...Nothing Comes.

One of the most basic premises the ancients adopted in their first thoughts about the question of ultimate origins can be expressed through the latin phrase "ex nihilo, nihil fit," or put alternately, "from nothing, nothing comes." In other words, everything comes from someplace. If something exists, it has an origin.

That seems simple enough, and in many of the senses that matter, it is. Everything comes from something. But that begs a question when we apply it to ultimate origin. Is there a point somewhere/sometime/someplace where there was nothing? If so, there is a profound problem that must be addressed. If nothing comes from nothing, forever and ever, and now there is something, either we must say that there has always been something or we must say that there was some kind of violation of that primary law of ex nihilo. I think most (though certainly not all) will acknowledge readily that we exist (whatever that means) and that the world in which we live is in some sense real and binding on those of us who live in/on it.

At first glance, this would appear to suggest that this universe has always existed. But science indicates this is likely not the case. The universe has a beginning. If we are to trust the astro-physicists (something I will do blindly at this point to avoid the tangential questions which have nothing to do with the point I'm attempting to make), we must believe that there was an explosion that marked the beginning of things as we know them, called, creatively, the point of expansion. At this point, all the matter that is currently in our universe filled an area that was just millimeters across, and later exploded to produce everything we now see.

Again, at first glance, this seems to solve our problem. Where did everything come from? Simple. There was an explosion, and the material that participated in the explosion later mingled/bonded/interacted in such a way as to produce the world we now see. But again, there's a problem. That doesn't answer the question of origin. If we posit that there was material as the beginning, we still haven't handled the question of where that material came from. It certainly didn't come from nowhere, as that is clearly impossible.

So, we find ourselves at an impasse. We must either accept that the material which comprised that explosion always existed, has always existed, and will always exist (think about the law of conservation of mass, etc on this), or we must accept that at some point in the timeline, there was nothing, and then there was something, an obvious violation. How are we to decide which option we prefer?

As a Christian theist, I have elected to select the option of violation--of miraculous intervention in the nothing--to explain everything we now see. Later, as issues of meaning approach, this option will be shown to be superior to the other options. It also should be noted that it does not necessarily find itself inferior to the other option, so long as we can marshal evidence that in fact some kind of miraculous intervention is either possible or likely. It need not remove the validity of other options to be worthy of consideration, it need only bear the scrutiny of the strongest competition.