The New Atheism’s answer to “why is there anything at all” is a universe from nothing. Everything depends on what the word “nothing” was quietly allowed to mean.
There is one question that does not go away no matter how much science gets done. Not how the universe developed. Not how long it took. The other one, the one a child asks and a physicist inherits: why is there anything here at all?
Give the New Atheism credit for this much — it did not duck the question. It answered. In 2012 Lawrence Krauss published A Universe from Nothing, and Richard Dawkins wrote an afterword comparing its significance to Darwin’s. The claim was that modern physics had closed the last gap where God had been hiding. Nothing, it turns out, is unstable. Nothing produces something. No Creator required.
If you are a believer and your instinct is to laugh at that, don’t. Read it first. There is real physics in it, the authors are not frauds, and most Christians who dismiss it could not state the argument they are dismissing. Let me state it properly, and then let me show you where it bends.
The Argument at Full Strength
Here is the case, made as well as I can make it.
Empty space is not inert. Quantum field theory says the vacuum has a lowest energy state that is restless — particle-antiparticle pairs appear and annihilate continuously. This is not speculation. It is measured. The Casimir effect, where two uncharged plates in a vacuum are pushed together by the surrounding fluctuations, is a laboratory result. The Lamb shift in the hydrogen spectrum is another. The vacuum does things, and we can read the dial.
Push that up to cosmic scale with inflationary cosmology and you get a serious proposal: a quantum fluctuation can inflate into a region the size of a universe. Add that in a geometrically flat universe the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravitation may plausibly sum to near zero, and a universe starts to look less like an enormous deposit requiring an enormous depositor and more like a transaction that nets out. Nothing in, universe out, books balanced.
That is not a cheap argument. It deserves a real answer rather than a sermon.
Problem One: That Vacuum Is Furnished
Look at what has to be in place before the first fluctuation fluctuates.
There must be quantum fields. There must be laws governing how those fields behave, and the laws must have specific mathematical form rather than some other form. There must be an energy, a lowest state for that energy to be the lowest state of, and something like a spacetime for the whole arrangement to occur in. Remove any one of those and nothing happens, because there is no “it” left to be unstable.
You may call that arrangement “nothing” if you want the word. But it is a labeled something with properties, and a thing with properties is exactly what the original question was asking about. So the book has not answered why is there something rather than nothing. It has answered how did this particular something rearrange itself into this other something — which is a magnificent piece of physics and a complete change of subject.
The question simply moves back one step and waits: why is there a quantum vacuum governed by these laws rather than no vacuum and no laws?
Problem Two: The Atheists Noticed First
This is worth saying plainly, because it keeps the conversation honest. The most damaging published review of that book was not written by an apologist. It ran in The New York Times, and it was written by David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia who is himself not a believer. His objection was precisely the one above: the vacuum of relativistic quantum field theory is a physical arrangement of fields, so describing how one physical arrangement becomes another tells you nothing whatsoever about why there are fields at all.
I am not going to put words in his mouth, and you should go read the review rather than take mine for it. The point for our purposes is narrower and useful: this is not a sectarian complaint. It is not Christians refusing to accept physics. It is a category error visible to anyone who is paying attention regardless of what they believe about God.
Problem Three: The Door Was Supposed to Be Locked
When the argument gets pressed this far, the fallback is usually some version of: the universe is just a brute fact. It exists. There is no further explanation and none is needed.
Fine. But notice what just happened.
For twenty years the central charge against theism was that “God just exists” is an illegitimate move — intellectual laziness, a conversation-stopper, a refusal to keep asking. Then, at the bottom of the stack, the same move is made on behalf of the universe and called sobriety. You cannot outlaw brute facts for one side and then claim one for yourself. Either an unexplained starting point is permissible or it is not, and if it is permissible, the whole objection to God’s existence as a terminus collapses.
And then the only question left is the interesting one: which starting point. Which terminus can explain anything other than itself.
The Distinction Everything Turns On
The classical argument here was never “everything has a cause, therefore God.” That version deserves the ridicule it gets, because it invites the obvious reply about who caused God.
The actual claim is about two kinds of existing. Some things could have failed to exist. You could have not been born. The constants could have been different. There could have been no fields at all. Call that contingent. A contingent thing never accounts for its own existence; it always points somewhere else.
Pile up contingent things forever and you have not escaped the problem, you have only lengthened it. Explanation has to terminate in something of a different kind — something that does not merely happen to be. Not the biggest item on the list. Not the oldest. Something not on the list.
Which is why Dawkins’s famous complaint that God would have to be improbable, even more improbable than the universe, misses by a wide margin. Probability is a measure over members of a sample space. The ground of the sample space is not one of its members. Asking what the odds are that the necessary being exists is like asking what the chances are that arithmetic is true.
And watch where Scripture puts the line. Not between big and small. Between made and unmade.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (KJV)
John 1:3
Read the last clause again — that was made. John is not padding the sentence. He is excluding the Maker from the set of made things, in writing, in the first century, with a precision that most of the modern objections have not caught up to.
What the Bible Actually Claims
Scripture never says God worked with raw material. It says the opposite, and the old English says it sharper than most modern phrasings manage.
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. (KJV)
Hebrews 11:3
“Not made of things which do appear.” The visible did not come from previously existing visible stuff. That is a flat denial of rearrangement as the ultimate story. Genesis opens the same way — In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth — with no pre-existing warehouse mentioned, because there wasn’t one.
And when God names Himself, He does not describe His size or His age. He uses the verb to be.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (KJV)
Exodus 3:14
That is a name that is an answer. Not “I am the first thing that happened.” I am. Existence belongs to Him the way wetness belongs to water. Everything else is on loan.
Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. (KJV)
Revelation 4:11
Where I Will Not Overclaim
Two honest concessions, because an argument that pretends to prove more than it does is worth nothing in a real conversation.
First: this argument does not get you to Christianity. If it works, it gets you to a necessary ground of all contingent being — and a Jew, a Muslim, and a philosophical deist can all sign that page. The cross is not reached by cosmology. It is reached by history: an occupied tomb, named witnesses who had nothing to gain, a city where the body could have been produced and never was. Different argument, different evidence, and you have to make it separately.
Second: a determined skeptic can simply deny that existence requires any explanation at all. There is no logical lever that forces him. But count the cost, because it is steep. He has to abandon, at the one point where it is inconvenient, the exact principle he relies on every working day of his life — that things have reasons, that effects have causes, that a reading on an instrument means something. He keeps the principle in the lab and suspends it at the edge of the universe. That is not rigor. That is a load-bearing exception.
Which Beginning Explains the Rest of You
So both sides arrive at a starting point. That was never in dispute. The question is what each starting point can pay for.
A restless vacuum governed by unexplained equations accounts for no obligation, no mind, no truth-tracking reason, no beauty, and no reason why the universe should be describable in mathematics at all. It is a bare brute fact, and it leaves every single thing you actually care about unfunded.
I AM accounts for all of it. Being, because He is being. Law, because He is a lawgiver. Mind, because He is a mind. Moral weight, because He is holy. And the fact that any of it can be known, because He speaks.
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (KJV)
Colossians 1:17
And here is the part no equation was ever going to produce. The necessary being is not an abstraction that philosophy backed into. He has a name. He gave it to a fugitive standing barefoot in front of a burning bush, and centuries later He took on flesh and let men drive nails through it — so that the One who did not have to exist at all could be known by people who did not have to be made.
Nothing never produced anything. It never could. Something was always there, and He is not an it.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist