¶ 0|∞
How can something come from nothing? The answer is simple, and has been known since antiquity: Ex nihilo nihil fit – from nothing, nothing comes. If absolute nothingness had ever been real, there would still be nothing now. The existence of anything at all means that, barring a logic-defying miracle, some kind of eternal ground must underlie reality. That leaves us with two options. One is an eternally complex source such as an Abrahamic God – a pre-existent being who chooses a possible cosmos and wills it into being. The other is an eternally simple source – a condition with no prior structure, no determinate content, but infinite potential. The simplest possible paradox: an Infinite Void.
I have never believed in the intelligent designer God which so many Western theists are convinced is real. By the time I was old enough to have formed a view on such things, I had decided it was about as believable as Father Christmas, and I chose Christmas Day to refuse to attend church ever again. Much has changed about my understanding since then, but the idea of God as a kind of CEO and project engineer of reality has never made sense to me. If such a being actually does exist – a God who thinks, designed the cosmos, and makes strategic decisions about the course of human history – then I have a lot of questions to ask about the details of Its decision-making. So for me this is not a tough decision – the Two-Phase Cosmology begins with an Infinite Nothingness. I write this as 0|∞. This represents the unity of absolute absence and limitless possibility – the paradoxical ground from which all structure arises.
This intuition is not new. Across cultures and millennia, thinkers have returned to the same idea, each time with different names. In Hinduism, starting from around 1500BC, it is the unmanifest Brahman, beyond qualities, from which manifest reality (prakriti) unfolds. In Taoism, from 6th century BC, it is Wuji – the undifferentiated stillness before Yin and Yang. For Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna (c.150-250AD) it is Śūnyatā (emptiness). This is not nothingness in the ordinary sense, but the recognition that all phenomena lack intrinsic essence and arise only through dependent origination. In the West it goes back to the pre-socratic philosopher Anaximander, who called it the Apeiron. Plotinus (204-270) called it the One – ineffable and prior to all categories of being or thought. Medieval German mystics called it the Ungrund – the groundless abyss that underlies God and creation alike. More recently Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), of the Kyoto School, wrote about Absolute Nothingness, conceived as a dynamic field that holds together both being and non-being.
These traditions converge on the common insight that the deepest ground of reality is not a determinate object, nor a being among beings, but a paradoxical absence that is also infinite presence. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere. We can end in complexity, positing a pre-existent complex God, or a multiverse machinery already loaded with laws, constants, and mechanisms, but this simply shifts the question. Where did that complexity come from? The only other alternative is to end in paradoxical simplicity, by recognising that the final ground cannot itself be explained without contradiction, because any explanation presupposes it. The ground must be both self-sufficient and unconditioned. It cannot be fully stated in positive terms. It is not a gap in our knowledge, nor is it a placeholder for future science, but a recognition that without such a paradox, no coherent explanation is possible. Modern logic and mathematics give us metaphors for this situation. Gödel showed that any sufficiently rich system contains undecidable statements – truths that cannot be proven within the system itself. The Void is the axiom that cannot be derived, yet without it no system can be complete.
Next section: The Pythagorean Ensemble | Two-Phase Cosmology