When I was a child, I used to ask my mother endless questions.
What happens after we die?
Where does our energy go?
And what about the universe?
Can it die?
Where did it come from?
How could there be nothing.
And then, suddenly, something?1
- Many of the earliest philosophers, including Parminedes and Plato,
refuted creatio ex nihilo, the premise of conception from nothing.
That all existent things must either have always existed,
or must have a cause — some other existent thing or things that predated it.
The idea of nothingness was absurd.
This school of thought proves a refuge for many a political institution, religious doctrine,
philosophical school of thought, and even scientific argument.
Examples are left as an exercise to the reader. ↩