The Big Bang (Origins)

by dhw, Sunday, April 25, 2010, 14:49 (5107 days ago) @ David Turell

The dialogue so far: George believes that the universe of space-time came from nothing, i.e. there was nothing before the Big Bang. David agrees, but regards this as evidence that a conscious intelligence has designed the universe. -I hope this is a fair summary, and no doubt George and/or David will correct me if it isn't. George's belief in the theory that a universe can spring from nothing is consistent with his belief that life can assemble itself without any guiding intelligence. While this seems to me no more and no less fantastic than the theory that a superintelligent designer can spring from nothing, where I struggle to find consistency is in David's position, and so let me risk an interpretationo you mean that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, but there was a conscious intelligence (God) that organized it? If so, there has to be a temporal "before", since a cause must precede an effect, and the something that existed before was God (your "First Cause"). If my interpretation is correct, quite apart from the insurmountable problem of where God sprang from, we are left with the image of a conscious intelligence that has no beginning, stuck nowhere/nowhen until 13.7 billion years ago it suddenly hits on the idea of creating a universe out of nothing. Far be it from me, as a non-scientist, to push other theories, but I'd have thought the bouncing universe concept would at least allow God to be a little less moribund. -For an admirably clear and impartial summary of this and other current theories, see an article by the cosmologist John D. Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University:
http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/jan-apr09/bigbang/index.html-On another website I found the following statement by two string theorists, one from Cambridge and one from Princeton, whose theory is summed up as follows: "The Big Bang was not the beginning of time but a bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars and planets." Sounds just as feasible to me as something out of nothing, and removes George's "philosophical problem of an origin for time": no origin - it just stretches back for ever.