There Was Never Nothing

The fact that something exists now is proof that nothing never did. No matter what your view of the formation of the universe, you cannot logically believe that there was at one time or another nothing.

The very word “nothing” is something. It’s a sound, an idea, a linguistic unit. Nothing, in the real sense of the word, cannot be described or thought about or comprehended. The closest you can get to perceiving nothing is to not think about it. It is not darkness, as you might imagine nothing to be—a great expanse of unending blackness—because darkness is just an absence of light. And there could not have been absence, because absence implies the existence of something somewhere, just not here. For example, the absence of food (or, rather, the present feeling of hunger) implies that there is food in some time and place. If there was an absence of everything, something would have to exist to be absent from.

Nothing isn’t even space, because space is dimensional and measurable and real. And if nothing existed there could be no time, because time is something measurable, and is itself a kind of measurement, which implies the existence of something to be measured.

The fact that something exists now means that something always did. If there was a “time” when nothing existed (which you cannot comprehend, since the idea of nothing is something), nothing would come from it. It is, by necessity, nothing in an absolute sense. If there was “mostly” nothing, save for a single atom, then there would still have been something. Nothing is either absolute or non-existent.

To push further, if there was always something, then that means something is eternal. There could have been no beginning, in the way we perceive of all things. Physical things are finite in nature, and all finite things have a beginning and an end. So how could physical things always exist, since we already know these things cannot come from nothing, and also that they must begin at some point and end at another?

It would seem an endless cycle, tracing back finite thing before finite thing, before you arrived at the conception of the first. (And it is logical to conclude that there was a first, since finite things have a beginning, and things with beginnings must begin with a first.) So the real question is: what came before the first? What caused the first to form? The thing that was before finite things—the infinite constant that existed from before a beginning and by argument after an end—must be in nature infinite, otherwise it too would itself have a beginning and continue the cycle of finites. So the question remains, what could come before all finite things that, by needs, must be infinite and eternal in nature, and in and by itself cause the beginning of everything we know as the universe?