The Big Bang (Origins)

by dhw, Friday, April 23, 2010, 11:55 (5326 days ago) @ David Turell

I maintain that no-one can possibly know that there was nothing before the Big Bang.-DAVID: Yes they can, theoretically. Guth Borde & Valenkin presented a theorem in 2002 which was represented by Guth in the 60th birthday party symposium for Stephen Hawking: simply there is no before, before the Big Bang. The theory of the Big Bang is a theory of what happened after the 'origin', whatever that was. To quote Guth (pg. 750 in the book)*, " the theorem...does show that any inflating model that is globally expanding must be geodesically incomplete in the past". His guess was: a beginning is some type of quantum event. Andrei Linde (multiverse proponent) agreed the theorem was correct. (Mike Martin 'Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology, Vol. 3,No. 5, Jan. 2003)-* The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, 2003, Cambridge U. Press-I find most of the above pretty confusing. If someone can know something "theoretically", you may as well argue that anyone can advance any theory and claim that theoretically they know what happened. A theory does not constitute knowledge. A theorem may do, but then it has to be derived from proven facts, and here I'm afraid I need help in understanding the meaning and relevance of your quote. In particular, how does "incomplete in the past" mean there was nothing before the Big Bang, and why "geodesically"? One of the many theories concerning our universe is that it is flat. You can't claim truth for a theorem if it's based on an unproven theory, but I'm genuinely asking for clarification here ... I'm in unfamiliar territory. -The statement "simply there is no before, before the Big Bang" is precisely what I'm complaining about. And if we don't know what the 'origin' was, but we do know or believe that there was a Big Bang, then the 'origin' must have been whatever caused the Big Bang, and a cause comes BEFORE an effect. Finally, I don't understand how Guth's "guess" constitutes knowledge.-Perhaps I may also be allowed a quote. Prof. Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology says: "We're trained to say there was no time before the Big Bang, when we should say that we don't know whether there was anything ... or if there was, what it was." 
This is from an article entitled Hints of 'time before Big Bang' on -http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7440217.stm-I'm afraid that in any case none of the above solves the conundrum of how a designer could design the universe if he didn't exist before it came into being.