Ex nihilo, nihilo fit. From nothing, nothing comes. That’s a basic principle of Aristotelian metaphysics: nothing comes to be from nothing. It’s the basis for one of St. Thomas’ Five Ways of proving the existence of God: everything that comes to be, that has a beginning, must have been brought into being by something else—because nothing comes from nothing. And that will lead us to an infinite regress, unless there is something that has no beginning, something that is, but was never brought into being, something that is, in the metaphysical sense, necessary, rather than contingent.

Recently this principle has come under a certain amount of attack from folks who don’t understand it. Lawrence Krauss has parlayed his misunderstanding into an entire book, called A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. (H/T to Michael Baruzzini at The Deeps of Time.) Others have made the same attack, notably Stephen Hawking.

It seems that in a perfect physical vacuum, pure nothingness from the standpoint of atoms, molecules, and so forth, there is still activity at the quantum level. Virtual particles pop into existence and evaporate again. If this happens enough, you can get a Big Bang, and creation begins. And thus, from nothing something has come, and so no God is necessary. All you need is nothing.

Well…nothing but a perfect vacuum manifesting quantum activity according to the laws of quantum physics.

And, see, that might be nothing from a physical point of view, but it isn’t nothing from a metaphysical point of view. In fact, it’s quite a lot of something.

Krauss might well be right, as to how the Big Bang came about. But he’s proven precisely nothing so far as God is concerned. So I guess he’s got nothing after all.