Cosmologic philosophy: Egnor on Big Bang, etc. (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 22, 2021, 14:06 (1220 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: The Big Bang: The Big Bang is clearly a physical effect — it is the ultimate physical effect (the beginning of the universe) — but it is just as obvious that it has no physical cause, because the whole notion of a physical cause is difficult to apply to the beginning of time. The singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang is prior to the universe not in time but in the sense of a causal chain. And the singularity is not itself a physical cause, because in general relativity is undefined.

dhw: I struggled through the rest of this, but I’m afraid I just can’t take this sort of thinking. A causal chain automatically involves time because there is a before and after. Nobody knows what caused the BB, if it happened, but since it is clearly a physical effect, it is possible that what preceded it was an earlier and eternal combination of physical materials and energy.

DAVID: But the problem you are not seeing is, there is no before before the BB. Time didn't exist. This was proven by Guth, Borde, and Valenkin by mathematics years ago, presented by my books and here.

But you are convinced that there WAS a before, and that nothing could come of nothing!!! How could your God create the BB if he didn’t exist BEFORE the BB? Nobody can possibly prove that that there was nothing before the BB, and why will you not accept a definition of time as a sequence of past-present-future, with cause and effect the most obvious manifestion?

dhw: For theists who believe that what preceded it was some sort of eternal immaterial conscious mind, where the heck did that come from? There is absolutely no more reason to believe that “first cause” was immaterial consciousness than there is to believe that first cause was non-conscious materials.

DAVID: Stick to that illogical reasoning.

Bearing in mind that nobody can possibly know what preceded the BB, please explain why it is logical to assume that there is an eternal, sourceless, conscious mind that preceded and caused the material BB, but it is illogical to assume that the material BB was caused by preceding materials?