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

by dhw, Thursday, September 09, 2021, 11:53 (1171 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] you wrote: “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.”

DAVID: Read properly: if imaginary BB's existed they contained time only within them!!! Not inbetween !!!

dhw: The question whether time exists as a sequence of before-during-after BBs (i.e. BETWEEN BBs) is irrelevant to your belief that time may have existed within earlier BBs. If you believe that there may have been earlier BBs which contained time, you do not believe that Guth & Co have proven that time did not exist before our BB.

DAVID: Your obvious confusion continues. Guth's paper referred only to our BB. In the paper the authors were simply saying time started with our BB.

Once more, read the bold at the top of this thread, and read what you have just written. They “simply say time started with our BB”. That means there was no time before our BB. And you disagree, as follows:

DAVID: Time exists only within BB's.

dhw: And if there may have been earlier BBs, then time existed before our BB.

DAVID: In that sense yes.

Thank you. If time may have existed in earlier BBs, you can’t say that Guth & Co have proven that time did not exist before our BB.

DAVID: Guth's point and mine is our time started with our BB.

They did not say “our time did not exist” but “time did not exist”, because they say there was nothing before our BB.

DAVID: We are arguing about nothing. Guth considers only the 'before' of our BB, nothing more.

He says, according to the bolded quote at the top, that there was NO before our BB.

DAVID: You've dragged in the concept of imagined sequential BB's to refute Guth. It doesn't as it exits only in your imagination. Guth speaks to a specific point and you generalize it.

You have denied that there is no before, because you believe that God existed before, and you have repeated over and over again that it is possible that God created earlier BBs. Neither of us is saying that they existed. We are both saying it is possible that they existed. And so we are both saying it is possible that time existed before our BB – the exact opposite of the bolded quote. You are quite right: we are arguing about nothing, because you agree with me that Guth has NOT proven that there was no before and no time before our BB. That should be the end of this discussion.