It’s a bigger leap to consider something came into existence from nothing.

Bigger leap than what? That it existed for infinite time? That a god created it?

Infinite time is just as big a leap as coming into existence at some point. It didn’t start at all? Why does it exist, and how, and why did it only expand when it did since it had infinite time before and didn’t, which doesn’t make sense that it took infinite time to do it if it could happen earlier? Infinity is wild, and causes all kinds of issues.

If a god, then where did they come from? Did they come from nothing? If so, why can an intelligent being do this but not the universe? If they were created, then who created them, and them, ad infinitum?

Your link explicitly explains it for you; “The zero point vacuum of space is proposed to be positive and infinite”. Nothing is created from nothing in science (despite the alluring title of the article) especially not any laws of physics, space & time itself, nor extra dimensions or anything else.

Yes, this is true and part of the article, like you said. However, it was just a starting point to look at. We can’t observe anything related to the universe starting, and we can’t test anything either. Also, the laws of physics do not apply to that, since it must be outside space and time, since it is space and time, and the laws of physics are built on space and time.

The point was to show how things can seemingly come from nothing (yes, it requires something to be happening to do this) even in space-time. Even the thing we do have the ability to observe, crazy things like this can happen. It makes space-time starting from nothing seem plausible, so why would we expect it to instead be something that only raises more questions?

It is of course not neither easier OR as hard to consider the universe to have been created by a conscious entity or as you propose, just spontaneously. They are both infinitely complex and “philosophical” as you say “impossible to prove”. They can be viewed as fundamentally the same metaphysical statement.

Fundamentally the same type of metaphysical question. However, one requires much more complexity. Refer above to “If a god…”. It doesn’t answer any questions and only raises the question of where they came from in its place. One creates a solution, the other creates more questions.

You argue in a circle against yourself when you say it is more complicated; … As time starts, what started it?Nothing is required for it to have always existed. It is more elegant to me, but you may feel differently.

Nothing. Nothing is required to start it. Infinite time seems possibly reasonable but less likely, again because that requires infinite time for nothing to happen, and then suddenly the big bang happens. Why did this take infinite time? Couldn’t it have been any time sooner, which could always be sooner, etc. For it to have not happened before for infinite time and then to happen statistically has a probability of 0.

It certainly does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t advance our understanding of physics.

I never said that. We should obviously study it. However, there’s no way to test for either infinite time or non-existence. We should still try to find answers, but this question cannot be solved, at least based on our current capabilities.

However in science, testing and providing an accurate framework for our environment is instrumental for philosophy.

Again, untestable. Not the realm of science, which requires the ability to disprove a hypothesis.

We often discuss, test and make thorough use of n-D systems, infinity, and many of the concepts you bring up without breaking our minds. You give the fantastic too much credit. We learn how to derive four dimensional proofs as kids. Ironically, zero dimensional problems are the easiest.

Mathematically, yes. Math is a great useful tool. However, as I’m sure you’re aware, a mathematical proof does not prove the existence of anything. It just proves a statement fits the rules. The framework of mathematics let’s us make proofs of arbitrary dimensions, but that doesn’t make them real, and it’s notoriously difficult to intuitively understand what’s happening in higher dimensions. Just because we can work with them mathematically doesn’t mean we can hold them in our mind, and zero is the hardest. It’s basically impossible to hold nothing in your mind. It’s easy to work with, but hard to intuit.

We are capable of proving physical properties of our world and use that to inform our philosophical choice. It’s just that you choose religious philosophy (not to be confused with philosophy of religion) and I chose scientific realism to explore.

Lol. We’re both choosing scientific realism. Literally both of our comments are about it. However, again, we can’t test what we don’t have access to. We don’t have any information from before the big bag. We don’t even have access to information at the beginning, only shortly after it started. You can’t use science to come up with an answer, because science requires falsifiability. I choose scientific realism, but I also know that it’s limited by this. We can use science to make guesses for things, but we can’t use science for the answer to the beginning, at least for the foreseeable future.