[Physicist]

The point is that the energy came out of the vacuum, not out of the matter. You said "out of nothing", not "using nothing as a tool".

If you take a region of space filled with gravitational field and stretch it by expanding the space itself, you can do the same thing without any matter. This is how inflation created the matter we see.

The process by which inflation proceeded would probably be extremely difficult to reproduce today. This is because inflation requires the vacuum to be in a higher energy state than it now exhibits. The decay of this "false vacuum" is what drives inflation. We don't know what it would take to throw a region of vacuum back into this excited state. It certainly wouldn't be "easy".

But if easy creation out of nothing is what you want, try this: virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly popping into spontaneous existence out of the vacuum, and quickly annihilating each other again. Every cubic nanometer of the universe seeths with them. We know they are there because we can measure their effect very precisely.

[scottiewottie]

"But if easy creation out of nothing is what you want, try this: virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly popping into spontaneous existence out of the vacuum, and quickly annihilating each other again. Every cubic nanometer of the universe seeths with them. We know they are there because we can measure their effect very precisely."

Seems then we should call it, "not really a vacuum". This is where ID parts with CS, CS needs an origin where there is nothing. ID is perfectly content to conclude there has never been a time when there was nothing. An absolute vacuum has never existed.