See here for some similar questions and their answers.

What fun!

But there are disanalogies -- the Christian view doesn't quite hold there ever was nothing, for there always was God -- and also I don't think it's exactly accurate to describe the Big Bang as 'first there was nothing then there was something' (it's rather: everything in the universe can be traced backwards to a singularity/explosion but nothing can be said about what if anything preceded that moment) -- but more importantly I would take issue with your claim that they have equivalent 'epistemological status' (if you m ean that in any technical sense): for scientists believe in the Big Bang as a result of a tremendous amount of empirical evidence while religious belief in divine creation is based on no such thing. So even IF both were versions of 'first nothing, then something,' the reasons for believing in them are extremely, profoundly, and fundamentally different -- hence they differ in epistemological status.

hope that's useful --

best,

Andrew Pessin

A few comments on Hilbert's Hotel (since Charles Taliaferro has brought that up) and "actual infinities":

1. If you want a standard presentation of the usual Hilbert's Hotel "paradox", which has nothing to do with money, then check out Wikipedia's good entry. The "paradox" just dramatizes the basic fact that an infinite set can be put in one-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself. There is nothing paradoxical about that: on the contrary, it is tantamount to a definition of what it is for a set to be (Dedekind) infinite.
2. Can there be "actual infinities" in the sense of realizations of Dedekind infinite sets in the actual world? Well, money won't do, to be sure (but that's just a fact about money, not about the general impossibility of "actual infinities"). Suppose you think that there are space-time points, and that actual space-time is dense -- i.e. between any two points there is another one. Then the points in a space-time interval will be Dedekind infinite. [Proof: label the end points 0, A. By the denseness hypothesis there is a point between, label it 1. By the denseness hypothesis again there is a point between 0 and 1, label it 2. By the denseness hypothesis again there is a point between 0 and 2, label it 3. Keep on going. That gives you a sequence of points 0, 1, 2, 3 ... in the interval. And by the Hilbert's Hotel shift, mapping the point labelled n to the point labelled n+ 1, it is Dedekind infinite (for that maps the labelled set of points one-one into a proper subset of itself).] But there isn't anything in the least paradoxical about holding that there are space-time points, and they are dense.
3. Not all Dedekind infinite sets can be put into one-one correspondence with each other, by Cantor's diagonal argument. That means there not all infinite sets are the "same size" and we can talk about smaller and larger infinities. But this hasn't anything to do with the Hilbert's Hotel "paradox" (if you are muddled about that, in its original form a "paradox" about the smallest kind of infinite set, you certainly can't unmuddle yourself by talking about larger, uncountable, infinities). We might, however, raise questions about whether sufficiently large higher infinities can be realized in a physical world at all like ours

Good question, and a controversial topic! Some philosophers, going back to Aristotle, are happy with the concept of a potential infinite: a series that expands indefinitely. But they are unhappy with the concept of an actual infinite, partly due to the supposition that an actual infinitude could never be attained through any number of succesive events / acts. Start now, and no matter how many events transpire it seems that (just as there is no greatest possible number) you would never reach infinity. There are abundant puzzles, going back to Zeno in the fifth century BCE, about achieving an actual infinite. Here are two brief ones, the first is called Hilbert's hotel. Imagine (for the sake of argument) that you have an infinite number of rooms in a hotel and each person pays you $50 per night. How much money do you bring in per day? An infinite amount. But now imagine guests in rooms divisible by 1,000 all check out (guest in room 1,000 checks out, guest in 2,000 check out...). How much less money will you be taking in after the check out? There will be no less money, for you will still get an infinite amount of money even though you lost an infinite amount of money. Now, imagine every guest in rooms divided by 3 check out. Same result. Buissiness is still just as good as ever. For some, this counter-intuitive result lends support for questioning the reality of actual infinites. Consider the paradox of the diary. Imagine Pat has always existed and has always been keeping a diary. But, perhaps like James Joyce, it takes her/him one year to write about one day. Would Pat be done with his/her diary today? We seem to be in the awkward position of having to say 'yes' because for every day, Pat has had a year to write about it, but then it also seems (intuitively) that Pat would be hopelessly behind (if Pat started today there would be no time at which Pat would catch up to the day in which Pat is writing).

There are responses to such paradoxes (some distinguish between larger and smaller infinities) though I am inclined to be skeptical. Could it be that infinitude (like negative numbers) has a theoretically well defined role in mathematics, but not in the actual world when it comes to actual infinites (though potential infinites are not problematic)?

You can find at least one response here.

My view (which I defended in my recent book, "Laws and Lawmakers" from Oxford University Press) is that symmetry principles in physics are widely regarded as meta-laws. For instance, the principle that all first-order laws must be invariant under arbitrary displacement in time or space explains why all first-order laws have this feature (and, in a Hamiltonian framework, ultimately explains why various physical quantities are conserved). The symmetry principles function as constraints upon what first-order laws there could have been. Had there been an additional force, for instance, then the laws governing its operation would have obeyed these symmetry principles, since these symmetry principles are meta-laws. Eugene Wigner and others have suggested that the relation of symmetry principles to the first-order laws they govern is like the relation of those first-order laws to the particular events they govern.

I see no reason why symmetry principles would differ from first-order laws by holding in all possible worlds. It is easy to construct a set of first-order laws that violates any of the classical symmetry principles (e.g., that treats some spatiotemporal locations differently from others). So the symmetry principles seem to be contingent, just as the first-order laws are. However, the symmetry principles could still be more robust under counterfactual antecedents than the first-order laws are. As I said, had there been an additional force law, then it would still have accorded with the classical symmetry principles.

To quote from the great SNL philosopher, Mango, "Can you touch a rainbow? Can you put the wind in your pocket? No! Such is Mango." I think he has it right. I don't know much about the optics of rainbows, but I'm pretty sure they move relative to the observer, so they do not have an objective diameter.

At least that's what I thought until I found this answer on the magical internet here:

"It's probably not impossible, but it is difficult. A rainbow looks circular because it's basically the circle where a cloud of rain droplets intersects with your cone of vision, like the circle on the end of an ice-cream cone. Imagine said ice-cream cone with the point in your eye (don't actually try this experiment unless you're looking for a career in piracy). Now make the cone bigger and bigger until the round end hits the cloud of raindrops that are reflecting the sun's light. The big circle on the end of that cone is where the rainbow appears to be -- as someone else pointed out, you can only see the top half of it (because the other half is below the surface of the earth). The raindrops reflect light at about a 40 degree angle, so you can calculate the diameter of the circle if you also know the height of the cone (because the height of the cone, the radius of the circle, and the 40 degree angle are all part of a right angled triangle). The challenge is knowing the height of the cone, which is how far away the cloud of raindrops is from you. If you can work that out then, yes, you can measure the diameter of the rainbow (diameter = (2*distanceToCloud) / tan 40)."

Also, if the ends of a perfect rainbow appear to touch the earth at two known landmarks (say, two buildings), perhaps the diameter is the distance between those landmarks?

This is a wonderfully knotty question that has occupied philosophers at least since Zeno of Elea in the 5th century BCE. One way of interpreting Zeno on this is to say that the problem shows that space is illusory. David Hume later, like the atomists ('atom' meaning uncuttable) seems to have thought that there must be a point at which the cutting stops, at least so far as the world of experience goes. I might say that Zeno is right that certain ways of conceiving space are flawed, including the way the problem as you pose it conceives of space--that is, as continuous all the way down, becoming just a finer and finer Cartesian grid if you will, always subject to the same sorts of properties or ways of conceiving things (like length, height, depth, etc.). It seems, however, that once we reach the sub-atomic realm these ways of conceiving things just don't hold, so that it becomes impossible to apply mathematical divisions of space. Space seems dependent on, you might say, the ability of energy to propagate and knot in various ways and as we approach quarks (which have perhaps no spatial dimensions) it simply is not able to do so. So, in a sense the atomists are right but not because there is finally an uncuttable (or indivisible) particle, either conceptually or really. Rather, they're right because after a certain point the idea of cutting becomes in applicable.

The answer to the general question is that indeterminism at the "lower" level doesn't have to mean indeterminism at "higher" levels. Here's an abstract way to think about it. Suppose some theory has a set of possible states -- call it S -- and a strict deterministic law governing how the states change over time. Let's suppose that this theory is both true and know to be true. But suppose, unbeknownst to us, each of the states in S can be realized in many different ways, at some sub-microscopic level that we don't have access to. And suppose that even though the law that tells us how we get from one state in S to another is deterministic, there's no deterministic law governing exactlywhich way states in S will be realized as the system moves from one state to another.We might never have any reason to believe any such thing, but it could be true all the same.

That's one story about how indeterminism at the micro level might not infect the macro level. Another way is a "for all practical purposes" version. There might be all sorts of blooming and buzzing at the fine-grained level, but all that might average out so that things at the macro level are extremely unlikely to depart from some deterministic rule. Thermodynamic systems are typically like that; the thermodynamic laws hold "for all practical purposes" even though what's going on under the hood is (or may be) indeterministic, and even though there is a teeny tiny probability that your cup of coffee will spontaneously freeze.

As for quantum indeterminacy, it certainly can infect the macro-world. Indeed, it does so every time someone in a lab performs a quantum mechanical measurement. (What the instrumnet registers depends, crudely, on which way the quantum jumps.) But there are good quantum stories about why most of the time, in most circumstances, macroscopic things behave deterministically to a very good approximation

See also Question 619.