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

by David Turell , Sunday, July 25, 2021, 15:33 (999 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Your confused question shows you do not accept the fact time starts with the BB. 'Before' is obviously timeless. I'm sorry to use 'before' but we think in a time context.

dhw: You have accepted my definition of time as the sequence of before-present-after. My question is not confused. “Before” is NOT obviously timeless, because we have no idea what happened before, and it is perfectly possible that there were millions of befores and afters prior to the BB.

I accept your definition as applying only to circumstances in this spacetime universe or any previous ones which might have come before ours. In between those universes there was no time. It is the ability of our human minds and our experience to see that form of before and after as a concept, not reality.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Eternal timelessness is a certainly a reasonable concept. We cannot know how God 'spent time' if there was no time in our sense of it since we live and think while living in time. God, in His realm, does not experience time, but of course He could have created multiple BB's that started time within those creations. Your trial at theistic theory is as usual muddled. I've presented the authoritative paper about no before before the BB. This means no time until the BB!!!

dhw: How can there ever be an authoritative paper on a subject we know nothing about?

Guth, Valenkin and Borde presnted at Hawking's 60th. I can send you the reference. I have the book. Mentioned over and over by me here and in my books.

dhw: If God exists, how can you possibly know that he does not experience time in our sense of it? Why do you assume that we experience befores and afters but God doesn’t? Even if he twiddles his metaphorical thumbs for a billion years in between creating universes, you can only say that he did nothing during the time that elapsed (there were no befores and afters between his activities). As I said earlier, the most we can say is that the first sequence of before and after (= our definition of time) we know of is the BB (if it happened). We cannot possibly go beyond that, regardless of what you accept as “authority”.

It is generally accepted, except by you, that the concept of an eternal God is a timeless God.