Reasonable Faith

Guest (Male): Dear Dr. Craig, I'm a Christian and I'm trying to hold together faith in God. Anyway, the question was, 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, so I'm just trying to hold my faith together and learn and grow in Christ.

Dr. William Lane Craig: Well, there are a couple of things going on here, 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.

Guest (Male): 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 somewhat disturbing.

Dr. William Lane Craig: He said it twice. And I just know in my past, in my walk of the Lord that sometimes I felt like I was on hold in my 20s and 30s and so on, until I get a certain question answered. You know what? 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, Bill. 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 like from this college student, something that kind of has him on hold a little bit.

Guest (Male): Right. And that's unfortunate because I don't think everyone is as fortunate as you are.

Dr. William Lane Craig: Kevin, I think many times Christians will not be able to receive the answers to their questions because perhaps they're geographically isolated, think 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. And so 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. So what is his problem he has with, is it even possible for nothing to exist?

Dr. William Lane Craig: Well, I think what's odd about this question, Kevin, 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.

So 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.

Guest (Male): 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? I mean, there was no space, no time.

Dr. William Lane 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 noun, as a common noun, thinking that nothing must refer to something, some sort of a void. And that's not in fact the case.

Anymore than say the pronoun nobody refers to somebody. It means it's not anybody.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Dr. William Lane Craig: And similarly, it's not anything prior to the Big Bang. So, 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. And 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 say, 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 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. So, I would say that God is not chronologically prior to the Big Bang. He's not temporally prior to the Big Bang. He's explanatorily or causally prior to the Big Bang.

And 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 that God has a sort of causal and explanatory priority to the universe, but not a temporal priority.

Guest (Male): Well, we've spent plenty of podcast time defining what you mean by nothing.

Dr. William Lane 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.

And 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. And 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.

Guest (Male): And the crux of his question, Bill, is the last few sentences. He said, well, 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. And he said, even if that were true, would this then defeat the Kalam's first premise?

Dr. William Lane 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, that there had to be something which brought the universe into being. It could not have come from not anything.

Guest (Male): Okay. This next question is also from the United States, Bill. It says, hi Dr. Craig, can there be a possible world where nothing exists? If so, would 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. William Lane 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.

Guest (Male): Could there be a possible world where not anything exists?

Dr. William Lane Craig: Yeah, yeah. No, in every possible world, something exists. Namely, at least God, who is metaphysically necessary. So 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.

Guest (Male): 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. Looking at something's negative attributes, inappropriate?

Dr. William Lane Craig: Well, 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 that's very important.

Guest (Male): So it serves as further description.

Dr. William Lane Craig: Right, it informs us a great deal about what kind of an entity we're talking about to learn these things.

Guest (Male): So it would be okay to say, this is Joe and he is a carpenter, but he's not a Presbyterian.

Dr. William Lane Craig: Right.

Guest (Male): That would tell you something more about him. And suppose you said this is Joe and he's penniless and he's uneducated. And so forth, those would be negative properties, but you'd learn a lot more about Joe.

Guest (Male): 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. William Lane 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, has no properties at all.

Guest (Male): Can't do anything.

Dr. William Lane Craig: 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 and therefore already, if you knew nothing else, this has differentiated it from a state of nothingness.

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