dhw: I don’t see any difference between the two questions, since they both imply that there OUGHT to be nothing, and I don’t see why the choice is between a multiverse and a UI. I agree that something has to be eternal, but the idea of an Eternal Intelligence intelligently doing nothing in a complete vacuum for ever (retrospectively) until eventually it came up with the idea of creating a material universe seems pretty laughable to me. Ugh, what a boring (retrospective) eternity! At least an eternal, material and ever changing universe doesn’t strike me as ridiculous...........Neither science nor religion can EVER come up with ANY theory connected with eternity that is not pure conjecture. So let’s have some more Christmas turkey...I may not know how it got here, but I do know where it's going.

You Europe folks never had turkey until we colonists discovered them in the wild and learned to grow them incaptivity. There is ALWAYS A FIRST CAUSE. You've missed that point in the discussion I've had with Matt.

MATT: The real question is thus, in my mind, not "Why is there something," but "Why isn't there nothing?"

I don’t see any difference between the two questions, since they both imply that there OUGHT to be nothing...

The difference is in the rabbit hole it sends you down:

"Why is there anything?"

It sends you into the world of the present, the world of now: Investigating every blade of grass, you stumble on every step. You contemplate the sun... your navel... you try to look at everything that is comprehensible and are arrogant enough to think that this--material stuff has any real meaning. It keeps your mind on things you can understand, and tricks most of us into thinking we have found "reality."

"Why isn't there nothing?"

Forces you to face the dark reality: On the other side of *here* lies the abyss. Asking this question faces you with your own mortality but in a different light:

"What did you look like before your mother was born?" This old Zen koan directly assaults the concept of existence. How do you contemplate nothing?

"Why is there anything?" puts your mind on objects--but its much harder to think about nothing. Hence why I think its converse is a question that holds much more power.

In a theological sense, thinking about nothing forces you to consider your place in a universe that suddenly seems more special. It forces you to consider that you too, could be nothing and in fact, it was much more likely that you should have been nothing.

That website I posted has made me more willing than ever in life to agree with the assertion that there must be something absolutely eternal about our universe. I'm with you, that the intelligent part seems almost absurd. But I think we align closely on this point.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"

I've shifted this discussion from the "Intelligent Cell" thread back to where it belongs.-DAVID: Why is there something rather than nothing? The most profound question in philosophy. Raised hundreds of years ago, and I haven't seen a reasonable answer yet.-dhw: I suggest: Because that's how things are.-DAVID: I think we have to accept that is the way it is supposed to be.-TONY (B_M): "Supposed to be" implies purpose. It also implies something to suppose that purpose. Maybe that's why no one wants to answer the question. If they answer it honestly, there is only one answer that can be arrived at.-Welcome back, Tony. If, as I suspect, you agree with David and are thinking of "God" as your answer, do you consider God to be nothing (= a total void)? If you don't, you still have the same problem: i.e. why is there God (something) rather than nothing? My honest suggestion ... though made, I must confess, with a smile on my face ... leaves the answer perfectly, agnostically neutral. Can you find fault with it?

The real question is thus, in my mind, not "Why is there something," but "Why isn't there nothing?"

Excellent way of looking at it. To my way of thinking, something has to be eternal, either a multiverse (?) or a UI. If there was nothing there should be nothing now. I don't buy the stupid stuff that nature abhores nothing so there always will be something created. How, created from what if there is absolutely nothing to begin with?

And every philosopher who's claimed creation ex-nihilo runs into exactly this problem. What explanation, for the uncreated God?

Back to the 'same old'. I am with the guys who tout First Cause.

DAVID: Lawrence Krauss defends HIS philosophical ability:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos-KRAUSS: "It may be true that we can never fully resolved [sic] the infinite regression of 'why questions' that result whenever one assumes, a priori, that our universe must have some pre-ordained purpose. Or, to frame things in a more theological fashion: 'Why is our Universe necessary rather than contingent?'-One answer to this latter question can come from physics. If all possibilities—all universes with all laws—can arise dynamically, and if anything that is not forbidden must arise, then this implies that both nothing and something must both exist, and we will of necessity find ourselves amidst something. A universe like ours is, in this context, guaranteed to arise dynamically, and we are here because we could not ask the question if our universe weren't here. It is in this sense that I argued that the seemingly profound question of why there is something rather than nothing might be actually no more profound than asking why some flowers are red or some are blue." -From my position on the agnostic fence, this is a non-argument. We don't need to believe in a pre-ordained purpose to have an infinite regression of questions ... namely, not why but how. We simply don't know that "all possibilities etc. can arise dynamically", and so there is no guarantee that our universe could arise dynamically, and while it is obvious to the point of absurdity that we couldn't ask the question if the universe wasn't here, that proves absolutely nothing about how we got here ... from the birth(s) of the universe(s) to the origin of life.-I agree, though, that the seemingly profound question of why there is something rather than nothing is not profound. It doesn't matter a jot whether you believe in a creator or in impersonal natural processes, it all boils down to some form of energy the source of which we shall never know. And I see absolutely no justification for a physicist assuming that his speculations have any more (or any less) validity than those of philosophers.-KRAUSS: What I tried to do in my writing on this subject is carefully attempt to define precisely what scientists operationally mean by nothing, and to differentiate between what we know, and what is merely plausible, and what we might be able to probe in the future, and what we cannot. The rest is, to me, just noise.-I have read the article twice, and would challenge anyone to find where the author "defines precisely" what we cannot probe. That is "precisely" the area that levels out the claims of physicists and philosophers.

How do you get something from nothing or is something eternal? This essay poses questions, but I don't see answers:-http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the-bridge-from-nowhere-rp-The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.-In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It's not simply that we can't find the right explanation—it's that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing.-***-The solution to a paradox lies in the question, never in the answer. Somewhere there must be a glitch, a flawed assumption, a mistaken identity. In so succinct a question as “how did something come from nothing?” there aren't many places to hide. Perhaps that is why we return again and again to the same old ideas in new and improved guises, playing the trajectory of science like a fugue, or variations on a theme. With each pass, we try to lay another stepping stone in James's elusive bridge.-***-Following Aristotle's intuition, physicists today conceive of nothing as the ultimate state of symmetry—a relentless sameness that precludes the differentiation one would need to define any “thing.” Indeed, as physicists run the cosmic film in reverse, tracing deep history back in time, they see the disparate shards of reality reunite and coalesce into an ever-growing symmetry, a symmetry that signifies an origin—and a nothing. -***-Wrought by uncertainty, quantum fluctuations are effects without causes, the noise beneath the signal, a primeval static, random to the bone. The rules of quantum mechanics allow—actually, require—energy (and, by E=mc2, mass) to appear “out of nowhere,” from nothing. Creation ex nihilo—or so it seems. -Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle ...says that certain pairs of physical features—position and momentum, energy and time—are bound together by a fundamental indeterminacy, so that the more accurately we specify one, the more ambiguous becomes the other. Together they form what's known as a conjugate pair, and together they preclude the existence of nothingness. Home in on a spatial position and momentum will fluctuate wildly to compensate; specify smaller, more precise quantities of time and energy will vacillate across a wider swath of improbable values. In the shortest eye blinks, across the smallest distances, whole universes can boil up into existence, then disappear. Zoom in closely enough on the world and our calm, structured reality gives way to chaos and randomness.-***-In spite of the way quantum fluctuations are typically described, what sits “out there” in the world is not some preexisting reality wiggling around. Experiment has consistently proven that what sits “out there” isn't sitting at all, but waiting. Unborn. Quantum fluctuations are not existential descriptions but conditional ones—they are not a reflection of what is, but of what could be, should an observer choose to make a particular measurement. It's as if the observer's ability to measure determines what exists. Ontology recapitulates epistemology. The uncertainty of nature is an uncertainty of observation. -***-While cosmologists do believe that the laws of quantum mechanics can spontaneously generate a universe, this story just passes the buck. For where did the laws come from? Remember, we wanted to explain how something came from nothing—not how something came from the preexisting laws of physics. Removing causality from the equation is not enough. The paradox stands. (my bold)
***- the eternal universe reappeared in a strange new form—specifically, in an equation that looked something like this: H(x)|?> = 0. The physicists John Archibald Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt wrote the equation—which is now known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,-***-It's the right-hand side of the thing that's worth noting: zero. The total energy of the system is zilch. There is no time evolution. Nothing can happen. The problem, ultimately, is that Einstein's universe is a four-dimensional spacetime, a combination of space and time. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, requires the wavefunction of a physical system to evolve in time. But how can spacetime evolve in time when it is time? -***- In and of itself, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation elegantly solves our problem. How did something come from nothing? It didn't. Of course, it's a perplexing solution given that, well, we're here. -***- Quantum theory requires this strange reversal of time's arrow. Wheeler emphasized this fact with his famous delayed choice experiment, which he first posed as a thought experiment but that was later demonstrated successfully in the lab. In the delayed choice, an observer's measurement in the present determines the behavior of a particle in the past—a past that can stretch back for millions, even 13.8 billions, of years. The causal chain turns in on itself, its end links back to its beginning: James's bridge is a loop. -Comment: What is always was. Something is eternal is the answer. I choose God.