Romansh: the instability of nothing, rubbish (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, June 22, 2015, 19:25 (3232 days ago) @ romansh

Romansh brought up this issue. The so-called instability of nothing only occurs if you make nothing into something, as my answer to him implies. Quantum potentiality is not nothing as the following essay points out, and Krauss is one of the non-thinking atheist cosmologists who have dragged it out as a argument.:-http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=0-"Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. -"The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren't, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place."-Read the whole critique. It's worth it. And so is this discussion:-http://atheistwatch.blogspot.com/2012/07/reviwe-and-debuck-lawrence-krausss.html-"He seems not to understand what these “moronic philosophers” are driving at. He keeps talking like he's proved something if he shows that there is no “nothing” but in fact that's the only way his argument would work. If no actual nothing then he has no argument at all. Then he's just saying “the universe came from something that we can't account for.” Implication: it might have needed God to create it. It only appears to be that God is unnecessary if things can spontaneously pop up out of true absolute nothing. Even that would not be proof since we can't prove there really is no cause. Yet if we could prove that that would be the only real way to prove that God is not needed or not present. The real answer he has that might work is based upon pure speculation. He appeals to natural law and a supposition not in evidence that they are some kind of accident. This just puts the atheist back at square one saying “maybe there could be an alterative to God, maybe.'”-The whole issue is a slight-of-hand re-definition of terms.-Romansh will not have an answer.