Originally posted by Kelp(p)
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As I understand him, this is basically what Stephen Hawking means when he says that the universe creates itself without a God. He considers nothingness to be impossible and since there there is no such thing as a "beginning of time" therefore the universe must have an eternal past. I think Hawking killed my belief in a traditional Creator with this.
Let's have a simple graph (not to scale):
....._______________ Year 0 _____________________ year 1 million ___________________________________Year 6 billion (or however long our universe has been around for) ___ Present (year 2014)
How long would it take to get to the present? Since time goes backwards infinitely, the answer is an infinite amount of time. But since you can't count to infinity (try it if you don't believe me) time will never reach the present, or any other concrete point in time. Since we are in 2014 then it's obvious that points in time can be reached and passed. So even if we didn't know about the big bang the only rational option available is that our universe had a beginning.
Because of this, there must be some form of existence in which time does not exist that spawned our temporal existance. How would this existence look? Since there is no chornological sequence of events then there are only two possibilities: events cannot happen in non-time. This option is obviously false because things (including the creation of a temporal bubble like our universe) did happen. The other option is that all things happen simultaneously and eternally. Since there is no need to go from time A to time B between events, you can have a theoretical existence in which things can happen eternally. We know, from within our own limited existance that life, and subsequently, sentience can arrive. We also know that this life gets more and more powerful, with humans at the pinnacle of achievement. Our ability to manipulate the world around us is fantastic and continues to grow. Now imagine the same thing in an existance with no time, where such progress would be both simultaneous and eternal. The production of one (or multiple) eternal, very powerful (if not outright omnipotent) being is, based on what we can see in our own universe, not just possible but very very likely.
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