Anything that begins to exist has a cause.

All three justifications fail trivially.

Three is simply the assertion that science and experience confirm it, which is false. While it's true that we never see anything pop out of nothing, rejection of the vacuum as nothing means that we have never seen encountered any "nothingness" to observe. If vacuums are not nothing, then there is, literally, zero experiential evidence and zero scientific evidence anywhere in the world which supports ex nihilo fit, because there is no "nothingness" that we can observe.

Two boils down to this:

"Second, if something can pop into being out of nothing, it becomes inexplicable why anything and everything doesn’t pop into being uncaused out of nothing."

And that's simply untrue. I can offer lots of explanations for why anything and everything doesn't pop into being uncause. Again, this is because *there is no nothingness* (that we know of) in the universe--as long as vacuum doesn't count. And, if it does count, then *stuff does come from nothing all the time.*

Why do vacuums only produce some types of things? I have no idea--but it's an observed fact that they do, and pointing out that it does not yet have an explanation doesn't somehow contravene it as an observed fact.

But, more specifically, Wade talks about the nothingness--not even vacuum--that may have preceded the universe. Why didn't other stuff pop out of this?

The simple answer is, "how do you know it didn't?"

You can't ask for an explanation for a phenomenon for which you have no evidence at all. The idea that the universe came into existence uncaused, from actual nothingness, in no way entails the idea that nothing else came out of that nothingness--and now, within that universe, there is no nothingness (unless vacuum counts, but that would defeat p1 anyway, so Wade must--and does--maintain that it does not.)

Justification 1 isn't actually a justification. It's basically just the statement, "ex nihilo fit seems intuitively true." I actually agree with that statement--it does seem intuitively true.

I just recognize that this isn't an argument--that intuition, even though the author and I share it, simply doesn't constitute a good reason to accept p1 (no more than my intuition that God is a myth constitutes a reason to reject the premise).

So, this whole article is basically a waste of space. It can be summed up as: "ex nihilo fit seems intuitively true, and (the author) isn't good enough at this logic business to come up with anything else."