It’s an argument I’ve heard voiced recently a little more than usual, the creationist diatribe that the Big Bang somehow implies that the universe came from nothing.
Well, for starters, that particular argument is a straw-man – no one says that the Bang came from nothing and just leaves it at that: invariably there are good reasons for the supposition. At the very least they point out that we can’t observe or infer points prior to the Bang at this point. We may at some point in the future be able to determine the course of events prior, but the nature of space and time that we currently understand simply prevent us from gaining additional information about times beforehand. (And the term “beforehand” doesn’t even apply, since space and time began with it.)
But if there were a universe from nothing, what is the problem with that? It seems to me the only people insisting on that, without proof, are the creationists themselves – though in a much less convincing fashion than those physicists who do theorize a beginning ex nihilo. To give you a good run-down on that topic, I turn the floor over to Lawrence Krauss, who gives a much stronger representation than I can in these pages:
