Stenger\'s Cosmology refuted (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, March 21, 2014, 12:22 (3900 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You are implying that there has always been something.
-GEORGE: No I'm not. There was no time for something to "always" be in. 
I keep saying this, but everyone is too set in their ways 
to change their ways of thinking about time. 
Actually St Augustine had the right idea on this.-DAVID: I understand your point of view; time and space began together. I agree. St. A is correct. The issue is what came before that event. Either there was a false vacuum always existing, or there was a creation. According to the philosophers I've read and quoted, it is impossible to have any other alternative. I realize thinking of an eternity before time existed is a mind twister, but time is a sequence of events. If there are no events there is no time.
-You will both, I hope, forgive me for my ignorance, but the issue is indeed what came before our own particular time and space. We humans may measure time according to events, but if we define time as the passage from past to present to future, how do you know that there is "no alternative to a false vacuum or a creation"? How do you know that this universe marked THE beginning of time and space? How do you know that there has not been a past eternity of events? If, as David and I have agreed, energy is the source of everything, how do you know that energy has not been producing matter for ever and ever, with our own universe just one "event" in an endless sequence of "events"? This seems to me just as likely as a universe coming from an absolute nothing (a concept that nobody seems able to agree on anyway), or energy producing absolutely nothing until it suddenly produces this one and only universe. No false vacuum, and no creation ... just eternal energy eternally producing matter. How matter produced us is, of course, another subject.