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Did God really make the universe out of nothing? Is there really any such thing as “nothing”? Trent Horn tackles the difficult concept of “nothing” as he explains where we got everything.
Cy Kellett:
Did God really make everything out of nothing? That’s on Focus right now.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending the Catholic faith. Remember to subscribe to Focus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever else you might get your podcasts, that way you’re notified when new episodes are released, and if you’d be so kind, would you give us that five star review and help to grow this podcast?
Cy Kellett:
Trent Horn, the renowned author of What the Saints Never Said: Pious Misquotes and the Subtle Heresies They Teach You, is our guest today, and we presented him with one of the most difficult topics one can possibly discuss, the topic of nothing. We cannot imagine nothing. I used to try when I was a kid to imagine nothing. There was always blackness or whiteness, but there was never nothing there. This state, we might call a state of nothingness. I think we can’t imagine it, in fact, because it doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as nothing, but we do say that God created out of nothing, and what do we mean when we say this? Every act of creation that we can imagine is actually an act of transformation. Someone takes something, turns it into something else, makes something new out of it. Divine creation is not that. So what is it and how should we think of it?
Cy Kellett:
Trent has a wonderful philosophical mind, so it’s fun to get him away from his usual pro-life work or his life defending the church and ask him to explain one of the hardest things there is to explain. Did God really create everything out of nothing?
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome again to Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, joined by Trent Horn, apologist here and speaker and writer of many fine books, including Why We’re Catholic, Persuasive Pro-Life, Answering Atheism, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?, and an extraordinary thinker, speaker, and a very helpful person, Trent Horn. Trent, thanks for being with us.
Trent Horn:
Thank you for having me.
Cy Kellett:
I’ve got a really easy question for you this time. Usually we make you work hard. This, I would just [crosstalk 00:02:08] let you do-
Trent Horn:
I work hard for the money, so hard for the money.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, and we try [crosstalk 00:02:14] to treat you right.
Trent Horn:
And you be better treat me right, you better treat me right.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so I want to do just a simple little … Could you please explain creation to me?
Trent Horn:
Creation is when you bring something into existence that wasn’t there before.
Cy Kellett:
So are we doing that now?
Trent Horn:
We are creating a podcast episode right now. This podcast episode did not exist before, and now it does, so we are creating it, and there’s different elements of creation. Human beings create things typically by bringing preexisting material together through our finite powers, to assemble it into something from our rational minds projecting onto the world around us. God creates things. However, the most stupendous act of creation was the creation of the entire universe, and God did not create that from preexisting matter, like how humans make things. He is not a craftsman, as Saint Athanasius said, he is the creator, not a craftsman, and so God created everything ex nihilo, or out of nothing. So God brought the world into being, he said let there be light, and there was light, and he made the world from nothing. So I actually have a course that should be available soon from our Catholic Answers School of Apologetics, a mini course that focuses just on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing, and I talk about the evidence for that from science, from philosophy and from theology.
Cy Kellett:
So is it just me, or do other people have this problem as well? I can’t imagine ex nihilo creation. I have no mental image of how that could possibly … Every act of creation that I can imagine involves something being turned into something else.
Trent Horn:
Yes, that’s true. I think that the closest analog we could think of would be a mental creation of the mind, so that’s the closest parallel I can think of, when we create a fictional elements or ideas, though some people will say all we’re doing is that we’re reordering previously existing ideas. There’s that book … Well, there’s lots of people who claim that there’s 36 plots in all of literature, but there’s still things like creatures and ideas that never existed before. They may have analogs, but they seem to spring from the mind, it’s almost ex nihilo, but it’s not truly ex nihilo, You’re right.
Trent Horn:
We can’t think of nothing. It’s a really hard thing to think about. What is nothing? When most people think of nothing side, they think of a black slate. So they just think of a black slate and they say, “Oh, well, that’s nothing.” I’ll say, “Oh, it’s not nothing.” First, you’re looking in your mind at the color black. That has a specific property to it. Also, if you’re trying to think of it as something in your mind, you’re putting some sort of boundary around it. You’ve bounded it in some way. So that would not be … We can’t imagine nothing. So people will talk about nothing as if it is something. You have physicists like Lawrence Krauss who say, “Well, something comes from nothing. Something comes from nothing all the time,” and they talk about quantum vacuums and other things like that, and they’ll also say things like, “Well, nothing has no laws constraining it, so something could come from nothing, because we talk about nothing almost as if it were just a black slate, as something that’s this black, empty slate.”
Trent Horn:
The term nothing, we say creation from nothing, the term nothing is just a term of universal negation. So what it just means is it’s not a signifier of something. It’s just a universal rejection of anything. Nothing is just a term that refers to the universal rejection of anything.
Cy Kellett:
So it’s almost like saying there is no such thing as nothing. Part of why you can’t imagine nothing is that state doesn’t exist.
Trent Horn:
No, it does not, and I would say that when you look at everything from a philosophical and theological perspective, the state of absolute nothing is actually logically impossible. It is actually impossible for there to be absolutely nothing, because God is a necessary being. It is not the case that there ever could have been absolutely nothing, because even if there were no creation, there would still be God.
Cy Kellett:
There would still be God.
Trent Horn:
God is a necessary being. What that means is that God depends on nothing to exist, and God must exist by definition. Existence is just what God’s nature is. Everything else has a distinction between its essence, what it is, and its existence, or that it is, but God, God’s essence, what he is, is that he is. Exodus 3:14, “I am that I am.” So God just is. He is existence. God could exist without creation. Creation is not necessary, but God is, so there never could have been absolutely nothing, because there always would have been God. The fact that something exists shows there must be a logically necessary foundation for reality, and so there could have never been absolute nothing. There could have been no physical space or time, but there could have been absolute nothingness itself, because God is a necessary being that simply has to exist.
Cy Kellett:
So the act of creation then is that being begins to be that is not God, that is lesser than God?
Trent Horn:
Right, and this is important for us to solidify, that God is not just constituted of some weird material we call being, and he didn’t just rip out a part of himself and then bring the universe into existence. So when we say God is existence or being, we don’t mean that he is just all the matter that is and we were made from God. That would be a kind of pantheism to say that God and the universe are the same thing, pan meaning all, theos meaning God.
Trent Horn:
So that’s not what we mean. We say God is existence, we say God is unlimited and infinite, so he’s not bounded by anything, but he just is, he is perfect goodness itself and existence itself, and he gives existence to all other things. So God is that way … Because God is existence, he is capable of bringing being into existence from non being. He’s capable of granting existence to other things, and that’s what he did with the universe, and by the universe, we mean all of space, time, matter and energy. So all physical things he created. We say in the creed, that’s why we say God made all things visible and invisible, and that’s important, because I think in the older translation, we would say all things seen and unseen.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, before they went back to the English translation that matches the Latin.
Trent Horn:
Right? So seen and unseen would make it seem like God just made, “I see you,” and then he made the bacteria and the viruses and the things we can’t see, because they’re very small, but unseen is not the same as invisible.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So there are many things that exist that do not have a visible construct to them, because they’re not made of matter at all. God made everything, matter, energy, as well as things that exist that are not composed of matter and energy, but still have existence because God has given them existence. That would include incorporeal persons like angels, both the good angels and the fallen angels. So he gives them their pure spiritual existence, but they don’t have an unlimited existence like God, but they have a purely spiritual existence.
Trent Horn:
He also creates things that many philosophers believe there are immaterial things that are universal that exist. So many mathematicians believe that numbers exist, and so Catholics and Christians would hold that numbers, if they have an existence, they exist in the mind of God, and so their existence ultimately depends on him, they’re not outside of God. This is, of course, a bit controversial … Not that controversial. There’s a lot of mathematicians who are Platonists. I find it to be fascinating, because when we say a statement like two plus two equals four, what does that mean? We say it’s true, and it’s always true, but what does that mean that it’s true?
Trent Horn:
You might say, “Well, because I have two rocks and two rocks, and now there are four rocks,” but that would still be true even if there were no particles in the universe, even if there were no material objects to instantiate mathematical truths, because we can do mathematical operations with infinite sets. Georg Cantor developed what is called set theory, and that allows us to do what is called transfinite arithmetic, how you can add infinite sets together, you can say there are infinite sets that are larger than other sets. We say that those transfinite arithmetical operations are true, but it’s not like we can say, “Well, we know it’s true, because here’s that infinite set over there, and you add it with that infinite set over here.” The infinite does not exist in reality. There’s two head mathematicians, Kasner, and I forget the other gentleman. In their textbook, they said, “The infinite does not exist in the same way that fish exist in the sea,” is what they said, but it exists!
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
It exists, like infinite mathematical operations. These things really do exist, and God made them, even if they don’t have material elements to them, because God is all knowing and all powerful. All these things, all these infinite things ultimately have their existence rooted in him as the infinite act of being itself.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So you said this is short course on creation ex nihilo. What do you cover in there?
Trent Horn:
Sure. Well, I talk about the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, what it means, and then I go into, like I said, three different kinds of evidence for God. Mostly I talk about the Kalam. I talk about the Kalam cosmological argument as being a prime example of proving from reason that the universe came to be from nothing. So basically, the first half of the course is proving from reason the universe came from nothing, and probably the first three quarters, actually, proving from reason the universe came from nothing, and then proving from revelation it came from nothing.
Trent Horn:
So in the first part, I talk about the Kalam argument, which is whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence. The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause for its existence, and we can use reason to say that cause has divine attributes. So science shows points us towards the universe having a finite beginning, big bang cosmology, and I get into a little bit more of the cosmological details involved. The philosophical problems with the past being infinite and the nature of time itself, and then the scientific evidence that our universe didn’t just come from nothing accidentally, but that it has finely tuned laws of physics. So we talked about the ex nihilo part at the beginning, but then I also talk about the creatio part, that the universe didn’t come accidentally from nothing, it’s designed to be life permitting, and then I talk about what scripture and the church fathers say about the universe coming to be from nothing.
Cy Kellett:
So the main objection, I would say, from the person who will follow your logic on the universe … It being provable by reason that the universe is created from nothing. There’s going to be tremendous objections. You mentioned Dr. Krauss. I think is his philosophy is … Well, we wouldn’t say it’s strong in this one. He’s weak at presenting philosophy.
Trent Horn:
No, it’s bad. It’s bad. David Albert, I think is his name, he is another theoretical physicist and philosopher who wrote a review of Krauss’s book and talks about how Krauss just doesn’t understand the terms that he’s using, and he does a bait and switch with his audience when he says, “I can prove the universe came from nothing,” but by nothing, he means a preexisting quantum vacuum, which is just a low level energy state.
Cy Kellett:
But there are those who will make a reasoned argument, Krauss being one of them, and I’m just saying, he’s not very good at it, but who will say, “Look, Trent, this all rests on the idea that there is necessary being and that the universe itself is not necessary being.” So why can’t I just say, yeah, everything I see is a process of something coming from something else, but the universe just exists as a raw fact. It itself is the necessary being.” So I’m willing to say, yeah, there’s such a thing as a necessary being, but it’s the universe. It’s not a God outside the universe.
Trent Horn:
Well, there are two problems with that. I noticed you used the phrase raw fact. Also, the terminology that’s used is brute fact. These are two different terms. To say the universe is a brute fact is different than saying the universe is necessary. To say the universe is a brute fact would mean the universe could have failed to exist, it could have been the case it didn’t exist, but it just happens to exist, and it does exist for no reason at all. It just exists. As Bertrand Russell said, “The universe just exists and that’s all,” and the counter to that is, well, if you’re going to rely on that brute fact definition, things can just exist for no reason at all, then that would run afoul of the principle of sufficient reason, that seems to govern modern science, the way that we navigate the world. That things don’t exist for no reason, they exist for some reason. The search for scientific explanations, we couldn’t even go on that search if it was viable that things could exist for no reason at all.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, you wouldn’t ever say, “Why does a quasar exist?” Look, they just exist.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
We always find that a completely unsatisfactory answer.
Trent Horn:
We predicate that there are explanations, even if we cannot discover them. Also, so if you say the principle of sufficient reason is not true and the universe is an exception to that, it seems highly odd, highly suspect that we don’t find more examples of things coming into existence or going out of existence for no reason whatsoever, so I think the principle of sufficient reason is a well founded principle. So that goes against the brute fact argument.
Trent Horn:
The necessary argument is saying, “Yes, the universe exists because it has to exist. The universe must exist.” That is a claim that requires evidence to support it. Why believe the universe is necessary? Most things that are necessary, we can see they’re necessary by the nature of the thing itself. So let’s take a blue triangle. We asked the question, “Why is that triangle blue?” Well, because it could have been red. It could have been green. We don’t ask, “Why is it three-sided?” Well, because that’s just what triangles are. They have to be that way. So the question, “Why does the universe exist?”, it’s more like the question, “Why is the triangle blue?”, rather than, “Why is the triangle three sided?” It’s not a dumb question to ask. It’s a perfectly sensible one.
Trent Horn:
Other arguments that the universe is not necessary is that normally, things that are necessary, we can’t imagine them otherwise. I can’t imagine a four sided triangle. I can imagine the universe not existing. I can at least imagine, just by subtraction, parts of the universe going away. I could imagine there could have not been our solar system. There could have not been a Milky Way galaxy. There could have not been my breakfast burrito this morning. So if we start saying that certain parts can be taken away, there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason why that doesn’t apply to everything you could eventually subtract.
Trent Horn:
Then finally, if we have evidence that the universe came to be from nothing, if we have evidence that there was a state of nothingness, from science or philosophy or divine revelation, that there was nothingness and then there was somethingness, then the universe can’t be necessary, because necessary things always exist. So that’s where the creation ex nihilo argument comes in. You can use this Kalam argument or the ex nihilo argument to buttress a contingency argument for God to say, “Look, we know the universe is contingent because it didn’t always exist. It is dependent for its existence on whatever brought it into existence.” So then you would move from there with the argument.
Cy Kellett:
It seems to me, generally speaking, we’ll see a trend, if people can keep asking questions long enough, for answers that are illogical or impossible to kind of evaporate. Do you have any hope that these atheist arguments that are at their core illogical, they just don’t meet the basic test of reason, that they will evaporate or do they have a power that goes beyond mere reason? For other reasons? People just want to believe that there’s no God?
Trent Horn:
Well, I think there are a lot of people who come to belief in atheism, whether it’s the strong claim, “There is no God,” or the weaker claim, “There’s no good reasons to believe in God.” They do so without rigorously looking at the arguments. They just make assumptions that there’s no good reason to believe in God, the laziest one being, “If there were, everybody would agree.” Well, that’s not the case. There’s lots of things that people disagree about. That’s not proof of that.
Trent Horn:
Rather, I think that people will look at that, and then they won’t rigorously look at the arguments. I do think that a lot of other atheists will embrace atheism, not necessarily because it’s logically bankrupt, but they will just be extremely skeptical. So they’ll just say, “Well, I just deny the principle of sufficient reason. I deny the principle of causation. I deny there are universal moral truths.” So they’re just extremely skeptical about reality and won’t follow those first principles back to God. So if we have first principles of philosophy that lead to a necessary being, if they say, “Well, I just don’t accept those first principles,” then yeah, you can’t [inaudible 00:20:06] to get the path back to God, and you’ve purchased your atheism, though, at a high priced skepticism, that I think if people really sat down and thought about it, that’s not a price they’d be willing to pay in other domains.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. You don’t really want to give up the fact that some things are right and some things are wrong universally. That’s a really high price to pay.
Trent Horn:
Some atheist will try to say, “No, I can have moral objectivity and not root it in theism,” but I don’t think they can. It ends up being very selective or arbitrary in order to do that. So I think that the principles start to fall apart when you put them under closer examination.
Cy Kellett:
There’s always the Nietzsche option, just really, truly believe it, and then go insane.
Trent Horn:
Yes, you could be a nihilist. You could say there are no moral absolutes, life doesn’t really have a purpose, life is meaningless, and you just try to make your way through it as best you can, and just try to give yourself and your life meaning and try to just play the game as well as you can, and that works for some people for a while, but ultimately, you either fall apart in this life and see the game’s not worth playing, or in the next life, you will see it was a game not worth playing and that you have an existence, you have an everlasting existence, and that that’s been squandered, it will be squandered. It’s easy to try to sigh and just say, “Well, I’ll just try to live out the next 30 years, I’ll make it work, and I’ll die a happy person, fine,” and with the technology we have now, that’s not outside of people’s grasp, necessarily, to amuse themselves to death, as Neil Postman said in that wonderful book he wrote many years ago, but if you have an everlasting existence, you’re not going to be able to outrun that, and you’ll either find that out now or you’ll find that out later.
Cy Kellett:
Amen, brother. Well, a good place to start then if you want to see the logical … At least begin to look at the logical proofs for God’s existence and the creation out of nothing, ex nihilo, you can go to Trent’s new course at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. If you just go to schoolofapologetics.com, you will find it. Thank you again, Trent Horn. It’s always good to talk with you.
Trent Horn:
Thank you, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
You’re a fine person. I’m glad we have no banter anymore. I’m glad we’ve given up the banter.
Trent Horn:
Oh, the banter must remain. We will always have a witty reply that comes from nothing.
Cy Kellett:
Before he launches into a long list of immoral things to avoid in his letter to the Colossians, Saint Paul says, “Think of what is above, not what is on earth,” and the dynamics of this are very helpful. It’s much easier to do all the practical things of this life, including moral improvement if we take the time to reflect first on higher things, and sometimes those higher things are difficult, but there’s kind of a fun quality to the difficulty, and that’s why I enjoyed this conversation with Trent. God is our creator, and his action in making us really could be the source of endless reflection, and it’s good to do that kind of reflection. It’s the place to start if we want to share life with Christ.
Cy Kellett:
So thanks for joining us this week on Catholic Answers Focus. We do this all the time. I hope you’ll join us again next time. You can send us an email, just send it to focus@catholic.com. We want to hear from you. If you got a comment, that’s fine. If you’ve got a suggestion for a future episode, that’s welcome as well. Subscribe to Focus so you’ll get notified when there are new episodes, and don’t forget to make Zach happy, and if you’re watching on YouTube, like and subscribe. I said like or subscribe last time, and that’s apparently not good enough for Zack. Like and subscribe if you watch on YouTube. If you want to support us financially, and we do need the financial help, it costs money to produce this, we’ve got to pay Zack’s salary, go to givecatholic.com. Thanks again. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. See you next time, god willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.