Did the Universe Come From Nothing?

Here we go again. There is a new book by physicist Lawrence Krauss with the title A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. It is becoming increasingly popular for physicists to claim that the universe sprang into existence out of nothing. The corollary thought is that since we can now understand how the universe could come into being from nothing there is no need to posit the existence of a God to explain the existence of the universe. The average layman is completely unaware that the word “nothing” here is not being used in its normal sense of ”no thing; not anything.” This is made clear in one of the endorsements for the book by Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson who says: “Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something.  That’s how a cosmos can be spawned from the void . . .” Krauss states clearly in a lecture available on YouTube (see at 40:54) that “If you have nothing in quantum mechanics you’ll always get something.” Therefore, no one has proved the universe came from nothing. John Lennox makes this clear in his book God and Stephen Hawking. He writes, “Indeed, one might add for good measure the fact that when physicists talk about ‘nothing’, they often appear to mean a quantum vacuum, which is manifestly not nothing.” (30) What we are witnessing is a calculated effort to redefine the meaning of “nothing” to include a physical state of affairs compatible with a quantum vacuum. Don’t be fooled. No one (and I mean no one) has proved the universe came from nothing.