Philosophy And Physics

Lawrence Krauss reflects on his view of philosophy through the prism of theoretical physics:

It may be true that we can never fully resolved the infinite regression of ‘why questions’ that result whenever one assumes, a priori, that our universe must have some pre-ordained purpose.  Or, to frame things in a more theological fashion: ‘Why is our Universe necessary rather than contingent?’. 
One answer to this latter question can come from physics.  If all possibilities—all universes with all laws—can arise dynamically, and if anything that is not forbidden must arise, then this implies that both nothing and something must both exist, and we will of necessity find ourselves amidst something.  A universe like ours is, in this context, guaranteed to arise dynamically, and we are here because we could not ask the question if our universe weren’t here.   It is in this sense that I argued that the seemingly profound question of why there is something rather than nothing might be actually no more profound than asking why some flowers are red or some are blue.    I was surprised that this very claim was turned around by the reviewer as if it somehow invalidated this possible physical resolution of the something versus nothing conundrum.
Instead, sticking firm to the classical ontological definition of nothing as “the absence of anything”—whatever this means—so essential to theological, and some subset of philosophical intransigence, strikes me as essentially sterile, backward, useless and annoying.   If “something” is a physical quantity, to be determined by experiment, then so is ‘nothing’.  It may be that even an eternal multiverse in which all universes and laws of nature arise dynamically will still leave open some ‘why’ questions, and therefore never fully satisfy theologians and some philosophers.   But focusing on that issue and ignoring the remarkable progress we can make toward answering perhaps the most miraculous aspect of the something from nothing question—understanding why there is ‘stuff’ and not empty space, why there is space at all, and how both stuff and space and even the forces we measure could arise from no stuff and no space—is, in my opinion, impotent, and useless.   It was in that sense—the classical ontological claim about the nature of some abstract nothing, compared to the physical insights about this subject that have developed—that I made the provocative, and perhaps inappropriately broad statement that this sort of philosophical speculation has not led to any progress over the centuries.

Apparently, an interview he gave about his book, A Universe From Nothing, rattled some cages in the fields of philosophy and theology.  Considering the number of evolution doubters, I don't think that any cosmological or theoretical physics breakthroughs on the origin of the universe are going to convince many folks.