then that leaves you with the bind of something arising from nothing
:shrug:
Right.
A lot of discussion here on Sciforums makes what in my opinion is the basic error of imagining nothing or non-existence as if it is some dark and mysterious
place, a super-cosmic
void of some kind, out of which everything, the entire universe, flows and emanates.
That, btw, isn't dissimilar from many traditional religious ideas. God is often thought of as being beyond human concepts entirely, a kind of transcendental cognitive void that can only be approached apophatically, by clearing one's mind of phenomenal images. A great deal of Indian thought moves in that direction, as does Neoplatonism and the whole 'negative theology' stream in Christian and Islamic theology and mysticism. God is the ultimate inconceivable One, the unity out of which all the diversity and multiplicity of phenomenal reality flows, like light emanating from the Sun.
In my opinion, nothing is probably better thought of as a limiting concept than as a transcendental being. 'Nothing' is a term that marks out the limits of being. A boundary that doesn't separate being from some different (and infinitely productive) kind of being on the other side called 'nothing', but rather a boundary that only has one side, where it's meaningless to even speak of there being a beyond.
So instead of 'something coming from nothing', what we perhaps should be talking about are causal anomalies inside being, namely things and events that simply occur or come into being without any explanation or prior cause. It's effectively the same thing, but it doesn't land us in the fundamental philosophical difficulty of imagining nothing as if it was something.
I don't think that the 'out of nothing' idea successfully answers any of our ontological questions. It's just a way of avoiding those questions, and for that reason it's seemingly just as uninformative and ad-hoc as the ancient religious cosmologies that it's meant to replace. In other words, I don't think that it's adding anything tangible or useful to our knowledge.
