Recently in my philosophy class this question arised. Why is there something rather than nothing? It seems an impossible question but I was wondering if anyone has ever tried to solve it.
It is something, and it will never go away. Nothing is not relevant, and have never been. Nothing only exist if it’s possible to remove what covers it. Or physically speaking: Energy can not be removed, only transformed. The universe was never born; it just “bangs and crunch”, and it can not commit suicide. We just have to learn to live with it.
Johan
i dont think its answerable. u would have to ask mr. creator
To me the question is a paradox we created, but doesn’t really exist. There is no such thing as nothing, in my opinion. The concept of nothing is an erroneous notion present in taking logic to its extremes. Because we have something, we drive our logic to an extreme in the other direction and say that there is nothing. Furthermore, we use the term ‘nothing’ within an assumed context, ie. if we are talking about apples and I ask you thousands of questions about some apples in a room you can see, and I ask you if there is anything in the room you may answer “nothing”, because the context assumes we are referring to apples and there are no apples in the room. Which obviously does not mean there is nothing in the room in the broad context outside of which we were speaking. Therefore there is something, if it isn’t one thing than it is another. Whether we have space, matter, vacuum, or any other phenomenon that we may not even know of yet. Everything is something.
Could you simply say that there is something because there is nothing?
No because the two are not dependant on each other. Ie. Most philosophers attribute heat, to the lack of cold and cold to the lack of heat. That being that each are dependant on each other. Something and nothing do not work like this, in my opinion. They do work like that only in the context of assumed things, but not generally.
To say there is something because there is nothing, is not really saying anything. Circular argument. You could just as easily say that there is nothing because there is something. Other than words, nothing is going on, especially if I ask you to define your something and than to explain to me a reality in which what you have defined as something can entail nothing.
I have to agree Magius, that nothing doesn’t exist. Limited nothing is a useful concept, but absolute nothing certainly seems to meet the qualifications of ‘not existing’. I mean, you can’t picture it, point to it, give an example of it, list any properties it has, or describe a situation in which there would be some of it.
Here’s my take, a bit confusing.
if you ask what’s between two objects you can say “nothing, just space.” The “just space” of course is something. It is physically gas etc. It is conceptually the something that is between two objects. Therefore nothing doesn’t exist And yet nothing is always always spoken about.
In terms of how we function we rely on the notion of nothingness as a necessary contrast to all of our somethings. Nothing is the setting of existence. This could lead one to conclude that while there is always something, it is a mere coverup to the actual reality that there is nothing. But the paradox continues that if all there is is nothing then nothing itself is something.
Let’s agree to the last phrase that Nothing is Something, then. It would be my contention (and perhaps Heidegger’s - He was really to difficult to understand) that the only REAL something is nothing, that nothing is a kind of something that is qualitatively different from all the other something somethings that exist.
But as with reading Heidegger - Who cares? I’m not too sure about its applicability … though it does a fairly good job at uncovering that reality is an illusion.
Until now I have only heard this question related to debates on whether God does exist or not. As universe does not seem to have in itself its own reason to be, philosophers - starting with Aristotle and continuing with Tome d’Aquino - seek for a prime cause. This cause explains the existence of something, rather than nothing. Extending a little bit, the existence of order (= “cosmos†in Greek philosophy), rather than chaos.
As for the existence of “nothingâ€, it can be debated, perhaps, from the religious point of view, that in the beginning God created the world out of nothing. So how can we say that nothing does not exist if it seems to be postulated in the first book of the Bible?
Are the existence of God and the existence of nothing two related questions?
Since Descartes, philosophers have fallen in love with dualities, because they seem to define our world. Good means nothing unless bad exist, pleasure loses its meaning if pain cannot be defined, same with cold and hot, light and darkness… “Something†stands by itself; so indeed “something and nothing” is not a classical philosophical couple. I look around me and I see “somethingâ€. I do not need to think of “nothing†in order to understand that there is “something†around me. “nothing doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.
So how did nothing come into mind anyway, where did it came from? Perhaps from the need to explain the world, from the question whether there is something beyond this. You can call this a philosophical take – questioning the empirical data given by the senses – or a religious take – the need to find a purpose and a justification for ones existence.
Some have argued that God cannot be called the prime cause of the existence because the principle of cause and effect works with empirical data. I say an iron bar is enlarged because it was previously heated. I work with empirical data. When I say that God created the universe, God, cannot be empirically demonstrated so I cannot say that he is the prime cause. So the whole principle all together can not be used related to Gods’ existence.
It is, I think, the same thing with nothing and something. One cannot prove the existence of “nothing†starting from “somethingâ€. No matter what we do experience gives us only material data. Even less one cannot demonstrate that there is any kind of cause-effect relation between the two.
So, indeed, “nothing†means something only when related to a specific concept. Also perhaps nothing is a sign that our mind could not, by now, explain to itself everything. “Nothing†doesn’t represent anything in itself, it’s just a measure of the fact that we are unable to explain everything. Remember the way maps in the antiquity were made. The unknown places that people knew nothing about, where marked “hic sunt leones†– “here are lions  Perhaps our mind marked the unexplained by concepts like “nothingâ€.
on the contrary i think nothing and something are dependent. in our mids we have the ‘nothing’ category and the ‘everything thats not nothing’ i.e. something category. without the ‘nothing’ category there can be no ‘something’ category.
sorry i couldnt have worded that better
Hi, wildchild. Here is something a friend had to say on this topic.
“Nothingness is attached to somethingness as strawberry’s are to cream, bangers to mash.
It is the human desire to compartmentalise which gives them this desire to isolate nothingness. Nothing is as much a part of life as anything else, there is nothingness in every moment, in every tiniest molecule. It’s a Yin and Yang thing.
The attempt to isolate nothingness from life is akin to attempting to isolate Creation from the created, the finite from the infinite, it is impossible as they are one and the same.
My suggestion is do not concentrate on definitions but on what life is and what it means in its totality and to oneself. There is no real understanding gained if one breaks it down or attempts to label it in any way.”
ahhh . . . the old monism vs. pluralism debate. Parmenides was the first to really break this question down. It is a question of being and non-being. I have come to believe that it is really just a matter of semantics, if you ask me. We define everything that “is” as being and everything that “is not” as nothing. The word nothing is no more than a word we have conceptualized in order to refer to the concept of non-being. No need to make it more difficult than it is. 
Actually, I would argue that they are explicitly dependant on each other.
This isn’t an answer to Wildchild’s question but a proof that there is something something rather than nothing. Nothing cannot concieve of itself, hence there must be something. It’s a simplified (and much stronger) version of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.
It’s an a priori argument as far as I can see. So why is there something rather than nothing? Because without something the question would never be thought of. It’s much like the answer why is there intellignet life in this particular universe? Well, cause all the universes without intellignet life couldn’t have asked the question.
There’s is such thing as nothing in my opinion, whether it’s concrete or abstract is another argument, but it is also perfectly reasonable to hold Magius’ view. It all depends on your philosophical view of numbers, etc. whether they are real or not.
Johan, note that there is such a thing as antimatter.
Magius, you could say that everything has a name. For instance, if you remove the apple from the table, there is air left where the apple was. If you remove the air, there is vacuum left where the air was. What happens if you remove the vacuum?
It’s a matter of terminology. This isn’t taking logic too far. It is a question strongly related to what exists in the place of “cognition” or “awareness” when it ceases to be.
Nothing exists just like night would exist if the sun always shone. 0=2.
It’s filled with air again! hehe 
Apparently, none of you have taken me up on my offer:
Magius stated:
Uccisore,
you will have to explain to me what limited and absolute nothing are, cause I am ignorant of them, and intuitively believe that a limited nothing is a contradiction in terms - even if I was to accept nothing as a possible aspect of reality, we would be left with a duality of all things which are nothing and those things which are something, but we would not be able to say that there is a limited nothing.
EnMarchant stated:
Yes, this is the whole problem, we work by myriad principles that do not relate to reality and help to make worse the illusion of reality that we already experience. I have mentioned in many posts that I believe these concepts should be completely dropped. Ie. Forever, never, infinity, nothingness, perfection, etc.
EnMarchant stated:
I disagree, in my opinion we don’t work on notions of nothingness, atleast not necessarily or not at all times. I don’t see how our notions of something are dependant on nothing. To me this is absurd, I don’t think about my monitor as a something because if it didn’t exist there would be nothing, there would simply be SOMETHING else in place of it. You say that nothing is the setting of existence, how so? See, I find the problem with people is that when they can’t find an answer to a question they jump on the God band-wagon, but few jump on the nothing band-wagon. When we didn’t understand where lightning came from we thought about where it came from, we used logic to bring us to the fact that “There can’t be nothing” so there must be a cause for the lightning. The only problem was that in answering, they could find no solution, and believing themselves to be too wise they came to believe that since they can’t figure it out, it must mean that they weren’t meant to figure it out because God caused it and our human minds can never truly understand God. So as you see, I believe that most people, if not all people, work on the construct of reality which portrays reality as always having a something and never a nothing. There is also the problem which you eloquently portrayed with your last example.
Hairyguy stated:
If we have a nothing category, than please be so kind as to tell me what you hold in that category. Or atleast inform me of how something becomes nothing or nothing becomes something without reference to religion. Furthermore, why is a something category dependant on a nothing category? It appears that you, like most religious folk, are stuck at the cause adequacy principle, that being that if we take cause and effect back far enough it has to lead either to a nothing or to a God. But, as far as we have taken cause and effect there is no reason to believe that there is a God. See God keeps getting pushed back. We use to believe that God was the cause of lightning, earthquakes, etc because we didn’t understand them. Then we solved that issue and found God not to be the cause. So God was pushed into the sky which we didn’t understand and it was said that the lights out in the sky were the angels of God keeping watch on us. But then we found out that the lights are but stars and planets and moons that are having sunlight reflected off of them at a great distance which causes them all to look white(generally). So now we have pushed God all the way back to the big bang, some have pushed him and nothingness even farther back to the creator or the substance present behind all the multi-universes present in our macro-universe of universes.
Moreover, it use to be believed that space has nothing in it, that it is a vacuum and by the definition we have given vacuum, it means there is NOTHING. Our own conceptualization of reality got in the way of our learning and still does, it took a while for us to find that even all space is filled with matter. Space has a temperature, a very special temperature called the Cosmic Microwave Background. Furthermore, we became aware of these particles which appeared to have no weight, called nutrinos. But no we have found out that they have weight it was only that our technology was not sensitive enough to detect the infinitesimaly small weight it possesses in comparison to thing we have thus yet experienced.
Yet another example is that it was believed that much of an atom is actually empty space (NOTHING), but as we are advancing we have found and are still finding new evidence to show that an atom is filled with many things. So far we have found these things called ‘quarks’ which seem to make up the atom.
I find it quite illogical for you to assume that SOMETHING is dependant on NOTHING, since we knwo something to exist, but the NOTHING is much trickier to prove, so it would be logical to assume that NOTHING is dependant on SOMETHING and not the other way around. Although, much religious text mphasizes the concept of something being dependant on nothing, for the very reason of God.
The Buddha,
although I find you to be an eloquent writer, I have a hard time finding anything of substance in the words you use. I don’t mean to be demeaning, for I honestly think that it is just me who doesn’t understand what you mean by your words. For example:
I wouldn’t say its our desire but our instinct to find patterns and meaning behind all things. Hence Aristotles belief in all things being teleological (having an end for which they are always striving) and that all things have purpose. We can’t help but to see things in such a way. To me, it’s all anthropomorphism (people putting their own (human) attributes onto things external of them and assuming they work as we do). I also think your logic takes a leap for you not only assume nothingness exists, but you also assume we have found it, which would be the first order of tasks to complete before we could go onto your statement of our isolating nothingness. For we cannot isolate something we have not found. You make a very profound statement that nothing is as much a part of life as anything else, but don’t back it up with any examples. Would you mind providing some so that I may come to understand your point of view better? Ah, the ying-yang, how I too become enthralled with the concept. I ended up throwing it out with a bunch of other misleading concepts, like good and bad. People are convinced that right and wrong is something objectively true outside of our conceptualization of it for ourselves. Something they don’t pay attention to the fact of laws changing from one day to the next, what is right today is wrong tomorrow and what is wrong today is right tomorrow. Few I have found understand that right and wrong is just something we made up so that we didn’t go around killing ourselves and destroying the society which we depend on and which has proven, from caveman times, to help us prosper. It’s a control measure for beings who would otherwise do as they please. But there is no right and wrong in nature or space or the universe. The more we categorize and group the more we find ourselves sowing everything back together again and realizing that what appears at first sight to be different are actually the same things.
Matt stated:
??? I’m really lost as to what you mean here. There are things (something) that don’t have consciousness, does that mean that they are nothing? Since that would be true of the logic in the above quote, only reversing it from nothing to something. What do you know about nothing? If nothing exists, than how do you know it cannot conceive of itself? What if nothing is the ultimate consciousness thinking of itself and everything else? But even if you were correct in assuming that nothing cannot conceive of itself, how does that prove something? Furthermore, how is it a simplified (and much stronger) version of Descartes Cogito Ergo Sum? He wasn’t postulating that that is all there is, he was postulating that that is all we can be sure of. There may be these things called bodies, there may not. There may be an external world, there may not. There may be an evil demon deceiving me of SOMETHING but it is not real, but yet it wouldn’t be nothing either, there may not. Lastly, scholars agree that Descartes went to far with his proofs, and that he didn’t prove his statement well enough. What he did prove well enough is that there is thought, but not that there is an ‘I’. He did provide proofs, but their not convincing.
Matt stated:
The first part of your paragraph makes alot of sense and goes along with what I am saying, although I wouldn’t explain it in that way because the logic can be attacked. It could be easily said that you are committing the Slippery Slope Fallacy which is when someone takes the existence of one thing/truth and assumes it to necessitate another, but it doesn’t. The latter part of your paragraph is vague to me, it presupposes that there isn’t intelligent life in other universes and that they haven’t asked the question of why is there intelligent life in their universe. But you can’t know that, for all we know there is intelligent life in other universes, maybe even ours (other than us).
Njoapte stated:
See, this is what I referred to previously in this post. It’s a matter of cause and effect for you, if one thing than another, if another than yet another again, etc, etc…sooner or later its gotta come down to nothing or God for you. This just isn’t so, we have no proof to believe that there is nothing outside of our universe, we have no proof to believe that there is a God that started it all. If you remove the vacuum there will be yet something else that we haven’t discovered yet, as I stated about the Cosmic Microwave Background and nutrinos in the vacuum of space.
Njoapte stated:
Yes, the whole problem is that we are dealing with terminology that is faulty and we don’t apply our theories and terminology to reality enough to see what is faulty from what is to the best of our knowledge. It is taking logic too far in the sense that we believe that which we conceptualize, ie.Infinity, nothing, forever, never, etc. If its strongly related to you to what exists in the place of cognition or awareness when it ceases to be, than I will say this: no one truly knows what happens when we die. Now when we are asleep (unconscious, unaware) there is still something, so that would be one hole in your theory. But I think the death things is more relevant and I will focus on that. Because we don’t know what truly happens when one dies we have to go by what the living experience of the dead. And that is that they seize living and their body disperses over time to join the rest of the atoms in an ungrouped (human body) form. There isn’t supposed to be assumed a kind of nothing in any of that. Hence why many people believe that a persons spirit goes to join God, or stays on earth as an invisible spirit, or what have you.
What’s your take?
I think I didn’t explain well enough. Firstly I think that thought is in itself something. It is, I would hazard, not nothing, otherwise we couldn’t call it thought. Keep in mind what nothing actually is, which is the absence of anything. Thus the rest of my argument, which is runs along the same lines as Descartes’s cogito, pretty much substituting something for “I think”, is as follows.
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Nothing cannot concieve of itself. It cannot by the very definition of nothing (it is the absence of anything).
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There is a conception of nothing (note in a universe without some sort of intelligent thought about nothing (vague in order to be all encompassing of any type of thought about nothing) this wouldn’t be a valid premise, which is where I think you’re getting me confused).
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Anything that is not nothing is something.
Conclusion: Hence there must be something.
This is a priori as I don’t have to rely on the outside world. Whether this becomes one of Kant’s confusing synthetic a prioiri truths is up to your own taste and view on kant, but I think it would be if you follow Kant.
You’ll see that in a universe without intelligent thought this argument would not be valid, but we do have thought, so it is.
It’s stronger than Descartes’ cogito cause it doesn’t use I think, thus it includes the possibility that I am part of another consciousness, say a dream of someone else, part of a multiple personality, etc. which Descartes’ idea can’t take account of, which I thought is pretty much the only quibble philosophers have with it. I would like to hear of any other arguments though, as this would undermine my argument.
So simply put there has to be something in order to even conceive of nothing. That’s the proof that there is something, though it’s not a proof of the external world, but that’s really irrelevant, as there still must be something (namely me or something generating my ‘thoughts’).
Descartes’s arguments for getting out of skeptisim of the outside world is what is generally derided by all philosophers, they were pathetic.
As for my second statement, it’s like saying that to be able to ask the question there must be something so it’s pointless to ask why is there something rather than nothing. There’s a distinction here between HOW and WHY, the ‘how is there something rather than nothing’ is up to the physicists to figure out, but even if they show that the universe must happen cause of the universe there’s still the WHY there of ‘why must these rules be so, ensuring that there is something rather than nothing?’. But that there is something is necessitated by the question in the first place so it becomes a slightly non-sensical question.
The other note about intelligent life was a little poorly explained too, but follows from the above. The crux of the argument is that it’s almost pointless to ask, why did the seemingly impossible chance of there being intelligent life in this universe happen? Well it’s because if it hadn’t of happened we couldn’t have asked the question. That it seems almost impossible is pointless because the only way we can ask the question is if we happen to be in a universe that has life.
It’s like someone saying “How could I possibly have won the lottery, it’s impossible” just after they’ve won. It’s true that beforehand there was very little chance of them winning the lottery, but afterwards the chance of them having won the lottery is 100%. So the chance of us being in a universe with intelligent life has to be 100%, the statement “it’s odd that there’s intelligent life in our universe cause it’s so unlikely” is unintelligable.
The argument doesn’t presuppose there isn’t other intlelignet life, they could ask the same question. I think it’s basically sayying, there’s no point at being amazedat the fact that we’re here, even if the probability was 1 in a billion that life started on Earth, unless that 1 in a billion chance had already happened, we couldn’t wonder at it, so it’s no all that surprising that we’re here.
Due to the length of other’s posts im discouraged to read them so ill go to the main post
Well there is something because something is more complex and noticable than nothing. We can only imagine nothing because its a imaginary device not a real one.
Also because something is made of complex mater, the mater and energy are always trying to go toward less complexity
Matt, you are proving what descartes proves - that there is A something, a thinking being. This doesn’t resolve the question that the thinker is thinking ilussionary thoughts that all amount to nothing.
Magius I read your post. Here is my not so direct response.
I’ll work with two examples of nothingness, both of which you spoke about: Death and absence of meaning. As magius seems to be saying, these examples of nothingness
Death: Death is an ending. Thus the act of dying is a something. But what happens next is possibly a nothing. Possibly, it is the end of consciousness and the end of existence; that is, it is the end of all somethings. It is a nothingness. Death comes to all of us. Thus, we are all facing this nothingness. Furthermore, it is a nothing amidst our lives filled with somethings.
Absence of meaning: Not far from the nothingness of death is the nothingness inherent in all of our meanings. I can argue this point in this manner: If we give death meaning - Paradise or Hell, for example - then this meaning conviently removes the possible nothingness of death. Death becomes a transitional moment from one something to another something. That is, Consciousness remains. The same with meaning. I can give meaning to all my everyday life and be assured that in me and all around me there are only somethings, and that “nothing” is merely a logical paradox, a fault of our logic. However, if I return to the death-with-meaning and posit instead that death has no meaning, then I am equally faced with the possiblity that LIFE - in all its apparent somethings - is a mere construct, that life too has no meaning.
This is not too deny the existence of matter and form. It is merely to question the meaning of matter and form. Where there is the possiblilty of making meaning, there is the corresponding potential of leaving the moment meaningless. Meaningless I think would be the same as nothingness.
I pick up an object. It is something. Physical - form and matter, according to Aristotle. I’ll go with his description. However, does Aristotle ask about the subject? The one picking up the apple? I pick up the apple and at first I am nothing, the apple is nothing.
You seemed to have missed the point again, it doesn’t matter if the thinker is thinking illusionary thoughts, as the illusionary thoughts are still something rather than nothing by very definition. Hence there has to be something rather than nothing. I’m not making any statement about the outside world, I couldn’t care less whether it exists or not for the purposes of this argument, it is truly irrelevant. For the question that there is something, as well as there is a conciousness (or A something as you termed it) , seperate questions answered in the same way, both of the can be answered yes through a priori reasoning as above.
It doesn’t matter if whatever is creating the thoughts is non-physical, like a non-physical soul as suggested by Locke, or other soul theorists, non-physical doesn’t mean non-existent, it is still something. In fact it doesn’t even matter if nothing creates the thought, if the though just 'be’s. As soon as it is in existence, there is immediatly something rather than nothing.
You’ll note above there I wrote ‘if nothing creates’. That’s actually a rather unfortunate consequence of the English language rather than a problem for me, as it’s not that ‘nothing’ creates something, it’s that there is no causal relation to explain the existence of something, it just 'be’s, as I termed it above.