ComestibleVenom

Well it seems that physicists don't actually agree with that conditional. Time is not as absolute in hypothetical physical realms as once we suspected. It could, for instance, be like the event horzion of a black hole where space becomes, like time, one directional and existing as such only under specific circumstance.

And this

I quite agree with the notion that time is in a sense supervenient upon matter and space and that they are quite tied up with each other. Thus 'the atheist' has not committed this particular error when he asserts that causation is similarly tied up in notions of energeic transfer in time.

The fact is that you cannot more have causation without the passage of time (hence exchange of matter and energy) more than you can have the passage of time without changes in matter and energy.

Thus I

[quote]"There was never a time when the universe did not exist"

equals this phrase

"Therefore, the universe never began to exist"[/quotre]

I think I can agree with this in a sense, but I insist that defining 'beginning' is considerably more problematic and theory-intensive on the issue of the beginning of the universe.

The cosmological argument ultimately is defeated upon the semantic incompatibility of it's assumptions. Namely the contradiction between projecting a cause for the universe and the fact that the universe, time and causation are semantically interdependent within our best understanding of them.

You didn't read what I said carefully enough. My central position is to specifically deny that this notion of "transition from non-existence to existence" is coherent. I have never claimed anything at all about the transition from existence to non-existence!

Sorry luvluv, your attemt to slide even an inch, even a thousanth of an inch north of the north pole is as much a logical contradiction as being a mile north of the north pole.

It is no better to assert that there was one hundred and twenty five years before the universe existed then it is to assert that there was one plank-length before and outside of it.

Within the domain of speaking of 'time' relationships, that is in fact the paradigmatic definition of 'universe'. If you don't like that definition, then you had better tell us what the heck you are talking about.

If you do posit a multiverse who's elements have a temportl relationship to our own universe you have merely deferred the problem . The same problems with positing a causative force before time remain.

Wrong on both counts. Immaterial events with a systematic relationship to time would have a definite place in the universe and it would be highly arbitrary to define the universe independently of them. The epistemological question of whether they exist is, furthermore, sufficient to dismiss them. If you are attached to such speculations luvluv, you are free to remain unconvinced, but be aware that your speculations do not and never will matter if they are informed only by a fantasy-based mystical-epistemology.

Secondly, if there are 'universes' with a 'prior' relationships to our own, then we are clearly using different definitions of universe. The mutliverse universe itself would not be able to have a cause in the normal sense of the term.

The universe within it would then potentially have a cause in a fairly conventional sense, but in that case there is no real disagreement and so the atheist doesn't have to revise his position.

luvluv

Again, you are treating a FUNCTION of matter and space as if it had an independant existence, and as if it had sufficient power to prevent the existence of that which gives it it's own existence.

You are, in fact, attributing CAUSAL POWER to time, inasmuch as you are giving it the ability to PREVENT causality.

Again, I beg you to understand that the big bang is not the beginning of an actual entity called time, it is merely the beginning of our ability to measure the passage of matter through space via a deriviative concept called "time."

If time is nothing but a relationship between matter and space, how can it's absence PREVENT the cause of IT'S cause (matter and space)?

Immaterial entities, by definition, would not be limited to material existence or spatial extension. So in what sense would they have a "definite place" in a universe defined SOLELY by energy/matter and spatial extension?

There has been extensive work on this done in the philsophy or religion, I understand, concerning the eternality of God. It has there been held that even given an unchanging God (such that time cannot even be measured in terms of his succesive thoughts) that creating a universe would place God in time EXTRINSIC to the universe's creation.

Thus, it is coherent to ask even of an eternal, unchanging God: Did He exist before the Big Bang or not?

Even if it is not coherent to ask: How long did the eternal God exist before the big bang.

I am simply substituting an unchanging, eternal "void" for an unchanging, eternal God, and suggesting that the same case can be made. Even if time WITHIN THE VOID cannot be measured, the void can be put in a temporal relation to the Big Bang: The void can be before the big bang, even if the vague term "before" is as precise a temporal definition as we can give it, it nonetheless exist in an extrinsic temporal relation to the big bang and therefore it is coherent to ask what happened before the big bang.

No, it isn't. If it is logically possible that nonmaterial entities exist, then the premise:

"There was never a time when the universe did not exist"

can be denied, and that particular objection to the cosmological argument would fail.

Well, your assertion (if you wish to make it) that time did not exist before the big bang is nothing but logical positivism and as such has no better of a reputation than my fantasy-based mystical-epistemology.

I need not even BELIEVE in nonmaterial, thinking entities, or in other universes. I need only posit them to show that the premise "There was never a time when the universe did not exist" is unfounded. If it is going to stand, you are going to need to provide some support for it.

He would still need to deal with the possibility of immaterial entities with succesive thoughts. If they are possible, then he cannot cling to his verficationalist concept of time, or the notion that the lack of a time so defined has "restrictive" power to prevent causation.

emotional

It's a fact that the universe did begin to exist sometime. "Universe has always existed" is theoretically possible, but contradicted by the evidence (the Big Bang).

fishbulb

1. If it is a fact that the universe did begin then it is not theoretically possible that it did not.

2. The Big Bang does not imply the beginning of the existence of matter, space, or time. It hypothesises that, at one point, the Universe consisted of a tiny volume of space, and this space contained all of the matter and energy that is in the Universe today was compacted into this tiny space. The resulting explosion is responsible for the large, expanding Universe we have today. It says nothing about what, if anything, came before that, and it has nothing to say about where all of that matter and energy came from in the first place.

We reckon the Big Bang as the beginning of time because we are unable to see or hypothesis what might have come before it. In principle, there is no way to look back, even indirectly, to before the Big Bang. That doesn't mean there wasn't a before, just that we can't observe it.

luvluv

<cough>

Goober

In my opinion reasoning that because everything within the universe requires a cause (which may not be true given quantum theory, I'm not sure), the universe must require a cause is the fallacy of composition, so premise 1 is flawed.

Fishbulb,

And if it is untestable, we rule it out with Occam's razor (as a scientific theory at least).

fishbulb

A scientific theory has, by definition, been tested many, many times. If a hypothesis cannot be tested, then it is not a scientific hypothesis. This has nothing to do with Occam's Razor (which is a principle for preferring one explanation over another) and everything to do with the very nature of science itself.

Physics has nothing to say about what happened at or before the Big Bang; it draws no conclusions because there is no known way to observe the state of the Universe prior to a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang.