Before the Big Bang? (Origins)

by dhw, Saturday, July 26, 2014, 22:22 (3783 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If space and time appear at the bb, you logic tells me the bb came from nothing! Where is your belief in cause and effect now? I have no problem with a timeless 'before'. True stasis is timeless.-dhw: I have argued all along that we have no idea when space and time appeared. We only know of space and time since the BB. Yes, true stasis would be timeless, but you have agreed that “BBs could have been going on ad infinitum”. So why assume “true stasis” and timelessness? Is this really more likely in your opinion than an endless process of energy transforming itself into matter, or your eternally conscious God actually doing something throughout past eternity rather than having nothing to think about except himself?-DAVID: Energy becomes matter only in bb's according to our observations. Has there been only stasis and our bb or endless bb's? Who knows except God. -If nobody knows, and if nobody can know, it is clearly pointless to state that space and time did not exist before the BB. At best, it remains a hypothesis with no more likelihood than that of innumerable BBs with space and time.
 
DAVID: The only thing we can observe is a creation through the bb. And pure energy has to be present first, in cause and effect.-Your choice of “creation” is no doubt deliberately provocative, but even that cannot be “observed”. What we can observe is our universe, and the most favoured current theory is that it came about through what scientists call the Big Bang. We don't know if the theoretical Big Bang was caused by “pure energy”, which itself is a controversial concept. But the concept of a “virtual vacuum” - which is not a vacuum at all because it contains particles - raises the prospect of “virtual pure energy”, which is not pure energy at all but contains particles. In quantum reality, anything is apparently possible. For those of us who believe in cause and effect, it is quite conceivable, then, that the first cause is energy (“pure” or “virtual pure”) which for ever has been transmuting itself into matter.