Jonathan Edwards' "On Being": is empty space a thing?

A few years ago, I found at my favorite used bookstore a collection of Jonathan Edwards' writings, and eagerly bought it and eventually started reading it. I was fascinated and delighted by what I learned in "Freedom of the Will," but that would be material for another post, because it's complicated. Here I mean to discuss his shorter piece "On Being" (or "Being" or words to that effect--I don't have the book in front of me).

The point of the piece, certainly the most important point, is that Edwards claims absolute nothingness is a contradiction, an impossibility. This, he says, is because space is not the total absence of anything; a thing must have something containing it, and whatever that something is, it exists. Essentially, space is not nothing. Space is a thing. He defines "space" as "this necessary and eternal omnipresent being." [He's referring not to God, but only to a place where some thing exists.]

Empty space is not nothing? I should re-read it, but...I don't know. What do you think?

(Note: Edwards was a Congregationalist, not a Baptist; and I wouldn't say this is a "Baptist post." However, it doesn't seem to belong anywhere in particular.)

 

What forces one to think is not that per se, but pointing out that this "thing where you put stuff," empty space, must be a thing. It apparently can't be "nothing," because things can't be contained inside nothingness. Why that doesn't work becomes clearer if one reverses the phrase: "Nothingness can't contain things." If it did, it would not be nothingness or empty space.

So says Edwards. I'm turning it over in my mind to decide whether I agree with it. I think I do...