Absolutely no one knows how it is that the universe happens to exist, and why it exists, if there is a reason.  Not even James David, a frequent contributor to Useless-Knowledge.com, knows these things, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Another contributor, Frederick Smith, has taken it upon himself to try to impress the facts upon James David’s mind, by giving the lie to a number of assertions made by James David.

So I won’t do likewise.  Instead, I’ll point out some examples of the defective English wherein James David attempts to couch his explanations. 

David begins his presentation by enumerating four, supposedly the only four, ways in which the universe may exist:

1) It came from nothing accidentally.

2) It has always been here.

3) It is not really here - it is an illusion.

4) It came from nothing supernaturally.

The first sentence and fourth sentences above mean logically just the opposite of what James is apparently trying to say.  If someone says to me, “Did you do this accidentally?”, and I reply, “I do nothing accidentally,” the meaning is that I do everything on purpose.  So, on analogy, the sentence, “It came from nothing accidentally,” means, “It came on purpose, if it came at all, from whatever its source was.”  However this is not what James means to say.  What James means to say is, “It came accidentally from nothingness.”

Likewise, in the fourth sentence, “It came from nothing supernaturally,” what James means to say is, “It came supernaturally from nothingness.”  What he is actually saying, however, is, “It came naturally, rather than supernaturally, if it came it all, from whatever its source was.”

These are grammatical subtleties probably way beyond James’s comprehension, and, though it may make me sound pedantic, still I believe that a man who thinks he has the answers to the genesis of the universe should be able to compose logically and grammatically correct sentences in his native language.

In a subsequent paragraph, James uses the phrase “begs the question” to mean “suggests the question”, whereas the meaning of the phrase, is “takes for granted the premises being challenged in order to prove the challenged conclusion.”  A more detailed treatment is to be found here.   I realize that this is a common mistake, but anyone expatiating on the genesis of the universe ought to be a highly intelligent person who does not make common  mistakes.

For my part, when I see mistakes of the kind, I immediately become suspicious of the writer’s intellectual reach.  Even if James had phrased all of his sentences in faultless English, I’d have had some reservations about his reasoning, in view of the grandiose topic he has chosen.  My eyes, however, fell immediately upon the two ambiguous sentences instanced above, and I dismissed the rest of the article without even reading it.  Later, I returned and read it in spite of myself.  At first, James David was using the name ‘Louise’, and I was curious.  Later, when ‘Louise’ was changed to ‘James David’, I just nodded my head knowingly.  Had it borne the name ‘James David’ all along, I’d have known it was nonsense to start with.

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