The tough thing for you, it seems, is the ability to ponder the existence of an intellect higher than ours. An intellect which can explain how yesterday, now and today is not the ultimate order.
I shouldn’t blame you—after all, toads can’t contemplate the minds of dogs, nor dogs the wisdom of chimpanzees. But we, recognizing the hierarchy, can extrapolate the existence of an upper level.
All we can do is think of time as yesterday, now, or tomorrow. And we really can’t define “now.” All we can do is say “Einstein showed time is relative.”
I’ll make it easier for you. The creation of time couldn’t possibly be a time-dependent action, nor could it be created by a being lacking the ability to understand the full dynamics of temporal nature.
(Hint: We must accept reality as it is. We cannot mold it to fit our static view of the universe. Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein all understood this very well.)
Scientists tell us the physical laws—mathematical constants and basic physical forces—didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang. To think time didn’t start until then is not a stretch.
There is not as much problem in allowing leeway for the chance that there might be “higher intelligence” that has an effect on the orders of the known universe, as much as there is in claiming that particular Middle Eastern mythologies ARE indeed what comprise this claimed “higher intelligence”. There is a leap of faith between the transition, and believers hesitate (and refuse) to acknowledge that.
The ethical case for the god(s) of this tradition has been argued about earlier in the thread, anchoring around this particular video, which I insist that you watch and critique:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx7irFN2gdI
Regarding time, as Kosta50 mentioned in his detailed reply earlier, nothing is known about the events prior to the Big Bang, so to say that time didn’t exist then, is an unjustified extrapolation. The recent article regarding the physical evidence for events prior to the Big Bang was also mentioned in the thread.
An interesting article from today:
Q & A: ‘Universe is not defined by one beginning and end’
Dec 24, 2010, 12.00am IST
Cosmologist Roger Penrose of Oxford University and author of the recently released book, The Cycles of Time, was in Delhi to deliver the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Centennial Lecture (Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science) on a new view of black holes and the universe. He talks to Narayani Ganesh on his new theory of the origin and future of the universe:
What your view of the universe?
My conformal cyclic cosmology theory is a departure from the Big Bang theory of the universe that is generally perceived to mean that the universe burst forth in a Big Bang from an infinitesimal point and then expanded by inflation. However, what i’m saying is that the universe is not defined by one beginning and end but goes through an infinite succession of beginnings and endings into the remote future, without a reversal or what is called crunching. It never collapses, it goes on expanding and it’s a cycle.
Could you explain this cyclical process?
The cycle from the infinitely expanded universe to the Big Bang of the next aeon is better explained with classical mathematical equations. However, you could say verbally that the universe is undergoing accelerating expansion. This is best understood in terms of what Einstein referred to as the cosmological constant (he used this term in 1917 though for the wrong reasons) - he was hoping to have a universe that was static in time. He later withdrew his idea but it could help us best explain the expanding, remote future of our universe where, following a succession of Big Bangs in different aeons, there is hardly anything left because particles now have little or no mass. No mass, no scale, right? As it continues to expand, it becomes indistinguishable from the Big Bang of the next aeon; the universe comes to lose its memory - it `forgets’ how big it really is. So the big and small, long-term and short-term, all become equivalent. In my scheme of things, there is no collapse; one universe leads to another. One way of discerning this is to find traces of energy bursts that get released when two galaxies collide and their black holes merge - as it might one day happen with the Milky Way and the Andromeda! My colleague Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and found signals in a circle that seem to corroborate my theory. However, you do need to see more of these concentric circles and perhaps more studies and analyses would reveal more of information of previous Big Bangs and universes.
Would studying concentric rings on the CMB help ascertain timelines of the universe’s previous incarnations, much like tree rings reveal the age of the tree?
Come to think of it like that, perhaps! There’s an awful lot of information in the CMB and it requires study. My model is driven by the Second Law of Thermodynamics that says randomness is increasing all the time.
How different is your view of the universe from that of Stephen Hawking’s?
Hawking is playing a crucial role; the original idea he put forward is that black holes will eventually swallow all the randomness; that the black holes will radiate and disappear and when they disappear - what they call the Black Hole paradox - he says information swallowed by black holes is lost. He later said that the information comes back with radiation and here I disagree.
Regarding time and the consequences for a being that exists outside it, you haven’t resolved the paradox that was mentioned earlier: For someone to be in an existence which didn’t have time as a dimension, everything that was done, will be done, and is being done, have either all happened, or not happened at all. This problem is impossible to resolve logically. If you’re aware of Einstein or anyone else having reconciled with the paradox, kindly explain how.