Check out the answer here:
http://sudy_zhenja.tripod.com/something_out_of_nothing.html

The reason is quite simple and lays in the mathematical paradox between
zero probability of a single event, and infinite number of tries (both
conditions are inherent to the Nothing).

Regards,
Yevgen

Immortalist wrote:

Sir Frederick wrote:

On 20 Aug 2005 07:10:10 -0700,

And how do they get funding for it?

I provided the funds.
The situation(something rather than nothing)
is a spam.

==## Why is there something
rather than nothing?

If there was nothing, you'd still be complaining!

...the question is ill-formed because there could not have been
nothing.

Who says there is not nothing?

--------------------

Nothing Ventured
A bold leap into the ontological void

Jim Holt
Harper's Magazine, November 1994

Most people spend a good deal of time thinking about nothing. Few,
though, take the next obvious step and wonder: why is there something
rather than nothing? Perhaps that is not such a bad thing. Since the
question was first posed by the philosopher G. W. Leibniz some three
centuries ago, it has occasioned a good deal of existential anxiety.
William James called it "the darkest question in all philosophy." The
British astrophysicist A.C.B. Lovell observed that it raised problems
that could "tear the individual's mind asunder." And, indeed, vexing
over it is often a prelude to dementia. Or, in the case of the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, to Nazism. In 1935, around the time he
began proclaiming that Hitler would rescue the German people from their
forgetfulness of Being, Heidegger declared "Why is there something
rather than nothing?" to be the deepest and most far-reaching of all
questions. Each of us, he claimed, is "grazed...by its hidden power" at
least once in our lives, whether we realize it or not:

The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to
lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured....It is present
in moments of rejoicing, when all things around us are transfigured and
seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think
they are not than to understand that they are and are as are. The
question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from
despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly
commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not...

It can even be argued that we are impotent to answer any question of
why there is something rather than nothing. For, as the Harvard
philosopher Robert Nozick has written, "how can we know why something
is (or should be) a certain way if we don't know why there is anything
at all?" But why should one bother with a question of such generality
that it appears impossible to answer? Although it is certainly
reasonable to inquire why each particular thing in the world
exists--our solar system, life on earth, the clock in the Grand Central
station--it makes no sense to demand the same of the tout ensemble. Any
factor introduced to explain why there is something rather than
nothing--a cosmic egg, a fluctuation in a vacuum, a transcendent
purpose, an omnipotent deity will itself be part of the something to be
explained. Besides, if the world is by definition all that exists, it
would seem foolish to inquire why the world itself exists. That is like
asking why a triangle has three sides. Existing is just what the world
does. To ask, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is, to this
way of thinking, not to pose a real question. It is to rhapsodize--to
express awe, astonishment, bewilderment before the cosmos. Wittgenstein
himself suggested as much when he remarked: "If I say, 'I wonder at the
existence of the world,' I am misusing language."

Whether the existence of the world is a mysterium tremendum et
fascinans or a mere tautology, it continues to exercise the imagination
of philosophers and theologians, not to mention stoned undergraduates
and insomniac yuppies having a Dark Night of the Soul. And it is
becoming the special province of a small group of physicists known as
the "nothing theorists." With some metaphysical chutzpah, these
physicists are seeking to resolve the "how" question that corresponds
to "Why is there something rather than nothing?": to wit, how could
something have spontaneously arisen from nothing? For we now know that,
contrary to what Aristotle believed, the cosmos is not eternal. Rather,
it sprang into being some 15 billion years ago with the explosion of an
infinitesimal speck of infinitely concentrated energy.

This truth, broached early in the century and recently put beyond doubt
by the data from the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, has
not been unanimously welcomed by physicists. Einstein, for one, found
the idea that the universe had a beginning in time nutty and downright
repugnant, although the evidence finally compelled him to accept it
shortly before his death. The great cosmologist Fred Hoyle thought that
an explosion was an undignified way for the world to commence, rather
like a party girl jumping out of a cake; once, during a BBC broadcast,
he derisively referred to the hypothesized origin as the "Big Bang,"
and the term stuck. Churchmen, by contrast, had finally seen a
scientific discovery that was cause for cheer rather than gloom. Pope
Pius XII, opening a scientific conference at the Vatican in 1951,
declared that the Big Bang theory bore witness "to that primordial fiat
lux uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth
from nothing a sea of light and radiation....Hence, creation took place
in time; therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!

Whether or not the Big Bang truly implies that the universe was created
out of nothing by an omnipotent deity in a wholly gratuitous act of
love, it does demonstrate that the universe is, as philosophers say,
contingent--that is, it need not have existed. Anything that exists by
its own nature, that is the cause and ground of its own being, must be
eternal and imperishable. The universe is neither of these things. Just
as space, time, and matter winked into existence with the Big Bang,
expanding to form the present universe, so too will they likely begin
contracting one day when gravity arrests the expansion, eventually
winking out of existence altogether in a great cosmic implosion--The
Big Crunch. The cosmos is thus a mere interlude between two nothings.
It cannot contain the reason for its own existence, the ground of its
own being.

But, then, what could? Only God, say the theologians. Remember the
words that the Supreme Being called out to Moses from the burning bush?
"I am what I am." What He was trying to put across was that His
existence was contained in His very essence. (Indeed, the Israelite
name for God, Yahweh, is a form of the Hebrew verb "to be.") Being the
cause of his own existence , He doesn't have the occasion to ask
Himself, "Whence, then, am I?" In the eleventh century, Saint Anselm of
Canterbury elaborated this idea into an ingenious argument for the
existence of God. Anselm's "ontological proof," which the monk cast in
the form of prayer, began with the premise that God is the greatest and
most perfect thing that can be conceived. It is clearly greater and
more perfect to exist than not to exist, Anselm reasoned, for a real
being is greater than a merely fictitious one. "So truly, therefore,
dost thou exist, O Lord, My God, that thou canst not be conceived not
to exist," concluded Inseam's invocation.

Leibniz, too, counted Necessary Being among the Godhead's perfections.
God exists as a matter of logical necessity; it is because He harbors
the reason for His existence in His nature, that He, and He alone, can
furnish the last link in the great explanatory chain, the ultimate
answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
There is a world because God created it out of nothing, through His own
free choice. This not only explains why a world exists, Leibniz
contended, but also accounts for the selection of this particular
world: since God's creative act was motivated by His infinite goodness,
the world He brought into being must be the best of all possible
worlds--and, adds the cynic, everything in it is a necessary evil. (A
physicist I know claims that things make much more sense if you assume
the world was created not by an all-good and all-powerful being but by
one that is 100 percent malevolent but only 90 percent effective.)

Was this putatively self-existent deity the cause of the Big Bang?
Theologians and believing physicists alike tend to find this conception
of God as a sort of pyrotechnical engineer a vulgar one. the Christina
doctrine of Creation is, in the main, about the dependence of a
contingent world upon a necessary being. God is not to be thought of as
an entity who gets the cosmic ball rolling--the Unmoved Mover; this
participation in the causal order would rob Him of His transcendence.
Rather, He is to be seen as the only sustainer unsustained, without
whose timeless purposing the world would altogether cease to be.
Whether the universe happened to have a beginning in time is, in this
view, irrelevant. The point was nicely put by the British physicist
Russell Stannard a few years ago in an article he wrote for the London
Times: "Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then
leaves the others to write themselves, so God's creativity is not to
seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event
of the Big Bang. Rather, his creativity has to be seen as permeating
equally in all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer
merge." This was presumably what the Church of England prelate William
Temple was trying to capture in the famous pair of equations he
propounded earlier in the century: God minus the world equal God; the
world minus God equals nothing. (But the archbishop's arithmetic was
more treacherous than he knew, for a little manipulation of these
equations yields "God minus God equals God"--which is, of course,
equivalent to "God equals nothing.")

The problem with this theistic resolution of the mystery of existence
is that it hangs rather precariously close to the ontological argument.
It was by that bit of scholastic jugglery, you will recall, that a
self-existent divinity was conjured into being in the first place.
Theologians were chary of Anselm's reasoning from the moment it was
articulated. Could a being whose existence is grounded in pure logic
really be the God of faith, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The
argument fared better with philosophers. Leibniz plumped for it; so did
Descartes, so did Spinoza. It was not until the eighteenth century,
after hundreds of years of muddled controversy, that Immanuel Kant
nosed out the fallacy. Simply put, it is this: Existence is not a
property of things, like size or color. It adds nothing to a concept.
If it did, all kinds of entities could be defined into existence.
Suppose, for instance, a unicorn were to be defined as the most perfect
horse there could be; would it not follow then, by the very reasoning
Anselm employed, that unicorns exist? No logical bridge can be built
between a mere abstraction and concrete existence. True, there are some
philosophers around today who defend the ontological argument on
various eccentric grounds. I have even met one rabbi who swore that he
based his belief in God on a version of Anselm's reasoning. Most,
though, would agree with Schopenhauer's assessment of it as a "charming
joke."

So reason, unaided by faith in revelation, is left staring at nothing.
And that is all to the better. For, as the German diplomat and
philosopher Max Scheler wrote, "he who has not, as it were, looked into
the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the
eminently positive content of the realization that there is something
rather than nothing." Let us, then, dip briefly into the abyss to see
what nothing looks like, fully confident that we will not come up
empty-handed. For as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, Nothing find.

What is nothing? Macbeth answered this question with admirable
concinnity: Nothing is but what is not. (Or as my dictionary puts it,
somewhat less felicitously--if more paradoxically--"nothing: something
that does not exist.") Although the ancient Eleatic sage Parmenides
declared that it is impossible to speak of what is not--violating his
own rule in the process--the plain man knows better. Nothing is, for
example, popularly held to be better than a dry martini but worse than
sand in the bedsheets. On occasion, nothing could be further from the
truth, but it is not clear how much further. Nothing is impossible for
God yet a breeze for the rankest incompetent. In fact, no matter what
pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of
embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is
mysterious. But that would simply mean that everything is
obvious--including, presumably, nothing. That, perhaps, is why the
world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing.
But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also
many bumptious types about--call them nullophiles--who are fond of
declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.

The philosophers of antiquity were inclined to agree. Ex nihilo nihil,
they unanimously declared: "Nothing comes from nothing." Not only does
this maxim attribute to nothing the divine quality of being
self-generating; it also impiously denies God the power to prevail
against nothingness, to bring about a world ex nihilo. The best any
deity could do, they held, was to organize a cosmos out of a primordial
mess they called Chaos; but this is an exercise in cosmetics rather
than fullblooded creation. Centuries later Leibniz paid nothing a
similar compliment, declaring that it was "simpler and easier than
something." (Hard experience teaches the same lesson: Nothing is
simple, Nothing is easy.) This conviction, indeed, is what prompted the
great Rationalist to ask why there is something rather than nothing in
the first place; if there were nothing, after all, there would be
nothing to be explained.

It was left to Hegel, though, to take nothing up and really make
something of it--or perhaps the other way around. At the beginning of
Hegel's famous dialectic is the assumption that the Absolute is Pure
Being. But Pre Being is totally indefinite; it has no qualities; it is
utterly empty. It is the same as Pure Nothing. You can't have one
without the other; they are dialectical twins. And yet, inasmuch as
they are also contraries, they can't coexist very happily. Something
new must be found that reconciles and supersedes them. And that turns
out to be: Becoming! Becoming is what happens when Being is on the
verge of passing into Nothing--or vice versa. Thus does the Hegelian
dialectic get merrily underway, eventually yielding up human history
and culture in all their variegated splendor. As a feat of ontological
boot-strapping, this is breathtaking. It leaves Saint Anselm simply
nowhere.

So nothing is nice, simple, self-begetting, and not really all that
different than something. Why, one wonders, was it regarded with such
apprehension by the existentialists? Heidegger was filled with angst at
the very thought of nothing (though this did not keep him from writing
copiously about it). For him the encounter with nothingness was
suffused with the dread of one's own impending nonbeing--the dread of
death. Sartre, too, was possessed with a sort of horror vacui.
"Nothingness haunts being," he wrote in the treatise aptly entitled
Being and Nothingness. Not even the cafes of Saint Germain offered
certain relief from nullity. He goes to Deux Magots--on a good day, a
"fullness of being"-- to meet Pierre. Pierre is not there. Et voila: a
little pool of nothingness, a frisson of anguish. To be fair, it must
be said that neither Sartre nor Heidegger was very favorably disposed
toward the category of existence either. Roquentin, the
autobiographical hero of Sartre's novel Nausea, finds himself "choked
with rage" at the "monstrous lumps" of "gross, absurd being" that
environ him as he sits under a chestnut tree in Bouville. The universe,
in all its gooey contingency, is de trop. For the more phlegmatic
Heidegger, the feeling elicited by "what is" was not so much nausea as
boredom. Ontologically speaking, the existentialists were fussy
customers: neither something nor nothing afforded them much jollity.

Across the Channel, British philosophers dismissed these vaporings as
much ado about nothing. The late A.J. Ayer submitted that Sartre,
Heidegger, and their epigones had been fooled by the grammar of
"nothing"; since it behaves like a noun, they assumed that it must
relate to an entity--a something. (The White King in Through the
Looking Glass made a similar blunder when he reasoned that if Nobody
had passed the messenger on the road, Nobody should have arrived
first.) Ayer's brethren among the logical positivists singled out for
derision Heidegger's famous pronouncement "Das Nichts nichtet":
"Nothing noths." Nothingness is more than a mere entity, Heidegger
seemed to be implying; it is the great annihilating force. "Nothing"
turns out to be a noun after all, but the present participle of the
transitive verb "to noth"! Nonsense with knobs on, chuckled the
positivists. Nonsense on stilts.

But what if nothing really is a kind of force? What if it does "noth"?
Perhaps it might just noth itself. The idea that nothing could usher
the world into being by committing suicide, as it were, may seem a
pretty barmy way to answer the question "why is there something rather
than nothing?" But it has been semi-seriously raised by no less a
thinker than Robert Nozick. In his book Philosophical Investigations,
he invites us to imagine nothing as "a vacuum force, sucking things
into non-existence or keeping them there. If this force acts on itself,
it sucks nothingness into nothingness, producing something or, perhaps,
everything, every possibility." Nozick recalls the vacuum-cleaner-like
beast in The Yellow Submarine that goes around sucking up everything
that it encounters. After hoovering away the surrounding background, it
ultimately turns on itself and sucks itself into nonexistence; with a
pop, the world reappears, along with the Beatles. (Come to think of it,
the cosmic background hiss left over from the Big Bang does rather
resemble a giant sucking sound.)

One of Nozick's more acute observations on the question "Why is there
something rather than nothing?" is that it is biased; it presupposes
that nothing is a privileged, natural state that requires no
explanation, and that something is a mysterious deviation from it. Now,
it is true that if nothing did exist, no one would be around to ask
"Why is there something rather than nothing?" It is also true that
while there are many possible worlds for there to be something --
worlds in which Henry Kissinger is a steeplejack, worlds in which
everything is made of cream cheese -- there is only one way for there
to be nothing; and that uniqueness would seem to elevate nullity from
the crowd. But this is a two-edged sword. For if all of these
possibilities -- the myriad worlds where there is something and the
single one where there is nothing -- are assigned equal chances of
occurring (and why shouldn't they be?), then it is overwhelmingly
probable that there will be something rather than nothing.

Tennessee Williams once said that "a vacuum is a hell of a lot better
than some of the stuff nature replaces it with." That sentiment has not
stopped certain contemporary philosophers of a Platonic kidney from
asserting that the world exists because it is so much better than
nothing. The leading exponent of this Axiarchic School is the Canadian
philosopher John Leslie. With considerable sophistication, Leslie
argues that the cosmos exploded into being in answer to a need for
goodness. "Suppose there is no nihilistic force fighting the existence
of things," says Leslie. "Then absolutely any valid ground or reason
for things will tend to bring about their materialization. And ethical
realities supply such grounds or reasons." What about the problem of
evil? Plotinus said that the murdered were themselves murderers in a
previous life. Christian apologists invoke the inscrutability of God's
designs. Hegel claimed that the conflict and wickedness were mere
appearances. The Axiarchists, to their credit, do not try to make evil
disappear. Rather, pointing to the majestic complexity of living
things, they submit that the world is on balance good enough -- that
is, at least marginally better than nothing. So its existence is
ethically required. Given a sufficiently developed sense of irony, one
can almost accept this.

The alternative, after all, is to believe that the triumph of Full
Being over the Absence of All Things was just a matter of reasonless
luck. Or that, as the Hunter College physicist Ed Tyron is fond of
putting it, "the universe is simply one of those things that happens
from time to time." Tryon holds the distinction of being the first of
the "nothing theorists," a cabal of theoretical cosmologists (clustered
mostly upon the banks of the Cam and the Charles Rivers and on
Manhattan's Upper West Side) who are trying to fathom what happened
before the Big Bang. It was in 1969 that Tryon, doing a bit of
woolgathering during a talk by a visiting celebrity physicist at
Columbia University, suddenly blurted out, "Suppose the universe is
just a quantum fluctuation?" This was greeted with a good deal of
harrumphing by the several Nobel laureates present. What the callow
Tryon was suggesting was that the entire cosmos might have bounded into
existence out of nowhere -- in complete accordance with the laws of
physics.

The key to it all is the notorious Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,
which says that, provided the scale is tiny enough and the duration is
sufficiently brief, anything can happen. Little space-time bubbles can
froth up from nowhere, elementary particles can appear and disappear.
Add to this the "inflationary theory" developed by Harvard physicist
Alan Guth in the early 1980's, which allows minuscule things to blow up
to colossal proportions in the blink of an eye -- miraculously boosting
their own energy in the process -- and the cosmogenic possibilities are
endless. A random blip in the void can easily cascade into a Big Bang.
"It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch," Guth
observes. "The universe, however, is a free lunch." The nothing
theorists have fleshed out a variety of rococo scenarios for creatio ex
nihilo in recent years, all relying on the idea that nothing is in some
sense unstable. When these fellows are speaking English rather than
equations, they tend to sound like the blowhard physicist Myron
Kriegman ("Name's Myron. Not Ron, mind you") in John Updike's novel
Roger's Version. Listen to Kriegman explaining the spontaneous
emergence of the universe to a nonplused young man at a cocktail party:



As you know, inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have
this space-time foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to
non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking.
You have a Higgs field tunneling into a quantum fluctuation through the
energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of
broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in
a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing
to the size and mass of the observable present universe. How about a
drink? You look pretty dry . . .

The giveaway here is "next to nothing." That may not sound like much,
but it is still something. The nothing theorists always seem to need
some sort of orphic seed, some little bit of mathematics-saturated
fuzz, to get their cosmologies going. Ed Tryon's universe pops out of a
"false vacuum" -- an infinitesimal patch of empty space-time that,
thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, is a mad ferment of particles and
fields. Stephen Hawkins calculates the probability that the cosmos
might have arisen from a three dimensional geometry of zero-volume:
close to naught, but no cigar. Others invoke a preexisting dust of
timeless structureless points and inchoate geometries: a quantum
tohu-bohu not unlike the Chaos of the ancients. But these are all pale
and paltry nothings, no the real item. You could hold them in the palm
of your hand. They scarcely inspire much angst.

Of all the nothing theorists, the one who appears to have got closest
to real creatio ex nihilo is Alex Vilenkin, a Ukranian emigre
cosmologist now at Tufts University. When Vilenkin says the universe
arose from nothing, he means it. "Nothing is nothing," he told me over
the phone. "Not just no matter. No space, no time." (Vilenkin suggested
that I think of nascent universes as little bubbles forming in a glass
of champagne.) By a quantum process called "tunneling," which permits
the breaching of otherwise impassable barriers, space-time emerged from
nothing into a manifold of potential universes, and thence into
reality. Of course, since time itself is created in the process, these
transitions cannot be thought of as taking place in time. They are a
logical, not a temporal, sequence -- one dictated by the laws of
physics.

But where do the laws come from? And why these laws? We appear to have
traded one orig9n mystery for another. "They exist prior to the
universe," Vilenkin assured me. "If you like, you can say they're in
the mind of God," he added in a bit of theistic hand-waving that is
fashionable among physicist these days. But suppose the laws of quantum
physics did somehow precede the cosmos, hovering transcendently like
Plato's eternal Forms. That does not change the fact that they are only
a set of equations, a mathematical pattern. They have no ontic clout.
They need a demiurge to get behind them and shove. As Stephen Hawking
asked in A Brief History of Time, "What is it that breathes fire into
the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? . . . Why does
the universe go to all the bother of existing?"

If the laws of physics come into being along with the universe, then
they can't explain it. If they exist prior to the universe, then there
is nothing to account for their existence -- not to mention their
extraordinary power to exact obedience from the void. That is the
dilemma of the nothing theorists. And there is no need to get impaled
on its horns when a much more economical way of showing why there is
something rather than nothing is available. It goes like this. Suppose,
for the sake of argument, that nothing existed. Then, in particular,
there would be no laws. (Laws are something, after all, despite what
the nothing theorists seem to think.) If there were no laws, then
everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then
nothing would be forbidden. Therefore, if nothing existed, nothing
would be forbidden. Therefore, nothing, if it existed, would forbid
itself. Therefore there must be something.

That is my own argument. I thought of it the other day while shaving.
The logic seems to be sound; at least, no one I have run it by so far
has detected a flaw. yet admittedly there is something sterile about
it. So I decided to enlist one more round of experts to pass judgment
on my musings.

First I phoned a theoretical physicist I know at Cal Tech. I got his
voice mail and said that I had a question for him. He called back and
left a message on my answering machine. "Leave your question on my
voice mail and I'll leave the answer on your machine," went his
instructions. This was alluring. I complied. When I returned to my
apartment late that evening, the little light was blinking on my
answering machine. I played the message back with some trepidation. It
was from the physicist.

"Okay," it began, "what you are really talking about is a violation of
matter-anti-matter parity . . ."

So I called a professor of philosophical theology at the University of
Virginia. I asked him if the fact that there was something rather than
nothing could be explained by invoking a deity whose essence entailed
his existence. "Are you kidding?" he said "God is so perfect He doesn't
have to exist."

Then on the street in Greenwich Village, I ran into a Zen Buddhist
scholar who had been introduced to me once at a cocktail party as an
authority on mystical matters. After a little chitchat, I asked him --
perhaps, in retrospect, a bit precipitately -- why there is something
rather than nothing. He tried to bop me on the head. He must have
thought it was a Zen koan.

Finally, I rung up a philosopher at Columbia, about the deepest
intellect I know. I said I was at the end of an essay about a
metaphysical question and the waters were fast rising up around me.
When I told him the question, his response was vehement and almost
churlish: "Who says there is not nothing?"

On reflection, I think I see his point. And as I've always said,
nothing is good enough for me.

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/holt.htm

One day a group of scientists got together and decided that humans had
come a long way and no longer needed God. The group picked one
scientist to go and tell God that the deity was no longer needed.

The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no
longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do
many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

God listened patiently; and after the scientist was finished talking,
God said, "Very well! How about this? Let's have a person-creating
contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"

But God added, "Now we're going to do this just like I did it
originally."

The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed a
handful of dirt.

God just looked at the scientist and said, "No, no, no. You go get your
own dirt!"

http://www.butte.cc.ca.us/~machuga/God%20of%20all%20Grace/Chapter%205.html