Do all things emerge from nothingness?

Answer 1

Kinda

Answer 2

I suppose philosophically it would be a better axiom to say this:

"nothingness emerges from all things".

In order to determine what true nothingness is, you must first totally know what all things are.

Anyway, this has naff all to do with physics.

Answer 3

No, all things emerge prior to any human knowledge.

Answer 4

One often hears it said that it is necessary to see ‘God everywhere’ or in everything’. For men who believe in God this does not seem a difficult conception; nevertheless there are many degrees involved, extending from simple reverie to intellectual intuition. How can one attempt to ‘see God’, who is invisible and infinite, in what is visible and finite without the risk of deluding oneself or falling into error, or without giving the idea a meaning so vague that the words lose all significance? That is the question we propose to clarify here, though this means returning to certain points we have already treated elsewhere.

First of all, we must consider in the things around us — and also in our own soul in so far as it is an object of our intelligence — the something that might be called the ‘miracle of existence’. Existence is miraculous: it is by a miracle that things are, so to speak, separated from nothingness; the gap between them and nothingness is infinite, and seen from this angle the least speck of dust possesses something of the absolute, of the ‘divine’. To say that one must see God everywhere means, above all, that one must see Him in the existence of beings and of things, our own included.

But phenomena do not possess existence alone, for otherwise they would not be distinct; they also possess qualities which are as it were superimposed on existence and deploy its virtualities. The quality which distinguishes a good thing from a bad resembles, though on a lesser scale, the existence which distinguishes each thing from nothingness;(1) in consequence positive qualities represent God, as does pure and simple existence. Beings are attracted by qualities, because they are attracted by God; every quality or virtue, whether it be the slightest of physical properties or the most profound of human virtues, transmits to us something of the divine Perfection which is its immutable source, so that, metaphysically speaking, we can have no motive for love other than this Perfection.

But there is yet another ‘dimension’ to be considered by the man who seeks the remembrance of God in things. The enjoyment that qualities afford us shows us that these not only exist around us, but also concern us personally through Providence; for a landscape which exists out of our sight is one thing, and a landscape we can see is another. There is thus a ‘subjective-temporal’ dimension; things recall God to us, not only in so far as they are good or display an aspect of goodness, but also in so far as we can perceive this goodness or can enjoy it in a still more direct way. In the air we breathe, and which might be denied us, we meet God in the sense that the divine Giver is in the gift. This manner of ‘seeing God’ in his gifts corresponds to ‘thanksgiving’, while the perception of qualities corresponds to ‘praise’; as for the ‘vision’ of God in existence alone, this gives birth in the soul to a general or fundamental consciousness of the divine Reality.

Thus, God reveals himself not only by the existence and by the qualities of things, but by the gift He makes of them to us; He reveals himself also by the contraries, namely by the limitation of things and by their defects,(2) and again by the absence or disappearance of something which, being good, is useful and agreeable to us. It will be noticed that the concrete opposite of existence is not nothingness — the latter is only an abstraction — but limitation, the limitation which prevents existence from extending to pure Being, from becoming God... Things are limited in very many ways, but above all by their existential determinations, which, on the terrestrial level, are matter, form, number, space, time. A clear distinction must be made between the aspect of ‘limit’ and the aspect of ‘defect’; in fact, the ugliness of a creature is not of the same order as the spatial limitation of a perfect body, for the latter expresses a form, a normative principle or a symbol, while the former corresponds only to a lack and merely confuses the clarity of the symbolism. However that may be, what God reveals by the limitation of things, by their defects and also, in relation to the human subject, by the privation of things or of qualities, is the ‘non-divine’, hence ‘illusory’ or ‘unreal’ character of all that is not He.

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Answer 5

No this would violate conservation of mass/energy