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

by dhw, Monday, August 23, 2021, 12:58 (1188 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You have agreed with the point that time has to be created to exist.

dhw: This is a new form of argument: tell me I have agreed with a point I have just explicitly disagreed with! Please look at the bold: “time is a description, not a creation”. The events must exist, and the word "time" is used to describe the sequence of before-during-after the events.

DAVID: I seem to remember such an agreement, but don't know how to find it as you do.

You won’t find it because it was never there.

DAVID: In theoretical physics time runs both forwards and backwards. And we consider our universe as in spacetime.

How does that come to mean that Guth & Co have proved that time did not exist before our BB?

dhw: we both reject the possibility that our BB came from nothing, and so we reject your statement that “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.”

Nobody can prove what did or did not exist before the BB.

DAVID: Our BB starts the only reality we know, and also the only time we know.

And it is patently absurd to claim that someone has proved there was nothing before what we know. You yourself are firmly convinced that there is/was a reality before the one we know, so why are you defending Guth & Co?

DAVID: Remember before the BB you can imagine anything you wish. The only real time is post BB.

So you are satisfied that Guth & Co have proved that our universe came from nothing and nothing preceded our BB, and now your God is not real to you, and the possibility that he may have created earlier BBs is not even to be considered.

DAVID: Of course I have agreed a series of BB's might have occurred before ours, but based on our BB experience, time only exists within BB's. That previous sequence looks like time to us with our experience in this BB. You cannot go further and insist time, as a real entity, exists between BB's.

I am not insisting on anything except the fact that nobody can possibly prove that nothing, including time, existed before our BB. But if, as you have agreed is possible, your God created a sequence of BBs before our own, then every BB would have come after its predecessor and before its successor in the sequence of before-during-after which you have accepted as a definition of time. I don't know why you keep defending an argument which you yourself keep demolishing.