I have been asked me to clarify a recent piece of news that has hit the popular science press with headlines like the following:
New genes found that can arise from nothing. (Phys.org, 12/8/2023)
The tenacity of the media (and some scientists) to abuse the concept of nothing is unbelievable. They don’t know that nothing does not exist, and that nothing can arise from what does not exist. This is something that pre-Socratic Greek philosophers did know. (The first to assert this was Parmenides). Twenty-five centuries later, modern man, so proud of the advancement of science and technology, makes the same mistake once and again. In these posts I have often criticized the phrase, common today, that the universe arose spontaneously from nothing, which atheists often formulate to deny the creation and, therefore, the existence of God. This phrase does not belong to science (because current theories do not let us go back to the moment of the Big Bang). As philosophy, it’s just a flagrant proof of ignorance.
