"Why is there something instead of nothing?" (Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt)

That is the central question of Why Does the World Exist, by Jim Holt. After surveying many possible answers, the first one he explores in depth is the theory that our world was manufactured somehow. He admits that this idea may not be different in any meaningful way from the God hypothesis, but in the process of explaining it, he does make an interesting point. If the creator wanted to leave any kind of instructions or message for his creation, one of his best bets would be to use mathematics-- to embed messages in the constants of nature. He also talks about mathematics itself as something that is not nothing but yet is not exactly something either. I hope he'll come back to these points.

The Greeks and most other ancients considered the world to have come about the same way the Bible says: by the organization of some preexisting mess. The word "cosmos" and the word "cosmetics" come from the same root, meaning an arrangement or an adornment. So the cosmos is that which is organized, and its opposite isn't the vacuum, but that which is disorganized. Many modern(ish) scientists, including Einstein, believed the opposite: that the universe was eternal and unchanging. Discovery of its expansion -- by a priest, no less-- put paid to this "because it's there" cosmogony. But if the Universe exploded into being out of nothing, what is nothing? In math, it's a powerful placeholder, but you can't get there from here: that is, if you have only 0, you can't get to 1. (Additional fun fact: if you have all the counting numbers, you can't just add them until you get to infinity, either. You can't get something from nothing, and you can't get infinity from the finite.)

So what is nothing? Holt distinguishes between "nothing," meaning "not anything," and thus NOT semantically a noun naming a substance, and "nothingness," which is both grammatically and semantically a noun denoting a possible reality. Or is it possible? It's certainly impossible to imagine, which doesn't mean it can't exist. If it exists, if there can be a state where there are no things, it is "as Leibniz was the first to point out, the simplest of all realities." (p.59) It is beautiful in symmetry and is  not subject to entropy. So, did God make the universe out of Nothingness... or is there no such thing?