For some folks the question whether something can come from nothing might appear meaningful in discussions around the creation of the world. For instance, how did the world come into being, and what was there before it came into being: something else, or was there nothing.
In trying to make sense of such questions it is easy to get caught up in language games. Words pushing words – without actually being able to assert anything either concrete or definitive. For instance, if something is not nothing, and nothing is not something – then, presumably, these terms are mutually exclusive, and it would be difficult to use either term, “something” or “nothing”, in some kind of meaningful relationship beyond stating that the one excludes the other on purely logical grounds.
One question that appears meaningful to me in this context is the one that asks: is the concept of non-existence even available to us? I guess that all depends on how existence is defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or properties – e.g., physical objects require spatial extension – a size and a shape that allows them to be detectable as physical objects – be they solid or in wave form, and if they don’t have these properties we can say that they don’t exist. So – in that sense -the “non-existence”of physical objects would be available to us,
Then there are all sorts of other things that can be said to exists that clearly aren’t physical objects. I’m thinking of things such as mental objects. Unlike objects having spatial extension, they can nevertheless be said to exist in our minds, when we refer to them in terms of thoughts and ideas, or feelings and emotions. While encountering them is different from dealing with physical objects, they are in many ways just as real as physical objects, and accepting their reality is an integral part of our ability to function within the everyday world of our experiences.
Leaving the reality of mental objects off the table for a moment – we are here to consider the possibility or concept of absolutely nothing existing before the world as we know it came in to being. Clearly, this is a completely nonsensical notion, and either postulating a God-like creator or Mr. Hawking’s singularity as a source of creation will not save the day as both are equally lacking in support unless – for the latter – you want to suspend the logic of the space-time continuum as a theoretical concept that accounts for everything that can be found in it, space, time, energy and matter except for it being there in the first place. This is the problem of being a closed system – you cannot get outside of it, to consider it either existing or not.
It seems to me that the answer is no. Nothing – nothing existing – is not available to us as a concept except, perhaps, in some abstract sense, e.g., in terms of the the absence of existence, as if existence can be reduced to one of more properties that must be present for something to exist, eg., spatial extension, and having a size and shape where we can approach the concept of non-existence, which – of course – is really a contradiction of terms, and by pointing this out, we have come as close to it as appears feasible, given the rules of language that are there to keep things intelligible to the extent that some kind of discussion it about appears possible. And that should not be a function of the fact that – when we say something like “in the beginning there was nothing” – we have actually implied the existence of nothing at some time or another, as that would clearly be a function of grammar as opposed to making an ontological statement. Clearly, our language is misleading us here.