well past time to bin. I want to think about what then is most likely the case. I want to do naturalist metaphysics. Because none other is worth the bother of doing.
So I have developed and burn-tested my Argument from Nothing because it might be a useful component of naturalist cosmology. It would have that use even if theism died out so hard no one even remembered what the idea of a god was much less how it ever functioned in philosophy.
Describing the Possibility Space
At a key point in his first video Malpass presents a tabulated representation of why his position (past eternal existence, which he labels for convenience “infinitism”) is more probable than the alternatives. I have doctored his slide here to squeeze in my own extra line for a fourth option, which I call causatum ex nihilo. Which is the conclusion my Argument from Nothing develops.
Malpass shows that theists already agree that “uncaused origination ex nihilo” (the most common naturalist alternative apart from infinitism) fails to provide an efficient or a material cause “explanation” of existence. These are Aristotelian categories of explanation, which mean, in brief, the material out of which something comes to be (of which ex nihilo means there is none), and the thing, the impetus or change-agent, that brings it about. A hypothesis of “uncaused origination ex nihilo” fails to provide that, too, because it is suggesting that existence just started for no reason. Nothing brought it about or explains why it came about.
But Malpass then argues the theist doesn’t do any better with their theory, here labeled “creation ex nihilo,” because they admit there is then no material cause (God is not what the universe is made of, and nothing was already around for him to make it from—contrary to the literal text of Genesis, which actually says there was, but theists stopped actually believing their own Bible a thousand years ago), and while they usually try to insist God is at least an efficient cause, Malpass points out that, actually, he’s not. Because theists never explain how it is that a disembodied mind can do things—or at least things like “conjure stuff from nothing.” So they are actually handwaving, not explaining. They haven’t provided an efficient cause here. It’s like Donald Trump’s “concept of a health care plan,” an excuse for not admitting there isn’t one. Theists have the “concept” of an idea for a possibility of maybe God somehow being an efficient cause. But that doesn’t count as actually having a cause. It’s just begging the question. Indeed, worse, because the whole idea is not even all that plausible (see Prep 1 at 40:20). This is one of several problems theists have that were explored long ago by Evan Fales in Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles (IMO a treatise still unrefuted to this day). And I developed a similar point in The God Impossible.
Malpass then points out that his favored view, infinitism, ticks both columns and thus outperforms both of those other theories. Because then there is an efficient cause (it’s causes all the way back; there is no beginning and thus never a causeless thing) and a material cause (there’s always stuff around to be caused and do the causing). A theist might winge dubiously about infinities—or complain about how endless stuff can exist in the first place, what keeps everything together that whole time, but the same existential inertia that keeps God from dissolving could keep the world from dissolving too. So there is no way for the theist to win at that game (see Joseph Schmid and Daniel Linford, Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs).
So Malpass has a strong point, and it’s an entirely credible position to defend against the KCA. You might say that takes out Premise 2, and here we’re talking about Premise 1. But Malpass’s point is that any Argument from Intuition to Premise 1 actually turns into a defeater for Premise 2: if we get to intuitively say positing an actual efficient and material cause is better, then they are inadvertently arguing for infinitism, and thus the KCA is sunk by their own argument.
I would say there is a fourth possibility. And Malpass mentions others besides, but I think we agree they are harder to coherently render. So I’ll just squeeze in my fourth way here: causatum ex nihilo. It also provides a material and efficient cause by making “a state of nothing” itself the material that becomes matter-energy in space-time (by transforming an existing “flat” field into a “curvy” one, and a geometric point into an expanding space and time: see Nothing as a Field-State and Argument from Non-Locality, respectively). And it does that through its own inalienable properties, thus it is also a proper efficient cause, in precisely the way the theist fails to actually establish God to be. While they just handwave an inexplicable and counter-intuitive power for God to make things with a mere thought, I can actually prove the causal powers of a “nothing state” are logically necessary and fully explain all present observations. So that’s then now a contender. It is, like infinitism, a multiply better explanation of existence than the KCA strives to generate. Which kills the KCA. Indeed, it kills every cosmological argument there is—even “how so” arguments against infinitism. But I’ll get to that last.
I call this the Argument from Nothing and I’ve developed and tested it in a whole series of articles and debates, starting with two primary articles, the first developing the idea in detail, and the second connecting it to a related scientific theory in the literature:
- The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists
- What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?
I then debated this argument several times, showing how all the arguments against it fail:
- Koons Cosmology vs. The Problem with Nothing
- Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco
- We Should Reject Even the First Premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument
And again in my debate with Michael Jones, but there’s hardly anything new in that to add.
The Argument from Nothing
Whenever theists argue that a “nothing” would prevent anything from happening, such as by “nothing” lacking the potential for anything to happen, they are granting that there was a “state of nothing” whose properties can determine what then happens. So if we grant their reification, we get the hypothesis of causatum ex nihilo: a state of nothing is the cause of something then happening, for exactly the opposite reason than the theist avers: nothing then exists to stop that being the case. I am not the first person to develop an argument like this (see bibliography below).
The gist of my own Argument from Nothing is this:
- A1. If there was ever a state of nothing whose properties could determine what then happened, then it has to be the most empty state of nothing that can logically have ever existed.
- A2. The most empty state of nothing that can logically have ever existed will contain no actual things (hence no substances, no energy, no eliminable powers or forces, no positive amount of space or time).
- A3. But the absence of all actual things logically entails the presence of all potential things. It is therefore not possible to have a state of nothing that lacks all potentials, because the only way to prevent a potential outcome is with the presence of some actual power or thing that prevents it. And the lack of any thing to prevent another thing happening logically entails the potential exists for that other thing happening. So you can’t have both.
The idea here is that in extremis you can only have one or the other: the absence of all actuals, or the absence of all potentials. And a state of nothing that lacks all actuals is less (and thus more “nothing”) than a state of nothing that lacks all potentials. Therefore, the most empty state of nothing you can have is one that lacks all actual things, not one that lacks all potential things. The most empty state of nothing therefore will logically necessarily have every potential (not no potential as theists incorrectly conclude), because it has no actual thing constraining or guiding or compelling it to do only one thing, or only some things and not others, or even causing it to do some things more probably than others. Hence:
- B1. If nothing exists to make any outcome more likely than any other, then it is logically necessarily the case that every possible outcome must be as likely as every other—no single outcome is privileged, because nothing exists to privilege it.
- B2. If it is the case that every possible outcome must be as likely as every other, then it is the case that nothing remaining nothing is infinity to one against (as there are infinitely many possible things that can happen, and nothing staying nothing is only one single thing among them).
- B3. Therefore, nothing cannot remain nothing. By lacking any thing to prevent anything happening (and thus make any thing more likely to happen than any other thing), a state of nothing will always become something (to an arbitrarily high probability). This is then a causal power that a state of nothing logically necessarily has. It is not a hypothetical or a possibility. If the state of “nothing” ever existed as described, its inalienable nature will necessarily have caused “something” to begin.
Again, if someone asks how “a state of nothing” can have the causal power to convert a potential outcome into an actual outcome, since it is supposed to contain “nothing” and thus should have no causal powers, the answer is that it is logically impossible to have anything more “nothing” than that and it not have that causal power. That simply is a logically necessary property of any such state of nothing, because there is no way to get rid of this power without adding something to prevent or control it—and a nothing lacks any such thing. So any “nothing state” logically necessarily has this power.
Put another way, a “state of nothing” that both is the most empty nothing there can be and lacks this causal power is logically impossible, and therefore there can never have been that state of nothing, Which means the state of nothing that theists want there to have been can’t ever have been. So they can’t appeal to it. It won’t ever have been the first state of anything. They have to appeal to what could be the first state of anything. And that simply is a nothing-state that has infinite causal potential.
And this follows by the logical necessity of probability. To say that nothing has no potential to become anything is to say that nothing will remain nothing. But to say nothing will remain nothing is to say that the probability is 100% that nothing will remain nothing and the probability is 0% that nothing will become something. But there is no reason why that should be. When nothing exists, there cannot be any thing that would skew the probabilities that way. When theists say nothing lacks all potentials, they are actually adding a thing to nothing (some power or rule or force that compels it to stay nothing and thus select one out of infinitely many alternative outcomes), and thus contradicting themselves. A proper definition of nothing lacks that thing. And lacking that thing logically entails the causal power to become anything.
One of the things it could become is “nothing,” i.e. one possible outcome is that it just stays nothing. But no law or power exists to decide what it will become, and thus every possible thing it could become must be as likely as every other (hence no outcome can be any more likely than any other). And from that it follows that “nothing” remaining “nothing” has effectively 0% probability, rather than the 100% probability theists incorrectly predicted. It also follows that of all possible things that it could become, infinitely many more of them will be quasi-infinite multiverses than lone universes, and therefore the probability is effectively 100% that if there was ever nothing there would immediately be a near infinite (or even actually infinite) multiverse, which explains all observations vastly better than any other theory (especially theism).
To see how that follows you’d have to deep dive my other articles. But the short of it is that if every permutation is equally likely (which is entailed by there being nothing to make any one possibility more likely than any other), then there are a whole cardinality more permutations that are vast multiverses than are single universes (see my discussion of cardinality in How All Math Is Real). So there are genuinely infinitely more multiverse permutations than universe permutations. It follows that the odds of a single-universe outcome are infinity to one against, even while a single-universe outcome is, in turn, infinitely more likely than “nothing” staying nothing—which is a single permutation of exactly zero universes. And a zeroth universe contains zero permutations, because it contains nothing to arrange differently—there is only one single arrangement of nothing. But there are infinitely more arrangements of a single universe than that—and infinitely more arrangements of multiverses than that—and not only that, but infinitely more arrangements of multiverses containing more randomly arranged universes than any number you care to select. Pick any number, and there are infinitely more larger numbers, and finitely many smaller numbers, producing a ratio of infinity to one in favor of the number of universes randomly selected to exist in a multiverse being higher than the number you picked. And this is true for all numbers you could pick.
One cannot object by saying it is counterintuitive that a state of nothing would have any (much less this) causal power, because intuition is useless in metaphysics (as Malpass himself explains in his first video). You have no pertinent experience to call upon here. What dictates the matter is logic, not intuition. And that gets us this:
- C1. It is demonstrably logically necessarily the case that the absence of anything to cause one outcome to be more likely than any other entails every outcome is as likely as every other, which logically entails something will be caused by this state of affairs to happen; and to effective certainty that something will be an arbitrarily vast multiverse.
Therefore “nothing” (the state of there being truly nothing) logically necessarily has this causal power. To make that not the case requires adding something to nothing to constrain it. And there is no such thing when there is nothing. Therefore, by its inherent structure, “Nothing” must obey an inevitable and unstoppable quantum mechanical law fixing the probability of outcomes, and the inevitably resulting probability distribution does not favor “remaining nothing” but “starting a vast multiverse.” And that matches observations better than any competing hypothesis.
This is also why it makes no sense to complain that we don’t see this causally efficacious nothing-state now. Because that state does not exist anywhere now for us to observe. “Nothing” only has this causal power when there is nothing. Now there is something. And everything that constrains and limits what can happen around us exists here and now (unlike there and then) and thus constrains and limits everything exactly as we observe (which is why, for example, All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical). Only when you remove everything—reduce space and time to zero, and remove all energy and matter, and all properties and structure producing any other physical law—will you cause this peculiarly generative state to exist.
Conclusion
This has been demonstrated on a scientific basis in an actual scientific study: Maya Lincoln and Avi Wasser, “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo,” Physics of the Dark Universe 2013 (see my discussion in What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?). And there is correlating support in similar arguments by previous philosophers, who have all made one or another argument to the same conclusion, deriving the result that a nothing-state is maximally unlikely not to cause something else to exist, and thus the theist’s intuition about the causal powers of nothing is simply wrong. See:
- Tyron Goldschmidt (ed.), The Puzzle of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (Routledge 2013)
- esp. therein: Matthew Kotzen, “The Probabilistic Explanation of Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” (pp. 215–34).
- Peter Van Inwagen, “Why Is There Anything at All?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 70 (1996)
- Bede Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Clarendon 2004)
- Sean Carroll, “Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics (2021).
- Nicholas Rescher, The Riddle of Existence: An Essay in Idealistic Metaphysics (University Press of America 1984).
The main value of this is not that it defeats the KCA (that’s just a byproduct) but that it provides us with a naturalistic cosmological theory of very potent predictive efficacy. Our world looks exactly like a randomly selected physical world, which is more likely in a vast multiverse of randomly arranged worlds. And lo, that’s exactly what we get when we posit a hypothetical starting point of a nothing-state ungoverned by any controlling physics (as being “nothing,” it wouldn’t be). As I just showed. And as Lincoln and Wasser show using a scientific framework. Both of which also rule out supernatural outcomes. It seems a strange coincidence that starting with the simplest possible hypothesis (a nothing-state that logically entails an infinitely variable causal outcome) generates exactly what we observe, and the very multiverse conditions that would make it likely (and which cosmological science is more and more finding evidence of).
It is only the more potent that this causatum ex nihilo model is compatible with all the most popular theories in the actual science of cosmology. For example, eternal inflation predicts from a single near-nothing state an infinite multiverse in which the budding universes are randomly scattered across time—and in block or “B” theory, the dominant theory of time in physics today, that scattering across all future time would arise in a single selection event. Of all possible permutations, few will have the universes bunched up early in time; therefore random selection predicts they’d be randomly scattered across time, which is exactly what eternal inflation predicts. It’s entirely possible that the hypothesized “inflaton field” that sparks spontaneous inflation ex nihilo is simply another way of physically describing the initial transition effect of a causally efficacious nothing-state (as, for example, Lincoln and Wasser propose).
But here’s the other utility function. The Argument from Nothing operates both temporally (if there ever was at some time past a state of nothing) as well as existentially—that is, if there has always been something. So it works even on infinitism. Because even then, if nothing exists to decide what that would or would not be, what turns out to exist could indeed be literally any possible thing, producing all the same logical entailments I find for the “initial nothing-state” condition. Likewise if we don’t reify nothing into a state: the existential probability of what first thing will then exist uncaused follows the same logical entailments.
So my argument applies no matter what condition you posit. If nothing makes any possible thing more likely, then “nothing” existing (in any sense at all) is literally the least likely state of affairs; and quasi-infinite multiverses, the most. And that is true on infinitism and uncaused first things (“origination from an unreified nothing”). So the Argument from Nothing provides a naturalist metaphysics for why anything exists at all, and why this thing and not some other. It’s a random selection effect—whether that happened at some specific time in the past, or is simply the atemporal “dice-roll” whereby what would exist was selected to be. “Nothing” was always one of the things that could be selected. But when nothing exists to decide what will be selected, the probability it will be “nothing” is effectively zero, while the probability it will be something like we observe is effectively 100%. Naturalism thus better explains everything than theism.
Malpass’ point about the efficient cause is, I think, a really effective strategy in general when it comes to engaging with not just theism but almost all supernaturalism.
Almost all supernatural claims lack any mechanism of action. How does God make the universe? It just does, or It just can and chooses to. What’s the specific rules? Is it the manipulation of essential material into manifested material, or the transformation of potential into actual?
This has several consequences.
1) At the point that everyone is agreeing that what is going on is mysterious, the theist can no longer complain about a metaphysical or scientific mystery. We all agree that what is going on at the start of the universe, assuming there is one, is going to be weird and unintuitive. So is a past-infinite universe. But God is weird and unintuitive if you are honest. Christians in particular defend the trinity which is facial nonsense, not just unintuitive but logically impossible. So if we can just accept a mystery, why can’t we accept one for naturalism? And if we must reject a mystery, then how can we accept supernaturalism?
2) From the perspective of an explanatory value, supernaturalism is useless. This is a pragmatic concern, but it’s why supernaturalism never gets a grip in the sciences.
3) More importantly, if you can’t comprehend a mechanism, how do you know that you’re right? A naturalist theory includes things you can observe. Supernaturalism always devolves to feelings, or intuitions, or specious deductions. You never get to make meaningful observations, or real predictions, or create tools yourself. The reason we have confidence in numerous naturalistic theories is that they survive this contact with testing, because requiring an actual mechanism of action entails predicted observations. So the supernaturalist theory isn’t just useless, you can’t be sure it’s true, as compared to some other supernaturalist theory.
All apt observations.
I wrote a whole article building out that perspective (cited here):
The God Impossible
Which links to further expansions of the point.
Very well said. And if you have experience with enough Christians, you find that the “truth” about God is about as solid as burning plastic…yet in their respective isolated denominations, they are equally certain that the other church “clearly errs” about God. More than enough reason to justify concluding that this is not a case of disagreement on an object of actual truth, but disagreement due to the object in question not being a truth in the first place. The minute we say there can be reliable truth discovered in a way “beyond” the 5 physical senses, we should also request the services of a cult-deprogrammer. What I’d like you or Carrier to comment on is, if in evolution, the knowledge of actual truth was key to survival…how did humans ever get to the point of dogmatic assurance about propositions that are not capable of true verification/confirmation? Did gullibility have a meta-purpose that facilitated herd-mentality and thus safety in numbers?
Because I do this for a living, I wrote a whole article answering that question years ago:
The Argument from Reason
Which references (for deep diving why logic governs reality) my earlier article:
The Ontology of Logic
And in respect to math (why math governs reality) I updated that recently with:
How All Math Is Real
Generally, what folks arrive at is that, through a combination of biological and cultural evolution, humans generally use sloppy heuristics and intuitions that work well enough.
For example, collective responsibility and punishment ideas, and stereotypes, are stupid if you actually believe in them, but they’re often going to have some validity to them, unless they are exclusively created by dishonest or utterly misinformed actors. Similarly, consensus and groupthink has obvious problems, but not only does consensus and groupthink at least have the benefit of moving past people being too arrogant to not admit that they’re wrong, it also lets groups make decisions quickly. All of these things are, for reasons Richard would likely say are fundamentally Bayesian, just generally good guesses in the right contexts.
In the case of agency overdetection, it’s far less harmful to have a false negative than a false positive. Same reason why dogs bark at nothing and animals in general frequently have false positives on alarms: better to look silly and waste a little bit of energy than to act too late for an actual threat.
This in turn almost certainly has to do with fundamental realities of information processing. As we’re learning now with automation and both pseudo-AI and real attempts at AI, it’s actually really hard to do what humans seem to do so effortlessly. From the way that our visual system works to our social cognitions to our ability to interpret ambiguity from stimuli ranging from auditory stimuli to language, our brain is using a ton of things that are basically compression or shorthands to be able to arrive at “good enough” reasoning. What’s remarkable from what we’re learning is that this isn’t just an evolutionary optimization that might have a ton of ability to improve: In terms of arriving at quick decisions, our biases are actually reasonably functional, especially in a pre-social context. (You may notice that a ton of our biases and sub-optimal reactions, things like our stress reactions, make a lot of sense on the savannah or as hunter-gatherers and not any sense in post-agrarian societies). Gladwell has his serious issues, but Blink is really interesting in constructing a case for intuitions.
I don’t see why the proponent of the Kalam need be committed to reifying nothing. When they say the universe could not have come from nothing, that’s the same as saying it couldn’t have not come from anything. When they say, “If the universe had an acausal beginning, then it came from nothing”, they are saying, “If the universe had an acausal beginning, then it didn’t come from anything”. But to originate out of nothing (i.e. not from anything) uncaused is absurd.
“Because theists never explain how it is that a disembodied mind can do things—or at least things like “conjure stuff from nothing.” So they are actually handwaving, not explaining.”
Power and causation, like being, are primitive concepts: they can’t be broken down or analyzed further. (At some point, A does B not by doing other things first, but just basically: otherwise, you’d always have to do an infinite number of tasks before doing any task.) God can do things because He has the power to do so. It’s basic.
Your idea that “Nothing” could cause the universe is absurd. To be caused by nothing is to not be caused by anything…to not be caused.
The assertion “things can’t just happen” has to be justified to have a sound argument. What we are pointing out is that “nothing can’t come from nothing” is not a justification but just rewording the assertion. It is therefore incapable of validating the Premise. It’s just reasserting it.
Likewise just calling something “absurd” is not an argument. What does one mean by “absurd”? And once one settles on what it means, does that actually describe this case? And if it does, why are things you classify that way not possible?
That’s a lot of work to be done. And what Malpass is showing is that no one is doing it. They are just handwaving past it. In Part 1 he shows that the Argument from Intuition can’t get there. And he’s right. That’s just reasserting ignorance rather than proving the conclusion.
As to your new claim (which is not the Argument from Intuition):
This is false. All examples known of power and cause are reducible (usually to geometry, e.g. inverse square laws, or the randomization of physical events, e.g. thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, or other physical facts). They are therefore not primitive.
If a power or cause exists, it exists because something else exists and has certain properties (there is a thing or structure or state of affairs that realizes it).
In the case of causatum ex nihilo that is the condition of a nothing-field lacking any power to make any outcome (like staying nothing) more likely than any other. That is a physical state of affairs that logically entails the resulting causal power: if it is the case that “nothing staying nothing” has a probability ~0% when reality is in that configuration, than that state of affairs by definition must and thus will cause something else to happen (as the distribution entails). This is like all quantum mechanics, where the probability distribution of what happens is fixed by the physical structure of the spacetime or field producing it. Here the physical structure is a zero-field without constraint. The causal law follows by logical necessity.
In the case of “invalid reification” Malpass is talking about, there is no state of nothing to have any power—which logically necessarily includes “preventing anything from happening” (nothing exists to prevent anything, even what you call the absurd) or “forcing rules on anything that does happen” (like “it must have a cause”). Those powers can’t exist when nothing exists. Hence your entire intuition is wrong. The opposite logically follows than you assert.
There is no evidence God can even have that power, i.e. there is no demonstration that that is a possible power for anyone (hence including God) to have. That’s why it is handwaving, not basic. “God” is also a giant stack of complex and bizarre (indeed, absurd) suppositions, and thus the least likely thing to just exist for no reason. Nothing existing to decide the matter is vastly simpler and more obvious a starting hypothesis. And that hypothesis hugely outperforms “God” in its predicted observations confirmed.
So it’s not that the Kalam proponent can’t take the tack you do, it’s that they don’t, because it makes the Kalam much less useful for propaganda (which is what apologetics transparently are).
The Kalam trades on an intuition we all too often have. We basically imagine the universe as something that gets put on top of something, like the white loading screen in The Matrix. When you do that, then you do have to ask who does the loading. That’s why you see so many people talking about the Big Bang as an “explosion” rather than an expansion of space. They are really thinking about a primordial nothingness void from which something comes. And, yeah, that does seem unintuitive, and would invite explanation.
But the moment you admit that’s not just true by sheer logic, and in fact seems really unlikely and really fails to understand pretty basic elements of how space and time work, the Kalam loses all of its convincing power. It just becomes an argument with a bunch of extremely unsound premises and dubious validity.
Also, sorry for the double post, but:
I would say that all causes, by definition, cannot be basic. A cause is, practically by definition, a statement of a relationship between two events. Event A causes event B, meaning that there is some mechanism of action that makes it so that a state of circumstances C would not have included event B were it not for event A. That can’t ever be basic, God or not. God has to interact with a state through some process to produce a new state. It’s irrelevant that the state at issue in creation ex nihilo is a nothing state. That gets back to the reification issue (how the hell do you interact with a nothing?)
I find it especially funny that Christians in particular want to die on the ex nihilo hill. It’s Mary Sue nonsense and it’s not even Biblical. Genesis 1 is so clear that God is interacting with a primordial state that isn’t quite nothingness, with objects existing at least potentially in there. Just being willing to accept that time, space and logic precede God even if essentially rather than temporally is so vastly more defensible.
In any case, this comment indicates exactly the point of my comment here, which is that you get to hand wave about causal mechanisms by just invoking “It’s basic”. That’s a bald assertion, and it’s a bald assertion denied by literally all causal analysis, to the point of seeming to me to actually be logically incoherent. It may not be, but you’ll need to prove that, not just assert it by fiat. Which is why this is all pseudo-philosophy.
Indeed, it’s worse than a bald assertion: it’s been proven false by science. So it’s literally pseudoscience now. But it was already proved false by Aristotle over two thousand years ago. His entire discourse on the four causes is about the fact that causes cannot ever be basic but are always descriptions of more fundamental facts.
The problem with (especially, as this often is, Catholic) theological pseudoscience is that it was already refuted even thousands of years ago, but all the more decisively the last few hundred years as science repeatedly swept its leg. Theological metaphysics and its entire mode of thinking is naive woo silliness compared to the actual sophistication of human knowledge by this point. So it astonishes me that anyone is still using it, much less with such embarrassing confidence.
But I already covered that fiasco in Thomism: The Bogus Science with a coda in Why I Think Theology Is Ridiculous (bless their heart).
As for causation, the most definitive study now (which takes Aristotle all the way to modern science and back) is Judea Pearl’s Causality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press 2009). Its entire point is that causality cannot be basic, but can only be a description of underlying factual processes.
Virtual particles are something from something, not something from nothing, so the citation does not apply.
Also, that supposed spontaneity of the appearance of virtual particles is an argument from ignorance. Just because there is no understanding of the causal process generating a particular virtual particle doesn’t mean there is none, it just means we are ignorant about the fundamentals of physics.
Now you are reifying “nothing” by saying it can have a property, thus you now contradict yourself.
Perhaps a whole bunny can pop out of existing spacetime because spacetime can have that property, but nothing means the absence of properties, no properties at all exist, no states of affairs exist.
No, the theist is saying that there can be no timeline at all, and therefore no ex nihilo creation.
Nothing cannot have the property of spontaneously generating something because nothing is not a thing that can have any properties at all, nothing is not a state of affairs, nothing has no timeline. Nothing is the absence of any properties, states of affairs, time, space, material, or anything whatsoever.
But clearly there was a change in creation ex nihilo, the change from no timeline to a timeline, the change from no material to material, the change from no properties to properties.
This change can be seen more clearly in regression analysis, as we abstractly go back in time we reach a point in time where existence began, a sharp discontinuous change.
Right, there simply are no potentials at all, rather than “nothing” somehow being a thing that has no potentials.
Clearly, the transition between something and the absence of something is a change.
Else, S = ~S, which is irrational.
More self contradictions, as this is just a reversion to the fallacy of reification. Nothing is not a state, it is the absences of states. Zero bananas is not a sort of banana, it is the absence of any bananas at all.
No, the absence of all actual things means the absence of all potentials, full stop.
No, if nothing exists to make any outcome more likely, then no outcome has any likelihood at all, P = 0.
No, nothing is the absence of potentials, not an infinity of potentials. You have this back to front.
No, nothing is not a state that has powers, nothing is the absence of all states and all powers.
No, nothing is not a state one gets to by acting to get rid of powers, nothing is the absence of all states and powers.
You are reifying your notions of possibility. You imagine possibilities and abstractly project them onto your imagined state of nothing. Nothing is not an infinity of potentials, it is the absence of potentials. Nothing is not an infinity of possibilities, it is zero possibilities.
For those things that can be explained at all, that is true.
The origin of existence cannot be explained. It is an unsolved riddle. All proposed solutions on offer are irrational.
I am not here to tell tell you I have solved this greatest of riddles, I am here to tell you that you have not solved it, nor any philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and least of all any theologian.
So, with great appreciation for your groundbreaking and pioneering work on the historicity of Jesus and scientific methodology for gauging historical likelihoods more generally, it is no insult to tell you that you have not solved this problem, neither have I or any of history’s greatest geniuses.
The addition of god only pushes the problem back a step, since we are rationally called to ask the same questions about god, which turns out to solve no logical or existential problems. Thus, the riddle remains. Qué será, será.
This is all refuted in the article you are commenting on. Just reasserting what was refuted is not a rebuttal. You are just gainsaying, which is denialism, not demonstration.
This is not how the example is used so your objection is moot. When I mention this, I am talking about the existence of a possible principle, lit. “a continuous “things can just happen” property of reality.” I am not there talking about what a nothing would do, but what a something already does, and why that undermines the argument being addressed there. You seem to have completely ignored the actual argument being made here, and just rage-skimmed a cherry-picked quote out of context and winged about it. You are going to have to do better than that.
I am there only exploring a possibility to extract what observations it would produce, to rebut a claim that it would produce a different observation. I am not asserting that possibility to be true. So your objection is again moot. I have other articles on the possible ontologies underlying quantum mechanics, but they aren’t relevant to this point, which is about probability, not ontology. You seem to be confused about this.
Perhaps what you mean to say is that quantum virtual particle fields may be constrained by some ontology such that if we removed that ontology “then” spontaneous rabbits and universes would become as common as spontaneous photons and quarks. If that is what you mean to argue, I already refute that where I linked in the article:
See the link in “I already explained this to Andrew Loke” and the link in “’that thing, being existent, now limits what can happen’ (I expand on this point in All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable, which pertains here since the kind of spontaneous assembly Loke is desperately trying to argue).” You need to interact with those arguments there, to say anything relevant here.
Now I know you just rage-skimmed the article and didn’t read it.
Because, first, I explain in detail that indeed I am reifying nothing—that’s the whole point. Malpass is the one arguing against reification, and I discuss the merits of that approach first (but also explain it is moot in the last paragraph of my article), and then I explore my different approach, which is to accept reification of nothing and explore what logically necessarily (not intuitively, but necessarily) follows. So you clearly didn’t read the article you are commenting on.
And, second, “If there is a continuous “things can just happen” property of reality” is a sentence about reality, not about nothing. So you have confused even what that sentence is about. Showing again that you aren’t reading the article at all, but just cherry picking things out of context and armchairing it.
This is in violation of my comments policy. Do not comment again until you actually read the article you comment on. Or you will be banned.
This is the claim my article refutes. It proves this claim logically impossible.
No, the theist is assuming there is a nothing-state before a something-state, which is a timeline.
And the reason this assumption is illicit is explained with the North Pole example. You seem to have no knowledge of what the argument is here. And consequently you have no pertinent reply to it.
This is the claim my article refutes. It proves this claim logically impossible.
That illicitly assumes nothing is a thing that something can be a change of. The problems then follow as I document. You seem to just be ignoring the entire argument here and have no relevant commentary on it.
The fact that, to the contrary, this is a logically necessary outcome of a reified nothingness is what my article proves.
Change “from” entails nothing is a thing. Which is reification. All of Malpass’s arguments follow. You are simply ignoring the argument here.
This is the claim that is proved logically impossible in this article.
Not as explained in the article you are ignoring. Stop ignoring the article. Show you know what it is arguing. And respond to what it is arguing. Stop just gainsaying the conclusions it proves to be true. That’s irrational and cannot accomplish anything, least of all knowledge.
There is no such equality. What nothing equals is logically proved in the article. Address what’s in the article. Not made-up stuff.
Refuted in the article.
Refuted in the article.
Refuted in the article.
Refuted in the article.
Refuted in the article.
Indeed. That’s my argument: that a nothing-state entails this reification.
And as the article explains, absent my argument, we collapse back to Malpass’s argument.
And both arguments then collapse into each other as explained in the last paragraph.
You seem unaware of any of this and are not saying anything pertinent to it.
Refuted in the article.
If you have a permanently existing God, then you never had a nothing state.
Which then must invite the question why a God need no causal explanation in the same way a universe does.
This is one of the many two-steps of all of these cosmological arguments. Neither the Christian nor any informed secularist is putting a nothing state as a likely hypothesis.
And if the theist argues that creation ex nihilo is possible, they are admitting that nothingness can potentially produce something. Which is literally the Aristotelean argument about potentials and actuals that Richard is proceeding from.
I would offer two points: First, the argument from “nothing” is pointless since a true state of absolute nothingness does not exist and there is no evidence that such a state ever existed, thus, exactly what we should expect from absolute nothingness, smacks of sophistry more than true grit.
Parmenides said only nothing comes from nothing,
Second, you say
Even if you are correct about intuition, few people would object to using math to model reality. The fact that math works so perfectly (i.e., engineering, neuroscience) provides a reasonable basis to trust it when the calculations are done correctly.
Dr. Carrier, why is it that zero consistently fails to produce something? Is the outcome consistent because it is logically necessitated, or merely because the currently existing universe doesn’t permit nothingness to possess potentiality?
For example, you say:
Nothingness cannot “obey” quantum physics, as being “physics” such laws only govern physical stuff. If Physicalism is true, then potentiality cannot exist apart from physicality. But if there is a physicality to potential, then any potential you find in nothingness will require the conclusion that nothingness contained something physical (!?)
Read the article you are commenting on before commenting on it. I already address this claim multiple times in it. So quote where I address it and respond to what I said. Don’t just repeat the claim I already addressed. That just wastes everyone’s time here, including yours.
Zero is a number, which is a word in the English language. It refers to a reproducible quantity irrespective of what it is a quantity of. It does not refer to a physical state of existence as described anywhere in my article.
Again:
Read the article you are commenting on before commenting on it. I already refuted this equivalence in it. So quote where I refute this equivalence and respond to what I said. Don’t just repeat the claim I already refuted. That just wastes everyone’s time here, including yours.
I refute this claim in the article.
Again:
Read the article you are commenting on before commenting on it. I already proved this claim false in it. So quote my proof of that and respond to what I said. Don’t just gainsay the claim I already proved. That just wastes everyone’s time here, including yours.
Which perhaps explains why Seinfeld’s “show about nothing” had so much potential. 😉
Well, theory of humor:
The joke was that being about nothing was actually about a bunch of something that just wasn’t considered meaningful or significant or exciting, thus making fun of the human use of the word nothing in describing literally almost the entirety of actual human lives.
The joke was no doubt punching up at studio execs and capitalists who constantly reject artistic pitches for shows on some version of “that isn’t about anything so no one will watch it.” Which may in fact have been said about their show in their struggle to get it produced in the first place.
If so, then it is humor of the false: making fun of the fact that rejecting the show because it’s about nothing is absurd because “that it’s about nothing” is obviously false. Which does make fun of the truth that people think ordinary life is “nothing” (yet here is an entire hit TV show about that so-called “nothing”), but the truth is that that belief is false.
Here, that reflects the fact that people need to define what they mean by nothing and check to make sure the thing they are talking about actually meets that definition.
This is what tripped up Lawrence Krauss when he got rolled for arguing a primordial quantum spacetime was the “nothing” that theologians and metaphysicians are talking about (because scientists suck at philosophy and never actually read it so as to actually know what it is discussing). In reality he either was failing to present a thing that met his definition of nothing, or using the wrong definition of nothing and thus not even contributing to the conversation he thought he was.
Yes, it looks like you had to tread carefully in your wording whenever you used the word “nothing”. For instance,
And it’s hard to describe that without making heads spin.
I am really intrigued by the concept of causatum ex nihilo. But I can see how someone could say it is just a play on words getting from “nothing” to “not even laws of nature” to “therefore anything goes” to Big Bangs.
Christians claim that a law requires a law giver. If that were true, and there was truly nothing, then there was no law giver, and then there was nobody there to say that existence must follow the laws of thermodynamics or any other physical laws.
Indeed, that’s the awkwardly false intuition of theists, mistaking what the word “law” means in different contexts to build a Bugs Bunny understanding of physics.
In actual physics, “law” just means a fixed relationship between observables (when x is present, y results), which we have long actually understood meant an underlying physical structure that we are observing, not a law “giver” making that happen. I use the example of Archimedes’ “law” of buoyancy in All Godless Universes Are Mathematical.
I actually think there’s more than just a joking insight here. The a priori restrictions of a more traditional plot that has an expectation of some kind of gimmick, or sensible resolution, or trite lesson, actually really restricts comedic and sitcom writing. For the same reason that improv can generate such remarkable reactions because it can arrive at an unexpected outcome because of the lack of restrictions, and video games and tabletop roleplaying too can tell emergent stories from systems interacting without fudging toward pre-desired outcomes, Seinfeld and shows that follow in its veins like It’s Always Sunny can be more fundamentally creative because they eliminate artificial restrictions.
As Richard has pointed out in other presentations of this idea, it’s like the point that, if you eliminate all objects around you, that doesn’t reduce where you can go, it increases it. Filling up space and time with objects actually constrains your possible worldlnes. Taken to its logical conclusion, if you eliminated everything, then anything is possible. There are no more walls.
This is perfectly put. And exactly right.
I actually think I have a subtly new argument track that can help to address something like what Neil is saying. (I think a lot of this is implicit in your presentation but this may be more succinct).
Let’s address this as a logical fork.
Either nothing is a state that has potentials within it, or it isn’t.
If it is, then your “from nothing comes everything follows”. That’s inescapable.
And while I am not as sold as you are that nothing with no potentials is literally logically incoherent to strong certainty, I think that you’ve made a weak proof that has to be overcome.
But let’s do the other fork.
If the other fork is a nothing that has no potentials within it at all, then nothing can never have existed.
Not deductively, in this case, but to 100% inductive, indeed Cartesian, certainty.
Because even God, at that point, not only would violate the nothingness state by existing Itself and thus be an actualized potential, but (even if we ignore that) could not create from nothing.
You cannot create something that has no potential to exist. And the nothing state that has no potentials within it cannot produce nothing.
You can’t alter the nothing state to have those potentials either. Because, putting aside that there’s no evidence (not even Biblical evidence) that God did that anyways, it’s incoherent to say that you can grant potential to have potential, because then it was a nothingness that had the potential to have potential, and then by virtue of nothing stopping it from actuating that potential it would, and then we’re back at the first tine.
So if there is a single object in the universe, that kind of potentialless nothing could never have existed.
Which is strong inductive evidence to the conclusion that such a potentialless nothing can’t exist.
That’s a good point. If “nothing” had no potentials, then you are also ruling out creation, because then even a God could not make anything out of nothing.
For God to create ex nihilo, then then nihil must have the potential to become something else, which God is then actualizing.
And you are right that “God could give it a potential it didn’t have” doesn’t work because that would require nihil have at least one potential: to potentially have any potentials. But “to potentially have any potentials” is logically the same as “having all potentials.”
Even if someone tried to legerdemain their way around that, they’d have to argue that nihil has only that one potential—but how can it have one and only one potential if it contains nothing, not even potentials? To say that there is some rule or power that makes an exception for nihil allowing it to have just that one potential and not others is to contradict the statement that nihil was truly nothing. There is a more nothing nothing than that: the one that lacks that weird guardrail. And since there is nothing logically contradictory about that greater nothing, obviously it must predate any other kind of nothing—in the absence of anything selecting which particular lesser nothing would exist instead.
Nothing exists in the universe. It doesn’t do what you suggest.
In fact your attempt to define nothing by observables destroys your premise that a lack of law introduces random change, as we can observe the lack of law lacks change hence the first postulate of relativity. Not to mention the arbitrary constraints you impose about the necessity of the mind. You would have to theorize cognition first to make that claim.
You really just refined quantum vacuum fluctuations to fit the definition of God then arbitrarily stated it can’t be
Sorry, I don’t understand any of your thinking here.
Lots of things exist in this universe. Indeed, that it is a universe is itself a thing that exists.
Since this universe is a collection of existing things (spacetime volumes, particle seas, structures, contents, laws and properties), it cannot tell us what a nothing-state would do. A nothing-state cannot behave like this universe because it lacks all the things that cause this universe to follow fixed behaviors and have stable contents with durable properties.
I don’t know what that means. What do you mean by “observables” and how am I defining nothing “by observables” in whatever sense you mean?
My premise is the lack of laws. That this results in random behavior is the conclusion, not the premise. You seem to have skipped my entire actual argument. So I don’t know what you think you are rebutting here.
First, we observe no volume in this universe where there is a total lack of law, so you cannot have made this observation you claim. You are making no empirical sense here.
Second, it is logically impossible that a lack of all laws will lack change, since to remain unchanged would be a law (ensuring one state is more probable than other states). That’s exactly what would not exist if nothing existed. So you aren’t even making logical sense here.
What is the “first postulate” (do you actually mean postulate?) of “relativity”? And how does it produce your conclusion?
Because if nothing exists, neither will any “postulated things” of relativity—unless they are logically necessary and thus must always exist even when nothing else exists, but then it wouldn’t be a “postulate.” So you seem to be contradicting yourself here. Even if you are saying anything intelligible here, which I am starting to doubt.
What “arbitrary” constraints? What “necessity” of the mind?
If this is a poorly worded sentence (maybe English isn’t your first language), and what you mean to ask is how Malpass and I come to the conclusion that “theists never explain how it is that a disembodied mind can do things,” then you should watch Malpass’s video and read my article on specified complexity of minds. Because that’s a side point here. It’s covered elsewhere.
I have no idea what you are talking about here.
I distinguish quantum cosmology from nothing-state cosmology. Perhaps you mean my describing the inescapable law of a nothing-state as a quantum law, because it is an inalienable law of any true singularity. That is not “vacuum fluctuations,” as those require there be a vacuum. I am talking about a state lacking even a vacuum in that sense, and about laws that are inevitable, not arbitrary. So you seem to be confused here.
But yes, a geometric singularity will have no thoughts or feelings (and thus won’t be a God), yet will inevitably explode into an endless multiverse, as proved in my article. You have not referred to a single step in that argument, so you seem unwilling to engage with the actual argument in this article.