Notes From Stephen Law's Debate on the Existence of God
He recently debated Hamza Andreas Tzortzis and he concludes a bit like me:
We may not be able to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” But we can be rightly confident the answer isn’t “Because a supremely powerful and evil person made it.” So why can’t we be equally confident that the answer isn’t “Because a supremely powerful and good person made it”? Link
2 comments:
Hamza Tzortzis is a front man for the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain and a rip off artist in respect of William Lane Craig.
See my blog post here.
Richard James
I've always been baffled as to why the question couldn't just as easily be, "Why would there be nothing instead of something?"
The question "Why would there be something rather than nothing?", presupposes that there could actually be nothing, despite the fact that it isn't clear if this is even possible.
As agents that create things, we might see this as an useful way to look at things in our daily lives, but it appears to be fallacious assumption the case of absolutely everything. In fact, the more we look, the more we notice that nothing actually gets destroyed, it just gets converted into some other form. So, it would seem a more appropriate question would be "Why does something exist in one form rather than another?"
Of course, we already have a number of explanations for these kinds of questions, such as biological and stellar evolution, so this wouldn't be a very helpful question in supporting the theist's pre-conceived assumption that God exists.
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