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

by dhw, Saturday, July 24, 2021, 07:07 (1005 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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 manifestation? […]

DAVID: Your definition fits only after time appears instantly at the BB. You still don't grasp the concept of timelessness becoming time, part of the consequence of BB creating space and time. Time only exists if space exists.

What does “time appears” mean? If the BB happened, you can say no more than that the BB is the first example of past-present-future that we know of.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: You ignore the complexity of what appeared in the inorganic universe and the appearance of organic matter leading to our minds and consciousness. You must look at this continuum to analyze from the whole set of evidence. What preceding materials do you imagine existed before time appeared??

dhw: We have discussed the complexities elsewhere ad nauseam, and they are not the subject here.

DAVID: You won't answer because you have none for "what materials existed before the BB".

Of course I don’t know. But you wanted to shift the subject from the BB to the complexities of life and consciousness, whereas I am pursuing the following claims by you and Egnor:
dhw: You claimed that if the BB was true, it provides “absolute proof of God”, and Egnor claims that the BB obviously had no physical cause because it’s difficult to apply a physical cause to “the beginning of time”. And yet he acknowledges that there a “causal” chain, which can only mean a sequence of before and after, which I propose as a definition of time (with each present moment in between the two, i.e. time = past, present and future). I have no idea what materials existed before the Big Bang. How does that prove the existence of a sourceless, immaterial, conscious mind? I eagerly await your definition of time.

DAVID: Time is the same as your definition but only in this universe. Humans can theorize about before the BB while knowing it was without time. Timelessness means no sequences, the key to your thinking.

Thank you for accepting my definition. And how the heck do you or other people know what happened prior to this universe? How do you know there were no causes and effects denoting the passage from past to present to future which you and I call “time”? It is absurd to claim that you know there were no sequences. We haven’t a clue. Do you believe your God would have sat there for eternity and done absolutely nothing until he decided to make a big bang out of himself? If one big bang, why not millions of big bangs? We don’t know, and therefore there is no point in saying time didn’t start till the BB, and there is even less point in saying that the BB provides “absolute proof” of God, whether you think he sat there eternally doing nothing or not.