NOTHING (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 14, 2012, 17:34 (4474 days ago)

MATT: Giorbran starts his book with a discussion about "nothing," and I think it will breathe some fresh life into our discussion as well... Your homework question is to come up with some thoughts about why "Nothing" is necessarily simpler, more primordial than "something." What is "nothing?" 
(This one goes for you too David...)-I understand "nothing" as meaning either a total void, or the absence of something. I don't see any problem with the latter, but I agree that a total void is unimaginable. For me, the Big Bang poses just as many problems as it solves, because in the immortal words of my old buddy King Lear, "Nothing will come of nothing." But just as a total void is unimaginable, so too are infinity and eternity and an intelligence that made itself out of nothing or is infinite and eternal.-DAVID: The great disparate authorities always describe the creator as pure simplicity. This is one of the great divides: atheists want God complicated. Religions claim He isn't!-I wonder how the great disparate authorities define "pure simplicity". One of your most potent arguments for a deity has always been the extreme complexity of the mechanisms for life, evolution and consciousness ... so complex that our greatest minds cannot fathom any of them. And yet you claim that the mind that created these complexities, not to mention the astronomic complexities of a finely-tuned universe, is simple. If the creative force is "pure simplicity", you may as well believe in chance.-Please can we keep this discussion on the new thread.