Why is there Something Rather than Nothing

It's common for religious theists to ask atheists "why is there something rather than nothing?" It's part of an argument intended to show that their religious theism explains why there exists anything at all and is therefore superior to secular atheism. There are a number of problems with this question, not least of which is the fact that science can indeed provide answers -- real answers, not the pseudo-answers that religious theism offers.

As physicists have learned over the past few decades, symmetries are made to be broken. Wilczek's [Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] own speciality is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes how quarks behave deep within atomic nuclei. It tells us that nothingness is a precarious state of affairs.

"You can form a state that has no quarks and antiquarks in it, and it's totally unstable," says Wilczek. "It spontaneously starts producing quark-antiquark pairs." The perfect symmetry of nothingness is broken. That leads to an unexpected conclusion, says Victor Stenger, a physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder: despite entropy, "something is the more natural state than nothing".

"According to quantum theory, there is no state of 'emptiness'," agrees Frank Close of the University of Oxford. Emptiness would have precisely zero energy, far too exacting a requirement for the uncertain quantum world.

Instead, a vacuum is actually filled with a roiling broth of particles that pop in and out of existence. In that sense this magazine, you, me, the moon and everything else in our universe are just excitations of the quantum vacuum.

Source: New Scientist, July 23, 2011 [emphasis added]

The idea that nothing might be "unstable" and "something" would always naturally arise out of any "nothing" that happened to lying around will probably seem counter-intuitive to most people. But it shouldn't. After all, what sort experience of any true "nothing" have you had? None. So why would you have any intuition about what "nothing" should be like or not be like?

People have lots of experiences with something they think is "nothing," but it's not real nothing. It's just an absence of the usual sorts of things they take for granted. It's not true "nothing" -- not a true quantum vacuum. Our experiences with "nothingness" of an empty room or even the "nothingness" of space just don't compare. This means we can't extrapolate from our experiences with those "nothings" to the "nothingness" of a quantum vacuum.

So why is there something rather than nothing? Well, it looks like nothing just can't last and will always boil over into something.