From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2002 9:13 AM
To: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures.

"Paul Holbach" <paulholbachSPAMBAN@freenet.de> wrote:

> "There is something possessing the property of being nothing 
> such that being nothing is incompatible with being something."
> is logical nonsense.

I think you're confusing ontological existence and logical
existence. The first "is" in your sentence connotes logical
existence, while the first "being" in your sentence connotes
ontological existence.

By your reasoning, wouldn't talk of holes be "logical
nonsense"?

> being absolutely nothing would mean the absolute absence of 
> any property, including "being nothing".

I don't see why the notion of (uninstantiated) properties
would be self-contradictory if it were the case that nothing
had ontological existence and so no property were actually
(i.e. ontologically) instantiated.

I think the more interesting case is not absolute nothingness
but absolute impossibility: that not only nothing exists,
but nothing is even possible. It seems one might be able
to show that absolute impossibility is self-contradictory,
even if absolute nothingness isn't.

(Perhaps by "absolute nothingness" you don't simply mean
a possible world in which nothing ontologically exists,
but rather the logical non-existence of any possible worlds.
I would call the latter case "absolute impossibility" instead.)

> A positive state of absolute nothingness, that is the objective 
> absence of absolutely everything, is logically impossible.

1. What do "positive" and "objective" contribute to this statement?
2. How can you demonstrate that nothingness is impossible?
Consider a possible world in which only one thing exists.
Why would it be impossible for that thing to cease existing,
and thus leave nothing in existence?
--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net