I can already tell you that the following argument is "logically" flawed; but can YOU tell me WHY that is so?

Question

PLEASE read the following (it is rather long, specially if you further follow the related links, so please read it when you have TIME lol) and let me have your thoughts/comments.
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http://www.everystudent.com/journeys/nothing.html

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BTW: I am NOT (and I repeat NOT) contesting the validity of anyone's faith, I am merely asking you to analyze the article’s presented argument (for the existence of God) and point to its inherent logical and philosophical flaws. ... Serious commentaries only, please! ... Again, I am ONLY interested in the critical analysis of the presented material in the above argument, so please refrain from biblical / Islamic / religious quotations in this case. ... Thank You!

P.S. Meanwhile, here is a small token of my appreciation for your hard work; Enjoy!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntm1YfehK7U
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57cs8dntLyg
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I want to thank each and every one of you for your wonderful answers - I enjoyed them all. Clearly you each have a piece of the answer. You guys vote for the one you like the best. In summary, all I can say is: Consciousness can not step beyond the boundary conditions of Being, pretending to examine Nothingness. I'm afraid circular arguments, in the end, only work on mentally square people. ... Live long and prosper, always!

Answer 1

I didn't necessarily have the time to read it, and the only thing I wish to say is that read like a badly written douglas adams novel........

Answer 2

As far as I can tell, there really isn't any logical flaw in the author's basic argument . . . which is that something cannot come from nothing. If you can find one, I'd love to hear it.

Clearly the article doesn't prove the existence of God, if that is what it intended. After all, just demonstrating that there must have been something since there is something today does not necessarily lead us in any direction as to what that something might have been. But my quick reading of it gave me no immediate impressions that the author's stated goal was anything beyond pointing out the obvious, that something cannot come from nothing.

Eventually, whether one posits that the universe always existed, or came from nothing, or that the question is nonsensical since time didn't yet exist, the materialist worldview ends up being just as fantastical and faith oriented as most theological worldviews. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, just it would be nice if people would just be plain and honest about it and admit this simple fact.

Answer 3

It is flawed in that it implies that within the mass that would become our Universe, there was nothing. That is the flaw. All that was, was. Time, being the measure of the expansion of the universe did not exist before the it began. We can only run the clock back to the moment in time of the big bang.
Since we are in the room, it was never empty.
What was before? That asks a question of time. Since that did not exist (time) pre time is irrelevant since it does not exist. (Now the is the expand and contract theory where this universe is just one of a series of them. That is irrelevant because they do not exist in this, our, universe which is the one we have to deal with.
What is outside the universe is also irrelevant since time does not exist out there, so it has not existence in here, which actually, in here is all there is.

Answer 4

I do not know which part you have chosen. But, I disagree with the following premise:

Which of the two will be greater with regard to POWER? Again, Ball #1. It has the ability to produce Ball #2 out of nothing--which also means it has the ability to unproduce (destroy) Ball #2. So Ball #1 has far more power than Ball #2. In fact, at all times, Ball #2 must depend on Ball #1 for its very existence.

I would question why? The reasoning is not satisfying.

Answer 5

Hello there! :-)

I just read the 'nothing' part(because I still have to watch 'Ugly Betty' on the Internet so I don't have much time)

Well, It seems to be VALID(I'm not a logician so don't trust me on this one) at first glance but the arguments which the article was based on doesn't seem to be sound. For starters, it has been found out that even empty space contains energy. Second, it assumes that nothing comes from nothing. But does it? I have read somewhere that even in seemingly empty space particles just pop into existence. Also, when it did the thought experiment about the empty room, it explicitly assumed that space and time are eternal and that they are somehow unaffected by what's in the room. It assumed that time can go on even when nothing exists(it assumes space-time is independent of matter. Much like that old cliche problem about what went before the beginning of time). But is that even true? What if space and time were born WITH all of creation and that the existence of 'empty space-time' prior to creation is meaningless, even absurd. And yeah, there is space inside the pitch black room--doesn't that count as 'something' and not as nothing? Fourth, it explicitly assumes that there must be a reason if something pops out. Is that true? We are after all pattern-seeking creatures and would like to fit everything in our cosy 'cause-and-effect' picture of the world. What if our concept of 'cause-and-effect' is only an ingenuous artifact that helps us live in what MAY be an orderless world? And yeah, it says that nothing can be put in the room from the outside and assumes that the Universe must be the same. But is it really so?

Ultimately, we are far from proving anything about the start of existence itself. And forgive me for all this blabbering; I'm no logician so you can just dismiss this as the mumblings of a madman. Anyway, I'm going back to Ugly Betty...

Maybe I'll read more later:-)

Have a nice day^_^

*edited*
And we're back.

I just read the 'something' part. Well, the flawed assumptions are still there. Ten balls may be just ten balls but to assume that they will do absolutely nothing for all eternity is baseless. What if I have ten balls of sodium and ten balls of water. I then put them together and then what happens? A chemical reaction occurs--change just happened. To assume that non-living things will continue to exist unchanged for all eternity is unsound. Just think of all their interactions--gravity, electromagnetism, etc. And yeah, protons will eventually breakdown into more fundamental particles after eons and eons pass.

Answer 6

That is a very long and complex argument for the existence of God. It would require months of study to pick out all the flaws in it which i'm sure there are many. Much simpler to establish that "there is no such thing as nothing" is to just imagine finding nothing. If you did you would soon realize there is something which would be you, alone, and you would be god and have to create something out of nothing to keep from going mad from loneliness.

That is what he is trying to do there, imagine nothing and create somrthing out of it.

By the way that something happens from nothing, by chance, is postulated (and demonstrated by experiment*) in quantum mechanics in the case for "virtual particles" appearing momentarily in the "nothingness" of space out of the vacuum energy.

Good luck in finding those errors, good health, peace and love!