Seriously though how does one wrap their head around the fact that something rather than nothing exist?
Consider: youtu.be/ynWKQcjznQU
A good place to start: The part about “why?” distinguished from the part about “how?”
And it’s an important distinction because to ask the question “why?” tends to take us in the general direction of teleology. “How?” might be encompassed in the ontological. This is how something either always existed or came into existence out of nothing at all. But asking “why one rather than the other?” can’t help but nudge us into exploring what possible purpose existence could have. And purpose implies one or another entity having one. God is obviously the explanation that will pop into the head of most of us. But could there actually be another explanation?
And, if so, how would we go about describing it?
Krauss seems especially eager to dispense with the part about “why”. Why? Because he clearly recognizes how quickly this can take the discussions to things like God and religion.
Better to just focus of “how”…how “scientifically” there might be an explanation.
Then he goes on to speculate that there is something rather than nothing because nothing is “unstable” and will always produce “something”.
But:
How can he possibly know this unless he has performed actual experiments with nothing at all. In fact this is the sort of conjecture from the scientific community that always basically annoys me. He speaks of the nothingness of empty space containing “virtual particles” that come in an out of existence.
Okay, how has this been demonstrated definitively? Where do the theoretical assumptions here end and the actual empirical evidence begin?
Sure, he says a lot of things here that are clearly over my head. There’s no way I can get around that. I have no way in which to demonstrate that he is wrong.
So it would then seem to come down to the extent to which someone like him is able to demonstrate that what he says is true is in fact true for all of us.
Assuming of course that any of us have it within our capaicity to pursue this autonomously.