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

by dhw, Monday, July 26, 2021, 07:03 (1216 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

You accept that when a star is born and when a star dies, there is a reality of before and after. If there are periods when nothing happens, then they are periods when nothing happens. How does that invalidate the concept of time as a sequence of before-present-after?

DAVID: 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?

DAVID: 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.

Well, I never knew that presentation at Hawkings’ 60th guaranteed the truth of the offering. From your intricate knowledge please just tell me how there can be an authoritative book on a subject that nobody can possibly know anything about? But perhaps you would also be so kind as to tell me these authors’ definition of “time”. It is very easy to create definitions that will exclude any possibility of contrary theories. (I recall Romansh’s definition of free will as being independent of the universe, and therefore non-existent.)

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”.

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

Words! One definition of timeless IS eternal. I wonder how many religious folk sing of their timeless God, believing it means that there was nothing before the BB, and their God had no concept of before and after except after he’d caused the BB.