Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

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The THING is...topic

I cannot imagine nothingness. I tried when I was a kid, in a pitch dark, noiseless closet, but even then THAT was SOMEthing.

Much ado about nothingness.

We forget how the universe we live is in fact little more than a void consisting of only smidgen more than nothing. A hiccup in a vacuum.

First consider how far apart stars from each other, and then within our solar system how far apart planets are from each other- you then realize how little solid matter there is compared to the vast amounts of empty space in the large scale of the universe.

Then you look around at the "solid" matter around us that you and I and the objects around us on the earth's surface are made of. You realize that even this 'solid' matter isnt solid at all.

The distances between atoms in your body are huge compared to the size of the atoms themselves.

Then you look at each atom. The atoms themselves are almost entirely empty space.

You have a halo of light wieght electrons as the outer shell of an atom.

But the heavy nucleas at the center is tiny- comparable to the distances between planets in the solar system- relative the size of the subatomic particles.

So on every level matter is made mostly of nothing.

Thats the universe we already live in.

So an totally empty universe is NOT much different from what we already have.

There should be nothing and yet there is something instead, which is truly bizarre. The ability to contemplate this itself is even more bizarre.

42 is not the Answer to the Ultimate Question - it's the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Not quite the same thing.

One of the posts started off, "Assuming there is a God..." That's where you lost me. You're starting off by assuming your conclusion. You may well believe there is a God (I do), but you cannot logically prove His existence with any argument that starts off by assuming it.

As for your original argument, Kon, if the Many-Worlds hypothesis is correct, then there would be an infinite number of universes. Of these, there would be an infinitely-large subset of universes in which the laws of physics, following the Big Bang, did not support the existence of anything, and a similarly infinite subset of universes in which there never was a Bang to begin with - empty universes. There are also infinite universes in which there is something, one of which is the universe we occupy now.

Why do we occupy a universe of something? Because if there were nothing here, that "nothing" would include us - that is to say, we wouldn't be there to comment on it. This is called the Anthropic Principle. It comes in two flavors - the Weak Anthropic Principle says that we know this universe exists because we are in it, while the Strong Anthropic Priniciple holds that the only universe that exists is one which has observers - that a universe cannot exist without life to note its existence. (I don't follow the logic of the second argument; I personally think it's just another way to try to slide religion into science by the back door.)

if God or the concept of a God is the ultimate non-physical reality, and this God also exists, then there must be a non-physical reality.

The 20th century philosopher Alan Watts pointed out that most people take for granted that we exist, when it is in fact quite an odd situation. Here we are, egos trapped inside a bag of skin, living on this ball of rock orbiting a spherical fire. Watts quoted G.K. Chesterton to illustrate this point:

"It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't."
— Chapter I, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts, 1966