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

by dhw, Sunday, September 26, 2021, 11:15 (943 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Ellis is a very prominent cosmologist has presented philosophical discussions of cosmology before and presented here. Ellis is simply telling us we can imagine but we have no way of knowing anything about 'prior' to our BB. Especially since our 'time' starts at our BB.

dhw: And I agree. It still doesn’t mean that he is a major authority on what happened before our BB, but I’m delighted to see that a prominent cosmologist and I share the same view: namely that we have no way of knowing anything about ‘prior’ to our BB, in which case it is manifestly absurd to claim, as you did two months ago, that “there is no before before the BB. Time did not exist. This was proven by Guth […] presented by my books and here.” The fact that our time starts at our BB has nothing to do with what may or may not have happened before our BB. I’m relieved to see that you have now stopped trying to defend your earlier statement, and hope we can now close this thread.

DAVID: I stand by my quote from my book. You have invented an objection based on suppositions we invented 17 years later that prior BB's might have occurred. Guth's point stands. There can be no 'before' before our BB because our time started with our BB. Simple and correct.

Once again you are twisting your own statement. You did not say our time started with our BB, which is self-evident. You said time did not exist before the BB – as if there could only have been one BB. It never occurred to you that your God might have created prior BBs. But now you accept that this is possible, and you realize that Guth’s point – or your previous point (as bolded above) - which started this whole discussion two months ago, does NOT stand. That should be the end of this discussion.