I disagree, pure nothingness has the largest potential for creation because by virtue of not being there (nor anywhere) it doesn't prevent anything at all from creating itself.
if this sounds strange is because the concept of nothingness is strange.
rather than asking why is there nothing rather than something, I marvel at how we can conceptualize 'nothingness' in such a way that we can even think of these kinds of questions
Potential cannot exist of its own accord. It is secondary to something already actual and only then can it be actualized.
If in the beginning there was truly nothing, and I mean also the absence of any cause that could make things exist, then there is not only nothing to actualize anything since only actual things can actualize, but not even the potential to be actualized.
So no, absolute nothing can not produce nothing and can never yield anything not even in principle.
EDIT: _Mostly agreed_. Religion never proves itself. It just demands that you have faith.
You're assuming that "nothingness" isn't an impediment to creation of something... it may very well be the ultimate barrier to something being created.
We'll probably never know, but at the end of the day until we can devise a way to define and measure "nothingness" we cant setup any experiments (thought or otherwise) to develop theories from/about it.
and how can you concieve of a way to measure "nothingness" when by definition you would be trying to measure that which isn't there to be measured?
have you ever seen zero of anything? how would you measure that?
but I fail to see how this is related to your first statement. >but nothingness in fact isn't an impediment to creation because nothingness just isn't.
Again the statement that nothingness isn't an impediment, literally can not be proven. Because of that, you must leave open the potential that pure nothingness might be not only an impediment to creation but it might also be the ultimate impediment to creation of something.
We dont know what the properties of nothingness holds in our universe or how our universe of stuff behaves around nothingness.
nothingness holds no properties.
I think it's more useful to ponder how can we even talk about it to discuss its precise nature. which it doesn't have, so is it kind of recursive? i.e its nature is its 'own' non-self? ugh..
in any case, nothingness already makes no sense on its own