There's no meaningful difference. The basic and perhaps the most fundamental question of all "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is the key to it. There is something, even though there doesn't seem to be any comprehensible reason why there would be. Something has come from nothing, maybe not in the big bang sense, maybe yes in the big bang sense, but in one sense or another, it has happened, because here something is.

Say you take the classic dodge and say something has always existed and gave rise to each new thing - the infinity of causes stretching back away forever - this still begs the question - why does that exist at all? you can't really get out of the uncaused cause dilemma, the sooner a human being accepts that this is perhaps the one question that is unanswerable with traditional logic, the better off they'll be

Consider these other voices on the topic:

Victor Hugo: "All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’ there is only one answer and that is ‘yes.’ Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread."

This is why mystics primarily talk about "being," because being is the weirdest, most inexplicable, and most sublime thing of all, because it *is* all.

William James: "How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? ... from nothing to being there is no logical bridge."

@"you can't really get out of the uncaused cause dilemma" - my usual response is the self-caused. But reading your post just gave me the most interested existential dread, of which i don't think i've ever felt before.

(i call the self-caused the Universe, others rely on God - being eternal, and being the first cause -to answer this question. Lawrence Krauss claims that it can happen and therefore it had to happen - see his book 'a universe from nothing')

We are just living in a simulation guys so evolution can coexist with the idea of God. Everything is possible nothing is truly provable. :D

Except what Lethologica said! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*cheesy applause*

The chain of causation giving rise to our existence either has a beginning, or it does not. The uncaused cause and the infinite regression are both basic violations of logical reasoning. And yet one of them happened. That is the paradox of existence. No clever dodge or hidden resolution can overcome it, any more than an axiomatic system can justify its own axioms.

For Nietzsche, the resolution was a cyclic regression, in which it's clearly false that there was ever a 'nothing', there's always the same something repeating itself. At the end, this constant deja vu probably made him deeply depressed.

There is a solid model for the universe in which the physics (if our model is correct) allows a universe to go back in time and be it's own cause... not even needing an infintely repeating loop (though that works in the model aswell) but one which is constantly expanding towards the future, but in the past it looped back on itself...

I think that avoid either an infinite past OR a finite past beyond which there is nothing. (and i learned about it from the youtube link i shared above)

All of yall except Lethologica are kind of missing the point.

You can come up with whatever physicalist explanation you want - simulations, loops, etc, none of it answers the question of why something exists at all.

I'm not necessarily saying it has to be true that *at one point* (whatever that even means) there "was" nothing. Think outside the Big Bang box, think bigger, more comprehensive. Why is there anything at all? You appeal to a loop, why does such a loop exist rather than simply not existing?

You see how this works - you give me answer, then I ask you why does it exist. This is what makes being such an amazing thing - it underpins everything. It just does. It's God, no two ways about it.

Bottom line:

Why is there something, rather than nothing?

No one has or ever will have the answer to that. But it's the asking that makes us who we are.

*What* is God, no two ways about it? I don't think we've defined anything here that is meaningfully captured by the God concept.

It's all fairly straightforward. Many humans want, and some need, some kind of reason for it all to be happening. Science can give the illusion of reason, but eventually (like the child who keeps asking why) you realise you're not going to get an answer that will satisfy.

You either accept that there is no reason, or you accept that there is some form of God who provides it, or you choose to ignore the issue.

Indeed, I think that's where Thucy got it wrong. Why was never the question, at least not for me. How is an interesting question, but we have to accept that we have no clue what 'nothing' looks like. What properties 'nothing' has. All you can do is work your way back and think of something that might explain and say 'close enough' to you.

Why has nothing to do with physics. We don't understand stuff. We use models to explain and predict them. We can disprove things (such as all kinds of definitions of 'nothing' in the beginning), but we can't prove anything.

I meant to say describe and predict them. Relevant nuance.

Logic is just a set of rules defined in our world. It is like a module in our programming. The truth is there is much more out there beyond logic. Perhaps its our compassion to understand things by logic that makes us stick with well defined circular ideas.

Perhaps we should admit that there are questions that science cannot know and deal with. Questions that we can only theorise... Questions that can never and will never be answered... Questions beyond our capacity, as creations, or co-incidental existences... Questions that that are beyond our limits, understanding, logic and reasoning...

That does not stop us from trying to find answers. But we should not forget that whatever answer we provide, the answer will never be as accurate as the fact that we exist... That is if we exist...

"You either accept that there is no reason, or you accept that there is some form of God who provides it, or you choose to ignore the issue."

If this, the second choice, is intended as a characterization of what I talked about above, then you have badly misconstrued what I meant by God.

Lethologica asked: "what" is the God I was talking about. I thought I was fairly clear before but I will re-state even more clearly. God is being, or existence itself. The very property of being is what I call God. The reason I call it God is that it captures nearly all of what is traditionally considered to be God's characteristics. We should note that being precedes this idea of "God" in every sense, in the sense that being is God whether we call it God or not. Being is the real God, the "gods" of our various cultures are just ideas. Being is the God who is there. Who is there by definition.

Also, I want to point out one thing:

Normally when someone asks why they are asking one of two questions, never both at once. The first is justification "why do you have the right to...." the other is explanation "why can it be that..." People in the midst of discussion often waste hours over misunderstandings of the meaning of why in its contexts.

However I would say that the one exception to this differentiation is at this most basal level, the existence level. When you ask "why existence?" you are asking both at once - not only why can it, but also why should it?

This fundamental nature of being is what gives it its power. Everyone knows that there is an apparent unbridgeable divide between the subjective world and the objective. Each one has an equal claim on being the "true" reality, and nothing in one or the other can dethrone the other's claim. It seems simultaneously true that the things that are true for you are simply The Truth, while it also seems trivially easy to understand that whatever "I" am, it is subject to a much larger and seemingly impersonal reality that governs it completely.

How can both be true? The only way they are merged is through the aspect of Being. At that bottom level, they become one and the same. Octavious talks about human's psychological teleological needs with the tone of a scientist. This is taking the objective perspective, but the subjective is no less true at this level. There is no reason to suppose that the world Octavious is appealing to - the one where humans arose on the African savanna after billions of years of natural history - is any more real than your internal thought-world that you are living in at this very moment - the one with intuitions and un-articulated sensations about reality. This latter is mocked by science, but this is only because science cannot touch it, try though they might with attempts to explain away consciousness.

The bottom line is - it's a lot more complicated than partisans on either side of the objective-subjective question would have you believe. In reality - they are connected together into one reality - in a way that isn't really possible to fully understand, but in a way that is obviously true, since they are united by existence.

Hmm from my simulation perspective, assuming that we are characters in a huge computer. What you say is god is the coding, the programme, everything in the pc.

But what if the god is the programmer, that we can never directly interact with outside the PC (the universe we live in).

I dont know if are capable of leaving this simulation, as in Matrix, or whether we cannot be moved out.

But I think god is beyond being anything and everything. He is programmer living in his completely different and imperceivable universe/system.

"Hmm from my simulation perspective, assuming that we are characters in a huge computer. What you say is god is the coding, the programme, everything in the pc."

No, what I am saying is irrelevant to whether you and I are living inside a simulation, because the same questions then apply to whatever broader universe the simulation is housed in. If we live in a simulation, those who created it are not our gods. They have the same god we do - existence itself.

Trying to explain existence by saying we live in a simulation is a kicking of the can down the road, just like religious dogmatists who pretend they have the answer because they say "the world is God's creation." Whose creation is God?

To be clear though - I find the question of whether we are living in a simulation to be a very interesting topic - but its just not germane to the topic of Being.

@"Think outside the Big Bang box, think bigger, more comprehensive. Why is there anything at all? You appeal to a loop, why does such a loop exist rather than simply not existing?"

I just have to quote Neil De Grasse Tyson here "Words that make questions may not be questions at all"

(see: https://youtu.be/wtfj_ItsEOY?t=4611 )

The point being, there is a difference from 'can something come from nothing', and 'why is there something rather than nothing'

Well rather obviously, you would not be asking this question if there was nothing.

There need be no why beyond the necessity that if you can ask the question why is there something, it is because there IS something.

It may be reasonable to say that asking why doesn't make any sense.

Asking How, now those are the question i've been addressing.

Another common answer to the why question is, if we take 'nothing' and it is possible that something can be. It must be. Remember we have now included time into our space-time, so nothing also means no-when and no-where. So we don't have any amount of time passing for something to spontaneously create itself, we don't have any laws of probability under which quantum mechanics can spontaneously do anything... we have nothing.

If you ask the reverse question, 'why isn't there nothing?' - well i can give the stupid answer - 'we measured something, therefore there isn't nothing' - or i can say, 'you can't measure nothing, so it is not a valid question to even ask.'

This is true, in the sense that nothing is not something measurable. Thus the question makes no sense. I believe you can work backwards and say that if the reverse of the question makes no sense then logically the forward of the question makes no sense either.

But i'm not certain of that logic.

"Existence is God" seems like a semantic hand-wave. And philosophizing away reality to the level of consciousness is all very well until you try to act on it by, say, leaping off a tall building and overcoming gravity with your mind. Magical mergers of subjective and objective reality through "Being" are just that: magical thinking.

^not sure that philosophizing consciousness necessary implies philosophizing away reality, but in any case I totally agree that "Existence is God" is semantic hand-wave. And one that I'd totally refuse, considering all the other implications the word 'God' usually has.

I think the issue of living in a simulation is "germane" to our existence in the sense that, do we have a completely independent and unlimited existence or do we have a defined existence with a certain set of rules?

I am not using the simulations to give answers here, but I am just using them to think and understand our existence in at a deeper level. (compared to not using them, I am not trying to say I think deeper others do not) So it gives a special perspective.

Some people may believe that our existence starts with our birth and ends with our death. But is this the limits of our existence? Can we exist within a certain set of rules for a while, while we are alive (meaning while we are in the simulation) and then when our experience/test in one simulation is completed do we continue to exist within different set of rules, in a different level.

Secondly answering Thucy
"No, what I am saying is irrelevant to whether you and I are living inside a simulation, because the same questions then apply to whatever broader universe the simulation is housed in. If we live in a simulation, those who created it are not our gods. They have the same god we do - existence itself. "

I am trying to say here that we do exist because of god/programmer/creator, who has his/her/their own reasons to create us but they definitely let us know what it is yet. So I highly doubt that we can actually reach or comprehend this.

Here I try to answer why do we exists, by simply saying we cannot know.

Then you naturally ask why the god exist by saying "They have the same god we do - existence itself."

That is what I did not try to answer.

I didnt do this intentionally or to prove anything. I just thought and wrote. But this leads me to conclude this:

We can ask a general question "Why there is existence?"
We can ask a specific question : "Why do we (humans) exist?"
We can also ask another specific question: "Why does the god existence?"

The simulations theory is just trying to answer the second question. That is why you feel like I am trying to present you a dogmatic theory. But I think it is a little bit unfair to call any theories, whether religious,scientific or science fiction, dogmatic just because they do not deal with the other questions.

That is what religion do, that is what my simulation theory do. We try to explain why humans exist and we take the stance that the existence of god and existence of humans are in different levels.

"Magical mergers of subjective and objective reality through "Being" are just that: magical thinking."

Whoa whoa whoa, it's the opposite dude. It's 100% grounded in actual reality by its very definition.

If you're afraid of the word God for emotional reasons, fine, don't use it, but understand that it may as well be God, because it means what God means. You can call it anything you want, it means the same thing. The reason I use it though is that God is usually defined as the Ultimate, the biggest and baddest thing there is, the ultimate power. The truth is that what this is is existence itself. Being is bigger than Zeus. Zeus is himself a being.

I use the word God because this is the original sense of the concept of God. I refuse to abdicate the term to superstition - the concept of God has a meaning and place in human life - it refers to our relationship with Reality - that world in which we find ourselves, whose origin and power are mysterious and yet complete.

"We can ask a general question "Why there is existence?"

This however, is the only question that really matters, because it is the question from which all other questions are made, and all facts of our life depend on its answer.

I'll also just note that it's pretty funny how all you have to do is use a quasi-religious word like God or spirit and it's enough to bring all the ideological nihilists and materialists out of the woodwork. New Atheism was a fad, give it up. This idea of "science" and "belief" being incompatible is hokey nonsense. I can't believe anyone ever bought into it. Unbelievably simplistic.

If you believe that there are things that science cannot prove, then you should also accept that God could exist.
Just as physical theories cannot predict the spiritual world, neither can spiritual theories predict the physical world. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

"Just as physical theories cannot predict the spiritual world, neither can spiritual theories predict the physical world. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool."

Ten or a hundred thousand years from now, as the boundaries between the physical and spiritual are broken down in the human understanding, this statement will become as wrong as the belief that famines were punishment from God(s).