Question from Jay:
How is nothingness able to create a finely tuned universe?
A theist might make it more complicated by saying
“If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing. Why can’t books pop into being from nothing? Why is it only the universe that can come into being from nothing?”
If mind and conscience is invisible and if matter does not contain conscience or the potential of consciences, Where does conscience come from?
If the universe began with brute matter, there will be no explanation of the origin of consciences.
How do I answer these questions cause they are really hard?
– This is for my philosophy class.
Answer by SmartLX:
This stuff isn’t just philosophy, this is “philosophy of religion”. It’s religious apologetics by way of arguments from ignorance, where if someone can’t answer the questions the questioner is free to insert God as the answer. Even if there aren’t any other answers it’s a terrible way to make a point, logically speaking, but that doesn’t stop people.
We don’t know whether there was ever nothing, so how something can come from it is a hypothetical question rather than an essential one. There might have been nothing once; if something emerged from it then we know that the process is extremely rare, or happens out of our view, or both. If whole universes emerge all at once in each event, as the Big Bang would seem to suggest when viewed as a something-from-nothing moment, we’d have to travel to the next universe to see the effects of another such event, so it’s no wonder we don’t see ex nihilo creation every day. For a more scientific perspective, take an hour to watch Lawrence Krauss’s lecture on the subject, or read his book A Universe From Nothing.
The universe is not necessarily finely tuned, for that assumes a tuning process and a tuner. The universe supports life, yes, on the crust of one known planet in countless light years of nothingness and extreme conditions (most of which would instantly kill us if we went there unprotected). That suggests two things: if the universe is tuned at all then it’s not very finely tuned, and life has emerged in the one place which happens to be hospitable. I’ve addressed the fine tuning argument several times on the site already, if you want some more material.
Mind, consciousness and the specific aspect of conscious thought we think of as “conscience” are functions of the brain. They’re not entirely invisible, because many experiments have used MRI to measure electrical activity in specific parts of the brain during specific mental activities (dreaming, problem-solving, emotional reactions). Furthermore, if the brain is damaged then consciousness may be impaired or lost forever, leaving a human “vegetable”. We see the beginnings of all these thought processes in animals such as apes, which suggests to us that consciousness has evolved slowly in our ancestors, and persisted because of the tangible benefits of being self-aware and able to think well.
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Something comes from nothing all the time according to quantum physics. Particles and their anti-particle twins pop into and out of existence all the time. For a book (an organized collection of particles) to pop into existence would require a very long time (as the probability of it happening according to quantum mechanics would be extermely low) – but theoretically, actually it could happen.
Sometimes I think given the gibberish written in most religious texts, they actually did pop into existence. That may just explain why they are existent but unfortunately don’t make too much sense – this is what you’d expect of a random quantum event generating a book 🙂
Consciousness is an emergent property – dependent on the organization of the physical system. Thus – as SmartLX points out- if the brain gets damaged, consciousness may get impaired. From the looks of it, consciousness seems to emerge when a self organizing and sustaining system (the human body for e.g.) gets sufficiently complex through evolution. As smart LX points out, certain parts of the brain (that probably evolved relatively recently in our evolution) seem to be associated with consciousness.