Assume and presume both mean to take something for granted as true (among their many other definitions). The difference is in the degree of certainty. A presumption is usually more authorative than an assumption. To presume is to make an informed guess based on reasonable evidence, while to assume is to make a guess based on little or no evidence. So, the popular adage ASSUME means that when you assume you make an ass out of you and me ….or does it?

(Full attribution for the following article appears at the end)

Can Something Come Out Of Nothing Or Why Not?

In our current state of affairs it is safe and reasonable to assume something exists - be it a universe, pure consciousness, illusion or other designations. If some readers nevertheless assume something does not exist right now, then this question effectively becomes meaningless to them but to us "cogiti ergo sum" should suffice.

So let us assume right now something exists.

Therefore, when something cannot come from nothing then something must have always existed and cannot have a beginning. Is that entity the Universe or the Creator, is another question.

However, when something can come from nothing then something may not have existed always and can have a beginning. Is that entity the Universe or something else, is also another question.

It seems the popular intuition that something cannot come from nothing is at odds with the current scientific view that whatever there is, it must have had some kind of a beginning.

Can something come out of nothing or not? Why?

One argument is that time itself has a beginning. And thus,  the universe can be eternal, in the sense of being existent at all times. One could also argue that time must have a beginning, for how can an infinite amount of time elapse for it to be now (this is one half of a pair of arguments by Kant - his antinomies - with which he argues that a certain concept is beyond human reason to establish).

This still leaves begging the question what 'happened' before time began. Although naively this question looks nonsensical since we no longer have time - for then what can before mean - it still has sense in a speculative & imaginative sense. The only rational sense it seems that one can pose such questions.

In fact, certain speculative cosmologies of the Big Bang implicitly allow something to be exist before the big bang. For example, the universe began as a quantum fluctuation; one must ask in what sense physical laws exist before there is a space & time as traditionally understood. For the assertion to make sense at least this much must be true.

The argument that something cannot come out of nothing is a metaphysical one that goes back to at least Parmenides, if not earlier. In fact in the phenomenal world things always have beginnings and endings. For example, I have my hand open & then I close it: a fist has appeared and an open palm has disappeared, but of course what has remained constant between this, is my hand.

If something comes out of nothing then by what agency has it happened? From whence did it come from? If we postulate some fundamental physical law that allows something to come out of nothing, then nothing + physical laws, is not in fact nothing.

There is a scientific axiom that presumes 'proof lies in the assertion'. You are asking to prove a negation. Your question is asking why cannot - your asking for a proof of the negation, not an assertion. The question should be 'How can something come out of nothing' not 'Why cannot something come out of nothing'. Stephen Hawkings has recently argued as to how the universe can come out of nothing, but to my mind his argument is rather circular and it's not provable.

The Hindu scriptures say that the universe is eternal; there never was a time when it was not, nor will there be a time when it will not be. Rather they say that there are 'cycles' - the universe kind of ebbs and flows like the tides so to speak. The scriptures say there is a periods of expansion and periods of contraction, one following the other. At the end of a cycle, the universe almost completely contracts into Brahman where it rests in potentiality before expanding again. (Brahman which is by definition neither existence nor nonexistence). The current scientific theories as to a big bang, point to a beginning of the universe as we perceive it now, most people in the West get the scientific big bang theory confused with their Judeo-Christian beliefs that was taught them when they were young and lingers in all their analysis. They confuse 'beginning' with 'creation'. There is an assumption that before there was the big bang, there wasn't anything, that the universe thus came out of nothing - thus a creation. The big bang theory doesn't address what happened before; laymen assume there was nothing. Cosmologists don't know and we can never know by scientific means what came before. There are cosmologists that are now addressing that there are many universes; that we can only perceive our own. We are one verse in the multi-verse. In the Hindu scriptures it is said that our universe is like a small bubble on the ocean of Brahman, and there are many bubbles. Joseph Campbell does an excellent summary of this in the first chapter (chapter titled Eternity and Time) of the book "Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization" by Heinrich Zimmer, edited by Joseph Campbell.

For some 'thing' to come out of no 'thing' is not logical.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause.

Science is founded upon the idea that effects have causes which can be rationally investigated and characterized. To posit that there is no reason for something is as anathema as to say "God did it" and leave it at that. It's not clear that we could ever know that something came from nothing. Scientists often say that quantum fluctuations  (our universe could be an exmaple of this) are random, but that's not a causal explanation. What we can say is that quantum fluctuations arise from a 'place' that has certain rules. But once you say that certain rules apply to that 'place' (the vacuum), is it any longer 'nothing'?

Another way to go about this is to try to construct a chain of causes, starting from 'nothing'. You essentially have two options:

1. Anything can come from nothing.
2. Only certain things can come from nothing.

Option #1 doesn't explain anything. Option #2 explains everything up to the set of boundary conditions. It doesn't explain the origin of the laws, but we can at least rule out the vast majority of logical possibility space, which is what science does according to Karl Popper. But does #2 really make semantic sense? How can 'nothing' have properties?

There seems to be a certain amount of confusing the issues here. Asking if something can come out of nothing is not the same asking if there is no cause. It is entirely possible than there was nothing until a transcendent causal agent came along and decided to create something.

It seems the popular intuition that something cannot come from nothing is at odds with the current scientific view that whatever there is, it must have had some kind of a beginning.

I do not think this is really true. Einstein’s era of physicist where convinced of an eternal universe. Why anyone would claim that everything has a beginning is beyond me. Why would exclude things from being eternal?

However, when something can come from nothing then something may not have existed always and can have a beginning. Is that entity the Universe or something else, is also another question.

This seem right to me. Asserting that a thing has some type of cause to its existence does seem to remove the quality of being eternal from it.

Can something come out of nothing or not? Why?

Yes, because an all powerful transcendent cause willed it to be.

Attribution for this article:

This content is from www.stackoverflow.com

 http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/8173/can-something-come-out-of-nothing-or-not-why

Contributors:

Saul, http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/users/602/saul

Mozibur Ullah, http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/users/933/mozibur-ullah

Swami Vishwananda, http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/users/3021/swami-vishwananda

Labreuer, http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/users/4556/labreuer

Neil Meyer,  http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/users/1660/neil-meyer