I thought it was the Pope who told Hawkings that it was permissible to study the Big Bang as far back as the moment of creation but not before. That's what I recall hearing Hawking say in a documentary years ago.
This necessarily means determinism; i.e., every current action, down to those of the smallest subatomic particles, was predetermined 16 billion years ago.
Emotions are just predetermined chemical reactions. There is no free will.
I find this as difficult to accept as idea of God. What a quagmire.
Interestingly, it is always the invincibly ignorant who do not even know the correct spelling of the name of the scientist they "despise."
Lyndon LaRouche once wrote an hilarious "paper" full of mathematical howlers and mumbo-jumbo entitled, "Why I Must Attack Albert Einstein".
For you, it's a must read.
--Boris
If you ask about Zeus, he has a genealogy. And the Greeks also held some kind of fate (anagke) as prior and fundamental to the Olympian hierarchy. And the Ionians philosophers, in search of this fundamental substrate, suggested material substrates such as water. One of them suggested infinity (apeiron). In all of these, a stopping point is found. Everything and all configurations are a function of that. Also for Christianity, the question "what created God" is answered by their divine understanding of infinity--no eternal regress.
We should remember that there are kinds of infinity. The eternal recurrence that animistic religions held is different than a fundamental infinity that is anterior to that. Sometimes a duality is a function of a monistic feature behind it.
So a good starting point on this problem is to distinguish kinds of infinity. An eternal cyclical recurrence of oppositive forces must be a different kind of infinity than what gives rise to them.
Perhaps one kind of question must be asked whenever we posit a most fundamental infinity. Is it intelligent and personal as we are?
I once signed up for Astronomy 101. It was my first class in the morning of the first day of my venture into "higher education."
The instructor/professor (whatever) launched into pontificating about the "Big Bang". He droned on and on for about 45 minutes, then asked the class if they had any questions. I was the first to stand up, and I asked; "What was there before the 'Big Bang'"?
He gave me this "look". A sort of "How DARE you question the Big Bang Theory!" (And he didn't answer my question; in fact, he said nothing, just gave me "the look".)
A few hours later that day, during lunch, I dropped the class. I didn't want to spend one more minute of my time "learning" from the goose-steping Astrono-Nazi.