[MD] Dawkins quotes RMP on religion.

[Ham Priday]

Craig asks:

> Which is a better explanation of why there is
> something rather than nothing:
> a) something appears out of nowhere/nothing
> or
> b) something always existed?

Krimel answers:
> How about?
> c) Mu

This is the fallback position of the nihilist.  If something can't be 
explained in terms of experience, it's not worth bothering about.  Without 
philosophy, religion, or intuitive insight, existence is an enigma.  Even 
the logic that nothing can come from nothing is eschewed as meaningless. 
Despite my analysis of probability as requiring an event (something 
happening), Krimel sees no distinction between potentiality and probability. 
He's an active participant in a philosophy forum, yet he doesn't find the 
primary source of reality a compelling issue.

[Krimel]:
> Nothing I have heard about such a thing strikes me as compelling.

Craig, I have been working on this dilemma for half a century and consider 
it the fundamental issue in philosophy.  Heidegger began his 'Introduction 
to Philosophy' with the question, "Why is there something rather than 
nothing?"  We can't escape the paradox because we are part of it, and we 
can't push it aside with intellectual integrity.

Even if "something always existed" it has a primary source.  It's not 
sufficient to say that energy or matter always existed.  We must ask: where 
does it come from?   Things do not create themselves.
By the laws of mechanics, objects are changed by the energy or force imposed 
on them, and there is no energy lost in the system.  In nature, organisms 
develop and grow according to the DNA code implanted within them.  But you 
have to start somewhere, and my considered opinion is that existence begins 
as a negation of the source and is actualized as differentiated experience 
in space/time.

When I say "primary" I don't mean first in a series of events that can be 
infinitely regressed.  I mean the basic or fundamental source which imparts 
the "necessity to be".  Thus, we exist not by virtue of our will or choice 
but by the power that makes our existence necessary.  I call this power the 
potentiality of Essence.  All sensibility, value, cognizance, being, and 
dynamic potential is derived from this uncreated source.

So my qualified answer to your question, as well as to Krimel's 'Mu', is 
(b).  But one must understand that "always" is meaningless outside the realm 
of finite experience.  There is something because there is a source of 
something.  We don't experience the source because it is not us.  What we 
experience is the value which is our connection to the source, and because 
the mode of experience is reductive (finite and incremental), we objectify 
value into things and events arranged in time and space.

Thanks for your thought-provoking question, Craig.

Essentially yours,
Ham