I completed watching a lecture of Dr. Lawrence Kraus on the topic of the universe coming out of nothing. It is indeed a hallmark of success of modern cosmology that all events can be traced back now, from pieces of evidence, at the beginning of the universe up to time zero.

It goes beyond common sense to imagine how things came to be as depicted in the latest best model of cosomological understanding. As ridiculous as it might seem, most modern cosmologists are now convinced that the universe came from nothing – that is, from empty space. However, “empty space” is not really statically empty. It’s an emptiness where matter and energy are created and annihilated in a dynamic balance. This is called quantum fluctuation, which can be logically deduced from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. A sustained imbalance of creation/annihilation process resulted to a sudden outburst of matter and energy creation, which we call the Big Bang.

This is not immune to the sticky question of cuasation. What caused the sudden imbalance? Proponents of the god hypothesis can fill an intelligent god in this gap of our knowledge, something that really doesn’t explain anything. If an intelligent designer initiated this imbalance, how can we detect the presence of this designer? Alternatively, is there a non-intelligent/mechanistic cause of the imbalance?

In the end, the question of ultimate cause has to be confronted. Following Occam’s Razor, a simpler explanation is always most likely to be correct than a complex one (e.g. intelligent designer).

A simpler explanation that have been conceived is that the universe simply came from empty space. The imbalance that brought forth our universe is not unique, it could have been happening all the time. Thus, other universes may be lying out there but they’re just very far for us to observe. Universes, like ours, can just pop-out from nothing, due to quantum fluctuations.

If our universe came from nothing then nothing more needs to be explained. Nothing, therefore, could be the ultimate cause. If we should call the ultimate cause with the name “God”, then God is actually nothing.

On how this nothingness brought forth complexity in the universe is a separate question; but one that has been answered quite sufficiently by evolution. I personally think that the initial state of nothingness is actually already complex and that the resulting universe and life forms that happened to evolve later on are just other forms of complexity. In this point of view, evolution should actually be conceived as transformation from one complex form to another complex form and not from simple to complex.

For a graphical summary of the origin of the universe, see the figure below. Source: NASA.