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

by David Turell , Sunday, August 08, 2021, 15:46 (1203 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The truism is nothing can come from nothing. It is not THEORY for me. Something comes from something. Some form of conscious energy had to preexist our reality.

dhw: And so you agree with me that this spacetime-containing universe did NOT simply appear from nothing, and the most recent evidence is wrong. […]

DAVID: God did it.

dhw: So clearly you don’t agree with “current scientific thought”.

That thought is atheistic, as you well know.>

dhw: You do not know that the period preceding the BB, in which your God may have created countless spacetime universes, was not in spacetime. And how can you say time did not exist if time existed when BBs appeared?

DAVID: Time is present only in the spacetime of a specific universe or universes.
And later:
DAVID: True 'time' exists only when spacetime exists in specific universes, not in the interval between universes, assuming God made more than one.

dhw: If there has been a sequence of universes, then already you agree that time did not begin with our BB, and I have no idea why you should consider that an interval before one universe and before another universe does not constitute a sequence of before and after.

DAVID: Eternal God exists not in time but timelessly.

dhw: If eternal God has eternally been creating universes in a sequence of befores and afters, and if we define time as a sequence of before and afters, with “now” as each moment in between, then time has always existed. What do you mean by “timeless” if you don’t mean eternal?

I do mean eternal:

https://godtv.com/timeless-eternity-living-beyond-time/

" Timeless eternity – is this an oxymoron? Time is an earthly concept just like space. We are limited by time and space and so we orient our lives around this. Time is finite in that death is a reality and therefore an end of time for each one of us. Timeless means there is no concept of time. Eternity is where God resides and He has no beginning and no end. He, therefore, operates beyond time. Timeless eternity is therefore a dimension that is beyond time."

I also accept this religious version from Aquinas:

" For Aquinas, God's timeless eternity is unending, lacking both beginning and end, and an instantaneous whole lacking succession. It is a correlate of divine simplicity (see the SEP entry on divine simplicity), and it is incapable of being defined or fully grasped by a creature."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eternity/