Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · _intake0.955

   > universe because there was no nature there was nothing what rocks dream about and then the entire SpaceTime continuum leapt into existence if it's not a natural cause by definition it must be a

   _intake/claims-allbranch/curated-low/relativity/004-universe-because-there-was-no-nature-there-was-nothing-what-.md

2. 02 · yt0.811

   Davies explains, "The coming into being of the universe, as discussed in "modern science, is not just a matter of imposing some "sort of organization upon a previous incoherent state "but literally the coming into being of "all physical things from nothing." Now, this puts the atheist in a very awkward position. As Anthony Kenny of Oxford University urges, "A proponent of the Big Bang theory, "at least if he is an atheist, "must believe that the universe came "from nothing and by nothing." But surely that doesn't make sense. Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist, instea…

   yt/0tYm41hb48o-does-god-exist-william-lane-craig-vs-christopher-hitchens-fu/transcript.txt

3. 03 · blog0.793

   In the kalām version, however, the temporal ordering of the causal sequence is central, introducing issues of the nature of time into the discussion. 3. Complexity of the Question It is said that philosophy begins in wonder. Thus it was for the pre-Socratic Greeks, who wondered what constituted the basic stuff of the world (κóσμος) around them, how this basic stuff changed into the diverse forms they experienced, and how it came to be. These origination questions related to the puzzle of existence that, in its metaphysical dimensions, is the subject of our concern. First, why is there anything…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/cosmological-argument.md

4. 04 · blog0.789

   If the world is produced from nothing, it must either arise out of the “nothing” as out of matter or out of the “nothing” as out of a point of origin. The world cannot arise out of nothing as out of matter. Thus the world must arise out of nothing as out of a point of origin. If, however, the world arises out of nothing as out of a point of origin, then the world has being after non-being. Nothing having being after non-being can be eternal. The world, as a created thing, has being after non-being. Therefore, the world, precisely as created “out of nothing”, cannot be eternal ( In II Sent. , d…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/bonaventure.md

5. 05 · yt0.787

   The philosopher Derek Parfit says, "No question is more sublime than why there is a universe, "why there is anything rather than nothing." Typically atheists have answered this question by saying that the universe is just eternal and uncaused. But there are good reasons, both philosophically and scientifically, to think that the universe began to exist. Philosophically, the idea of an infinite past seems absurd. Just think about it: If the universe never began to exist, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the e…

   yt/0tYm41hb48o-does-god-exist-william-lane-craig-vs-christopher-hitchens-fu/transcript.txt

6. 06 · blog0.787

   We can easily be misled by the language of there being nothing at all, leading to the notion that nothing has being or existence. Heil suggests that nothing might be a precursor to the Big Bang. However, this too is a misconception—though one widely held by those who think that the universe arose out of nothing, e.g., a vacuum fluctuation. A vacuum fluctuation is itself not nothing “but is a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws” (Craig and Sinclair 2009: 183, 191). The contrastive question is comprehensible: “Why is there something rather than th…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/cosmological-argument.md

7. 07 · gutenberg0.780

   Something is always mere fact and _givenness_; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of view extant from which this would not be found to be the case. "Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in the mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild,--game-flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver's lathe gains but the breadth o…

   gutenberg/PG-26659-the-will-to-believe-and-other-essays-in-popular-philosophy/PG-26659.txt

8. 08 · blog0.778

   It is important to be more precise about what one is asking when one asks this broader metaphysical question about why there is something rather than nothing. Second, the cosmological argument lies at the heart of attempts to answer the questions, and to this we now turn. 4. Argument for a Non-contingent Cause Thomas Aquinas held that among the things whose existence needs explanation are contingent beings that depend for their existence upon other beings. Richard Taylor (1992: 84–94) discusses the argument in terms of the world (“everything that ever does exist, except God, in case there is a…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/cosmological-argument.md

9. 09 · blog0.774

   We could admit an infinite regress of causes if we had evidence for such, but lacking such evidence, God must exist as the non-dependent cause. Many of the objections to the argument contend that God is an inappropriate cause because of God’s nature. For example, since God is immobile and has no body, he cannot properly be said to cause anything. The Naiyāyikas reply that God could assume a body at certain times, and in any case, God need not create in the same way humans do (Potter 1977: 100–07). René Descartes advances his version of the cosmological argument not only as a piece of natural t…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/cosmological-argument.md

10. 10 · yt0.772

    nothingness since metaphysics is the study of what exists one might expect metaphysicians to have little to say about the limit case in which nothing exists but around the 5th Century BCE in China India and Greece philosopher's turn from what is to what is not ever since there has been commentary on emissions holes vacuums and the possibility of an empty world this survey starts with nothingness at a global scale and then explores local pockets of nothingness let's begin with the question that Martin Heidegger famously characterized as the most fundamental issue of philosophy one why is there …

    yt/OiAPjAIcXVE-nothingness-stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy/transcript.txt