tdcanam

Let me tell you a bit about me before I start the first point of this thread. (This is not a religion topic, and as for a theist topic, at least not yet. I started it already and it got moved, so I hade to give it a "God" title.) (Please answer the main part of this thread, I will plainly state it.)

As most of you know, I am a theist. I subscribe to no religion but still opt for causation. IOWs, I believe the universe was created.

Unlike most theists I know of, I do not opt for the Young Earth idea. Aside from the fact I cannot provide you material evidence of an immaterial Creator (I think you can see why), my opinion is sound.

A Creator set off the big bang which exploded matter and everything else (abiotic) developed naturally. The rest is kinda general knowledge, you know, the Creator started creating living beings to inhabit this universe. My inturp. of this Creator creating over a vast ammount of time may be new to some of you. (Not a literal 7 days) I don't think the creator just put oil in the ground and burried a few dino's ect.

After creating for billions? of years the bible says that on the seventh day "God" rested. He stopped creating. No more species.

Notice that every other "day" in biblical creation are shown as concluded by an evening and a mourning except for the seventh? We know the seventh started because the book says that "God" blessed the seventh day. But the seventh day is never concluded. No evening came. This points to us still being in the "seventh day". How long has it been since humans were first thought to exist? That is one long day. How long were the others?

Anywho, that's me in a nutshell. (The bit of me you should know about.)

The main topic starts here.

If the universe was not caused by a Creator, what happened before the big bang?

What existed?

Any theories?

(This is going somewhere, and not towards, "if you can't ....... then God exists. That is a stupid theist argument.)

ThorsHammer

The big bang was an event that may havde occured billions of years ago, but the universe is eternal. No need for a creator.

Hedshaker

Yeah, got one. Before the BB there was a giant invisible cucko who lived in a huge cloud. One day this cucko said to himself, "I'm really pissed of here in cloud cucko land all on my own for all eternity. It's a bout time I jolly well created a universe."

What'ya think? I know a talking cucko is a bit hard to swallow but other than that I think it's sound

LoneWolf

The quick answer is we don't know. That being said, there are a whole host of different theories of what caused the Big Bang. Of course one type of theory is that there was no "cause". It goes against our common sense but we have learned that not everything has a cause. Things pop into and out of existence at the quantum level without a cause all the time. When you deal with the ultra ultra small, such as the very beginning of the big bang, the laws of physics become a lot more loose.

Another theory is that the universe goes through a cycle of big bangs and big crunches. And this cycle has been going on for eternity. But it is important to understand that time is contingent on a physical universe. Without a universe there is no time. So there is no BEFORE the big bang.

My OPINION is that while our universe is not eternal, there might be an eternal multiverse where an infinite number of subuniverses, like our own, are "popping" in and out of existence. A loose analogy would be like the bubbles in the foam on a beach where each bubble represents a universe. The life of each universe begins with a big bang and ends with a big crunch. Each of the infinite number of subuniverses are at different points in their "life cycle" but the mulitverse, or "beach", is stable and eternal.

There is of course no way to prove this and we may NEVER develope the means to test this hypothesis but I find it rather elegant. I have only recently started looking into this so I have not even scratched the surface of all the different theories out there.

The point of all of this is that while we don't know what "caused" it we do know there are numerous possible natural explanations for it. So why introduce something supernatural when there is no need to do so?

Draygomb

I Don't Know But It Wasn't God

Atheos

I'm curious as to why you're bothering to stick with the Judaeo-Christian bible if you've already come this far in your thinking. You claim to subscribe to no religion, yet posit Yahweh for some inexplicable reason as your preferred causation object.

The simple fact is that we do not know what caused the change of state from singularity to universe as we perceive it today. We don't know. We don't know. Let me phrase it another way: Nobody knows. It's a mystery.

Centuries ago a father and mother didn't know why their seemingly perfectly healthy child would suddenly begin wasting away, getting sicker and sicker until eventually the child died. "It was just God's will".

Advancements in medical technology have lifted the veil and uncovered numerous causes that could not have been ascertained in pre-technology times, so now those parents might be told by the physician that "the child has leukemia", or "the child has Reye's syndrome". Witch doctors, shamen, healers, etc., once used their magic powers to treat illness, shrouded in mystery and rewarded with tribute if the body's natural immune system managed to beat the disease. These were pat answers to unanswerable mysteries that gave solace to believers and riches to those who claimed to know the answers. But in the end they were all just superstitions, perhaps even lies.

Advances in science have also raised our awareness of the nature of the universe such that it is no longer possible for us to accept a creation myth that includes three "evenings and mornings" before the creation of a sun. Other absurdities in the J/C creation myth include the solid "firmament" that separates the waters above from the waters below, which have windows that must be opened in order for it to rain.

Until approximately the 1600's homo-sapiens remained so ignorant about the universe that Copernicus and Galileo were branded as heretics for suggesting that the earth moved around the sun rather than vice versa.

If one wants to continue apologizing for the Judaeo-Christian creation myth one must treat all apects of that myth as allegorical or metaphorical. Clearly this was not the intent or understanding of the original tellers, not that that proves anything. But it does cast reasonable doubt as to the usefulness of this myth at all as a tool for understanding our origins.

As I said earlier, "nobody knows". Throwing up a convenient answer and claiming it is the TRUTH is the domain of superstition and religion. It harkens back to a time when shamen and healers dominated their peers through fear of the unknown.

There are lots of theories. Yahweh could have initiated the big bang but that means he lied about all that Adam and Eve bullshit. Of course the IPU could have poked a hole in the fabric of another universe with her holy horn and our universe is simply a gas bubble escaping through the rift. It's also possible that Thor beat this universe into existence with a mighty blow of his hammer or that Ra farted us out after a spicy dinner. Each of these possibilities are equally plausible.

But what's almost immeasurbly more likely is that there is actually a natural explanation that requires no boogie man. I'm not afraid of an unanswered question. I'm much more afraid of an unquestioned answer.

-Atheos

David B

My best guess, in which I don't have enormous confidence, is that there was a Planck length sized bit of very convoluted string under enormous tension, and then some quantum event let it unravel in 3D and time, while staying very tight in 6 or 7 other dimensions. As the string unraveled it started to resonate in ways that we understand as subatomic particles etc. Not very clear, I know - but this lack of clarity matches my understanding

Question back - if the universe was created by a creator, what are the origins and attributes of this hypothetical creator, and how did the attributes come to be?

David B

Perm

Why do you have to "go somewhere"? Just lay your cards out on the table. A quick search in this forum will turn up most of the accepted infidel arguments regarding the origins of the universe.

That being said, do you have anything new for us to consider?

MxM111

Did you consider that you question is not correct by itself?

There are two possibilities

1) The universe always existed, thus it was not created.
2) If universe appeared (created by god or not is not important here) then the space-time appeared together with the matter. So the time did not existed "before". But because there is no time, there is no "before", because before has meaning only if there is time.

In any cases you question is just not sensible, because it is just not possible to answer it.

Have fun thinking about it .

Neo-Nietzschean

Why do you need a creator? Why isn't it enough that the universe just is.Where are you going with this?