I have an argument called "temporal beginning." Its' very simple. I establish that there is no change in a timeless void. I document with Paul Davies and A guy named Fraser who runs a time study institute.
The argument says No change in a timeless void. time has a beginning, so it must have begun from a state of timelessness. Otherwise why say it begins, it would just be more time. But if there is no change in a timeless void, then how could time begin? that's a change.
Argument from Temporal Beginning.
A. loigc of the argument.
1) Time has a begining.
2) There is no causality or sequential order beyond time.
3) Therefore, no change beyond time is possible.
4) The putative state of affairs beyond time is one of timelessness.
5) Therefore, time should never have come to be.
6) We know that time did come to be, therefore, it must have been created by something capable of writing and circumventing the rules.
7) Only God would be capable of writting and circumventing the rules of time and eternity, therefore, God must exit.
B Version of argument
We need a B version because beginning of time is assumed with singularity models of Big Bang, and those are out of fashion now (at least with atheists on Message boards): Advanced physics theory posits "beyond time" in which super symmetry theory is applied to grand unified theory, but "beyond" still posits a timeless state of nothingness in which nothing can happen and no change can take place.
B. Analysis.
God must exist in order to rewrite the rules or to circumvent the rules of temporality. Now some argue that from a timeless perspective the space/time bubble in which our universe exists would also be. That may be true, and the beginning and the end of our universe would always be as well. Causality, or source may be hierarchical as well as linear
C. Objections:
1) Time is an illusion.
Answer:
Some atheists have tried to answer this by using Relativity theory to argue that time is an illusion, its relative, get it? But Relativity doesn't say there is no time. It merely says that the observation of time is relative.
2) Some other freaky theory of time.
Answer: Some have tried to argue that t=0 (time has a beginning) is wrong. It could be t=>0. This is similar to xeno's paradox, in that it segments time into infinitesimals so that it gives the illusion of no time, no motion, or perhaps infinite time. But that "infinity" of time could be hiding in a Plank interval, so and that would not do anything to the basic hypothesis. From the Cosmological argument (no.II) I quote physicists saying that t=0 is still the best way to think about it. Three major sources document this. Julius Thomas Fraser in Time The Familiar Stranger (one of the major authorities on Time research), Paul Davies in God and The New Physics and in the Book Time's Arrow All agree that beyond time there is no motion, causality, or change. More documentation time begins with Big Bang:
How could anything come to be if there is change in a timeless void? that's a catch 22 that cannot be gotten around. It's iron clad, there has to be some outside agent who (or which) changes things.
Yes I am suggesting this must be God.
On CARM, that genius of philosophical Terpsichore Windmill of lies decides that my argument is Xeno's paradox. For some odd reason, he first argues that Xeno beats my argument. When I pointed out that Xeno is clearly known to be wrong, and that's just common knowledge and that he compounds the problem by arguing from analogy he says my argument is Like the paradox.
But clearly this is not so and his first argument against it shows that he originally thought the other way, that Xeno was a disproof of my argument.
Here's how it works.
Xeno says that if a tortoise raced a man and was given a head start of ten meters, he would win because every time the man made up the 10 meter gap, the turtle would have tranced another distance.
Without telling a long parable it works like this: say you want to walk to the other side of the room. That's 40 feet. But to get there you have to first go 20 feet, then do the remaining 40. But you can also cut each of the 20 in half and so how you have four sets of 10 feet to travel. You can keep doing this hundreds of times by measuring smaller and smaller distances, until finally you have thousands of miles to travel to go 40 feet. In this way Xeno "proves" that motion is impossible.
OF course the mistake is he's not really measuring the distance from one point to the other, he's measuring the distances between artificially chosen points and multiplying the number of measurements rather than the actual number of feet.
Here's how I know the atheist first thought Xeno supported his argument. He argued that there is no change from moment to moment. we don't sense change as time passes, so there's no reason why you can't have change in a timeless void because there's no change with time either.
I quickly shot this down with three answers:
(1) He is trying to gauge measurement by sensing change and that doesn't work. how can you possibly measure subatomic structures and partials the motion of subatomic partials just sensing the passage of time? So while movement and change are happening all the time it doesn't seem so. A brick wall seems motionless and changeless and yet it is changing as we watch it just sit there.
(2) hes' treating time like non time. He's not recognizing that the initial state is non temporal.
but clearly he's first trying to use Xeno to disprove my argument.
(3) he's arguing from analogy; he's trying to say that because he can draw a para ell between Xeno and my argument then that proves my argument is wrong.
After I shot him down this way he then says my argument is analogous to the paradox, so I'm wrong because Xeno is wrong. But clearly that doesn't fit because first tired to say Xeno's paradox disproves my argument by showing that change is not possible like Xeno showed motion is not possible.
IN pointing this out the genius concludes that I think space is getting smaller. why? because that's what me makes of the explanation of xeno's paradox. Not that you are measuring smaller spaces, but that I think space is actually getting smaller!
what did I do to deserve this? No matter how I shoot him down he keep insisting he's won, even though he changes the argument, because he just can't understand what's goin on. He actually thinks I"m saying space is getting smaller!
what can you do? these guys are just intent on hatting God it just does not matter how good your arguments or how logical or the facts, just doesn't matter. some how they will couture your words in such a way as to make you look stupid while they are being as dense as high viscosity motor oil.
Sten Olenwald
NASA Scientist
2003
http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11839.html
No time "before" BB.
In the quantum world...the world that the universe inhabited when it was less than a second old...many things work very differently. One of these is that time itself does not mean quite the same thing as it does to us in the world- at-large. Although we have no complete theory of the relevant physics, there are many indications from the mathematics that yield sound experimental results, that time itself may have ceased to have much meaning near the Big Bang event. This means that there was no 'time' as we know this concept 'before' the Big Bang. That being the case, the question of what happened before the Big Bang is now a question without any possible physical answer. The evolution of the universe has always been a process of transformation from one state to the next as the universe has expanded. At some point in this process, looking back at the Big Bang, we enter a state so removed from any that we now know, than even the laws that govern it become totally obscure to science itself. In the quantum world, we see things 'appearing' out of nothing all the time. The universe may have done the same thing. What this means to us may never be fully understood.
"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8]
astronmy cafe
Odenwald, 2004
Was there really no time at all before the Big Bang?
As I have mentioned in a previous question, we do not know what the state of the universe was like at the Big Bang and beyond.
Our best guess at this time suggest that time and space as we know these concepts will become rather meaningless as the universe enters a purely quantum mechanical state of indeterminacy. Cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking suggest that the dimension of time is transformed via quantum fluctuations in the so-called "signature of the space/time metric", into a space-like coordinate so that instead of 3-space and 1-time dimension, space-time becomes a 4-dimensional space devoid of any time-like features. What this state is imagined to be is anyone's guess because as humans trained to think in terms of processes evolving in time, our next question would then be, What came before the Hawking space-like state? There is no possible answer to this question because there is no time in which the concept of 'before' can be said to have a meaning. The question itself becomes the wrong question to ask.
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Physical law opp orates in time
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_qc.html Cambridge Relativity and Quantum Gravity. 1996, University of Cambridge The physical laws that govern the universe prescribe how an initial state evolves with time. In classical physics, if the initial state of a system is specified exactly then the subsequent motion will be completely predictable.
Even assuming no beginning of Time, Susy Gut theory still postulates a "beyond time" as a putative state of affairs. This description confirms my argument since it describes a state in which no change can ever come to be. That leaves the scientific solution still seeking some higher set of coordinates upon which the universe must be contingent:
Sten Odenwald "Beyond the Big Bang."
Copyright (C) 1987, Kalmbach Publishing
"Theories like those of SUSY GUTS (Supersymetry Grand Unified Theory) and Superstrings seem to suggest that just a few moments after Creation, the laws of physics and the content of the world were in a highly symmetric state; one superforce and perhaps one kind of superparticle. The only thing breaking the perfect symmetry of this era was the definite direction and character of the dimension called Time. Before Creation, the primordial symmetry may have been so perfect that, as Vilenkin proposed, the dimensionality of space was itself undefined. To describe this state is a daunting challenge in semantics and mathematics because the mathematical act of specifying its dimensionality would have implied the selection of one possibility from all others and thereby breaking the perfect symmetry of this state. There were, presumably, no particles of matter or even photons of light then, because these particles were born from the vacuum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime that attended the creation of the universe. In such a world, nothing happens because all 'happenings' take place within the reference frame of time and space. The presence of a single particle in this nothingness would have instantaneously broken the perfect symmetry of this era because there would then have been a favored point in space different from all others; the point occupied by the particle. This nothingness didn't evolve either, because evolution is a time-ordered process. The introduction of time as a favored coordinate would have broken the symmetry too. It would seem that the 'Trans-Creation' state is beyond conventional description because any words we may choose to describe it are inherently laced with the conceptual baggage of time and space. Heinz Pagels reflects on this 'earliest' stage by saying, "The nothingness 'before' the creation of the universe is the most complete void we can imagine. No space, time or matter existed. It is a world without place, without duration or eternity..."
3)How could God create beyond time?
Answer(s) William Lane Craig's answer is that God creates everything in one throw, so time is created at exactly the same time that God desires to create. That might be worked out as an answer, but it strikes me as still requiring a sequential order. My own personal answer is that I accept Bishop Berkley's notion that we are thoughts in the mind of God. Thus, while the naturalistic assumption is that there is a "beyond time" and this is conceived as a giant room filled with non-time (and the space/time bubble like a beach ball floating around in that room--or say a beach ball in the ocean of non-time) that is purely a naturalistic assumption. We have no idea what is beyond the BB. Thus, I posit the notion that physical reality is in the mind of God. God is like the Platonic forms in that he is in an abstract reality which has no physical locus, and thus is "everywhere and nowhere." So in that case there is no "beyond time" there is only the mind of God. That is a world of the mind, thus it does contain causality, but no temporal progress, it is controlled by the "thoughts" of God. Thus the problem of causality beyond time is solved, but this only works if one believes in God.
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