{"id":943,"date":"2014-01-25T04:59:48","date_gmt":"2014-01-25T04:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wearedone.org\/?p=943"},"modified":"2014-01-26T02:44:18","modified_gmt":"2014-01-26T02:44:18","slug":"ex-nihilo-merda-taurorum-fit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wearedone.org\/?p=943","title":{"rendered":"Ex Nihilo… merda taurorum fit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"no<\/a>
\nLoosely translated “Out of nothing… bullshit comes<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

The Lateran IV Council of the Catholic Church in 1215 proclaimed that:
\n“God… creator of all visible and invisible things, of the spiritual and of the corporal; who by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature (from nothing), spiritual and corporal, namely, angelic and mundane, and finally the human, constituted as it were, alike of the spirit and the body (D.428)<\/em>” “Deus… de nihilo condidit.<\/em>” God, out of nothing created all things (even the angels). Angels, huh ? Really?
\nLions and tigers and bears, oh my.<\/p>\n

‘Ex nihilo nihil fit’<\/em> “Out of nothing, nothing comes<\/em>” unless God decides to create something from nothing and only he can do so and did so. That\u2019s the crux of the theological and philosophical biscuit.
\nThis idea has been around for millenia, going back to the Greeks (doesn’t everything?).
\nAnd thus it came to pass it became a religious truism and a dogma of the Church for the last 1,000 years or so and it has creeped along silently deep in our culture ever since as sort of an unquestioned cosmic given:
\n\u201cOnce upon a time there was absolutely nothing, and God made everything out of it<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems to have permeated philosophy as well as theology, but not modern science. Scientists are always willing to adjust their metaphysical assumptions to whatever they actually find in the world, our theological and philosophical friends appear a bit more recalcitrant.
\nWhat if despite the Lantern Council\u2019s proclamation, there is no true absence of anything, be it matter or energy (which we know from Einstein\u2019s E=mc2 are manifestations of the same \u201cthing\u201d). What if we discover, as is the case of otherwise empty space devoid of matter, there is an energy, space isn\u2019t really completely empty, so far we find there is always some thing there, matter or energy, the true absence of any thing doesn\u2019t exist. What if this nothing, nihilo, is merely an idea, an old idea, a very old idea in philosopher\u2019s and theologian\u2019s heads?<\/p>\n

What if true absence of \u201canything<\/em>\u201d is merely a metaphysical construct, an imaginary idea like the firmament, caloric, heaven, phlogiston, protoplasm, monads, hell, soul, or the luminiferous aether; all entities once proposed to explain how reality really is that are not found in the world we find ourselves in.
\nLike unicorns… they are in the Bible, after all.<\/p>\n

Lawrence Krauss\u2019s book: \u201cA Universe from Nothing<\/em>\u201d is a fascinating and dense wind through modern cosmology that redefines \u201cnothing<\/em>\u201d and shows that from the kind of \u201cnothing<\/em>\u201d the physicists find \u201csomething<\/em>\u201d (our universe and everything in it) can and most likely did come \u201cex nihilo\u201d without need, without evidence of any god… and the philosophers and theologians aren’t satisfied with the cosmologist’s answers.
\nThey want the theoretical physics to describe and the experimental physics to discover the theologians\u2019 “true and absolute nothing<\/em>“, the “nihilo<\/em>“, the kind out of which nothing comes… unless God decides to create it. And they want evidence of god. So far none is forthcoming. <\/p>\n

So check these two videos of Lawrence Krauss in Stockholm: the first is his lecture on the \u201cUniverse from Nothing<\/em>\u201d and the second another whole hour of Q&A, with a very impressive panel of educated folks… and it gets a bit testy.<\/p>\n