@Alan McDougall,
Alan, you are giving up everything to God, saying "Oh we are too stupid ever to know this but God is infinitely wise and knows all." As a priest that is a very devout and venerable world view, but as a philosopher it is a complete surrender of your obligation to seek the unknown with reason and logic. It doesn't matter a damn what God knows, frankly. We are philosophers because we seek to know as much as we stupid, ignorant humans can know, to use our God-given abilities to explore beyond the range of our senses. So don't respond to my post with a condescending God-Knows-All attitude. Tell me what YOU think.
Samm
---------- Post added 02-14-2010 at 10:48 AM ----------
xris;128170 wrote:But do you understand my problem? Its this constant nagging problem if there was nothing before how can you measure it? Something can't start from nothing. You cant have nothing then something,nothing does not exist. If we cant observe a before or even cause then why is it 13 billion years old. We are seriously missing something here, that we either can't understand or answer.
Cosmologists making the statement, of claiming its age, is an admission that the universe is a closed event with a precise age, originating from nothing. Its an admission of creation. Can cosmologist in reality say this? It might be that time has been changing or the observable events are only just that and it could have existed for eternity. We always have this eternity problem, either it is a chain of causes and events or this universe has existed for ever. WE must come to the conclusion that we are missing a certain subtle certainty that reconciles these paradoxes, Ive tried but it appears Ive got it wrong or no one understands me.
Xris, I can only tell you what I've read about what cosmologists know, and that is that it has been 13.7 billion years since the big bang birth of this universe. Some physical theories like string theory entail certain conjectures about how the universe may have come into being through the action of 11-dimensional membranes, but that is still pretty edgy stuff. In my opinion, it doesn't give a final answer anyway because membranes act within time and a final answer must take us to the beginning of time or at least to the beginning of an infinitely recurring cycle that is unaffected by entropy.
I can tell you again that before the universe, existence may be bound up in a state of potential where there is neither time nor space, and in that timeless potential state it may be effectively eternal and unending. This potential state of being is the initial condition from which the universe has its beginning.
As you say, nothing cannot exist. Therefore, there never has been and never will be nothing. There has always been and always will be something, some form of existence. Manifest existence, as in our universe, is distributed across time and space in causal sequence and locally binding interactions. Beings in the manifest existence of the universe have bodies with boundaries in both space and time.
Outside the universe, space and time are only potentials which are unmanifest and latent. In this state of being, everything still exists, but is not distributed over space and time. Everything exists in an absolute unity of being without beginning or end. This state of dynamic potentiality is the beginning point, the initial condition, of every universe that may exist. It is from this point that time begins with the first change (event, process, etc.) from the unmanifest state of being to the manifest state of being.
Samm
