Ask An Atheist: Contingent Existence

I have touched on this one before.  Is “nothing” an option?  Is it in the rule book that the universe itself cannot be (wink at Aristotle) an Uncaused Cause?  Or that anything can prevent universes (ours or others) from existing?

All such “Origins or Bust” questions are attempting to resolve unresolvable fundamental issues (even the question posed had to be a conditional, based on an “if”).  As far as we can tell right now, all the physical matter of the universe tracks back to an initial Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago.  None of the known religious stories match up all that well with those data, though apologists do text trawl and parse to make pieces of it fit.

Whether anything in a meta- or multiverse existed “prior” to the beginning of our space — time (and whether “prior” has any meaning in that context) is fun speculation but doesn’t make either the evidence of what happened after that (billions of years of natural change turning the initial energy into matter and eventually stars and eventually solar systems with planets, lots of supernova burps in between) including the evolution of living forms down to us) go away, or render any theological explanations for that (take your pick) any more useful or plausible.

Let’s turn the question around.  If not everything about the universe needs to have a contingent existence, could there ever be nothing rather than something?

I guarantee you, answering that question is just as unresolvable and assumption driven as the first one.

Have fun.