[Alamo-Girl]

Well, with God anything is possible, including that the universe was created as is. God doesn't need space/time to create. Besides, a periodic (oscilating) universe would keep re-creacting itself in a perpetuum mobile fashion without any need of God. Each repetition would be the 'beginning.'

Again, I must strongly disagree. The cyclic models, hesitating, ekpyrotic, brane collision, multi-verse, multi-world, imaginary time --- all of them --- require space/time for physical causation because in the absence of time, events cannot occur and in the absence of space, things cannot exist.

Truly the scientists burn the midnight oil looking for any way they can to obviate God.

The only cosmology which could say God was unnecessary was the "steady state" model which so many clung to with all their might until those pesky CMB measurements in the 60's blew it right out of the water.

[Quix]

Resonates with my mind and spirit.

Thanks.

[kosta50]

in the absence of time, events cannot occur and in the absence of space, things cannot exist

Catchy phrase, A-G, however it seems to me to be self-contradicting by suggesting that:

(a) "space" was created before "things" were (for, otherwise, things would not be able to exist by occupying it), and
(b) for "space" to be created (an event), "time" had to exist first.

Unfortunately, this still doesn't define what "space" is, and gives no clues whence did time come from and, paradoxically, "when?"

The "creation" of time in absence of matter and space is meaningless because such creation would by itself be an "event." Which means "time" was never created but had to exist forever!

One way to circumvent this self-contradiction and avoid making time into something eternally "divine," is to posit that everything was created at once, but that contradicts the Bible.

There was only one theologian, as far as I know, who (because of a rusty knowledge of Greek) mistranslated Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and said that God created the world at once! (simul in Latin)*, and that man was +Augustine of Hippo. Needless to say, the Church rejected such a notion as it contradicts the Scripture.

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*"Qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul." [Sirach 18:1] But the Greek text says otherwise: "ὁ ζῶν εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα ἔκτισεν τὰ πάντα κοινῇ." The last word koine does not mean simultaneously or at once, but common, defiled, ordinary..

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