A “Survey”

Question from Leonard:
Don’t you find it to be most odd that there is something instead of nothing?
Wouldn’t it be more logical and simpler for there to be nothing?

Answer by SmartLX:
These are not survey questions, Leonard. This is an argument, nominally rephrased as a pair of questions. Any questionnaire containing the above is essentially a push poll, and certain ethical implications follow.

It might be logical to think that there should currently be nothing, but only if we knew of any point in the history of the universe when there was nothing, and we don’t. As far as we know there has always been something, and our current laws of conservation of matter and energy tend to back that up. We have no idea what preceded the Big Bang, if anything, and it is far beyond our current understanding to simply assume there was nothing at all.

Putting this aside, the usual follow-up to this idea by apologists is that the only way there can currently be something is if someone created it. Firstly, if there was someone there then there wasn’t nothing, and secondly, where did the someone come from? Yes, many theists object to that question because their chosen someone is supposedly eternal and uncaused, but then what actually stops the universe itself from being that way? Adding an uncaused, intelligent, inexplicable being such as a god never, ever simplifies the circumstances, and is quite unnecessary unless you impose arbitrary constraints on the universe – which the god immediately breaks to justify itself.