Questions Atheists Cannot Answer: Existence

Thoughts on the Within Reason podcast episode

Some time in September 2024, Alex O’Connor published an episode of his podcast Within Reason, where his friend Joe Folley and he answered listener questions that atheists purportedly would not be able to answer. This episode has generated tremendous food for thought. Not least to clarify my own thinking on these topics, I would like to publish a series of posts on these questions. The first one is already a big one: why is there something rather than nothing?

The easy answer to this question is obviously that if there were nothing, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. But then the question would become why we are here. After all, we are part of that “something”.

To go deeper, we need to first specify what we mean by nothing. Is it a vacuum, empty space, the concept of the number zero? If we talk about true nothingness, we cannot just assume empty space. Quantum physics posits that there is no such thing as empty space. But even using pure Newtonian mechanics, truly empty space doesn’t make much sense. Space can be measured as the distance between objects. But if there are truly no objects, there is nothing to measure. Similarly there would also be no time, not just in the sense that there are no clocks. Time presupposes that there is something that vibrates with a regular frequency. In other words, there must be something that changes in regular intervals, returning to some sort of initial position or configuration at the end of a full cycle. Now, it might not actually be regular, but that is also a moot point as it needs to be similarly defined in relation to something else.

So the conclusion from above is that there must be change and that change must return to a certain configuration repeatedly. Perhaps then space and time are just emergent concepts resulting from such change, perhaps even space and time are merely representations of such change in our consciousness, more on that in the thoughts related the question of consciousness. Here this is only a side note, as an atheist would assume that something can exist even if there is no consciousness to contemplate it.

The question then becomes how did this something arise in the first place? If atheists state that the universe started with the Big Bang, then theists might challenge what came before. Again, this something conjures up the notion that there was empty space and time before the big bang, but by the very argument from above, there cannot have been anything before. In fact, there cannot have been a “before”, as “before” is something related to the concept of time.

This can be a bit of a cop-out for atheists, using the air balloon model of the universe, where there isn’t a true beginning, but the big bang is merely one point on the expanding balloon surface. But where did that “balloon” come from. Can change arise out of nothing? Is there an original cause that caused everything else?

One of the fundamental laws of physics is the Law of the Conservation of Energy, It states that the amount of energy in a closed system must remain constant. Energy itself refers to the ability to perform work or cause a change. Given that perhaps energy is actually more fundamental than space and time, perhaps energy is change. Given that each change must have a cause, there cannot be a situation in a closed system where there is no change. So change must happen all the “time”. There cannot be a situation where change arises suddenly, not just out of nothing, but similarly out of anything that is completely still.

Looking into this more closely, there are then two types of change:

1. The recurring change in vibrations that allows for the concept of time

2. The non-recurring change that underpins causality

Neither of these would allow for an initial change, still leaving unanswered the question where they come from. One option is that the entire system is self-contained in a way a spherical surface (as per the balloon model) is both infinite in that there is no border and finite in that it has a measurable surface area.

At the microscopic scale, the laws of physics are entirely symmetrical with respect to time. They work equally well forward and backward in time. At the macroscopic scale the issue is that second law of thermodynamics that uses probability to state that the entropy (disorder) in a closed system would always increase, giving us the arrow of time. This would provide a challenge to the idea that the universe is a “spherical” system with no definitive borders, not just in space but also in time.

There is however one counterpoint. The second law of thermodynamics that entropy always increases because there are vastly more configurations of matter in a disordered state than in an ordered state. Vastly more does not imply that there are none. It is vastly more likely that all the air molecules in a room are evenly spread throughout. But there is an ever so tiny probability that all air molecules could briefly clump together in one corner. If there is sufficient time available, then this could happen.

There is also a second possibility, what if something can indeed arise out of nothing. Quantum physics talks about virtual particles that arise and then disappear as suddenly. Perhaps this could also be related to the fact that our universe strangely consists out of far more matter than antimatter. Perhaps a universe and an anti-universe somehow arose together but are now disconnected from each other. This is of course pure speculation, but future physical discoveries can perhaps find evidence for such a hypothesis. Just because we cannot explain something currently, does not mean it’s not true. Just like the early humans wouldn’t have been able to explain lightning, they shouldn’t have concluded that weather phenomena aren’t even in principle explainable other than through deities.

In conclusion, while we currently do not have an answer as to why there is something rather than nothing and where that something comes from, we cannot therefore conclude that the question is unanswerable for atheists. It might in fact be answerable even within the framework of materialism. Perhaps one day, if and when we have a grant unified theory of physics, uniting quantum physics and general relativity and perhaps other concepts, when we better understand the underlying mechanisms behind quantum weirdness, perhaps we come across something that would either explain why there even in principle cannot be a nothing or that there are options for something to arise out of nothing.