I know it seems weird to call something in metaphysics a “fad” but a very popular position among my fellow atheists at the moment, certainly going by the youtube channels (Dr Blitz, Deconstruction Zone, Apparently Ian etc) is to take the position that the cosmos has existed for infinite time.
They believe that the big bang happened, but posit that there may have been a big crunch before that, and often point to the recent DESI dark energy data that implies the acceleration of the universe is slowing as supporting evidence (even though that is still a jump from predicting a big crunch).
Now, it annoys me a bit, because IMO it is making the same error as the talking point I grew up with: “You can’t ask what is before the big bang, because that’s like asking what’s north of the north pole”.
In my view, there’s an explanatory gap when it comes to existence itself, a mindblowing one, and while I don’t think “therefore, God” works on any level, I don’t think these handwaves work either.
Put it this way. Let’s say in my garden there are 6 golden fleeces and 2 copper fleeces. We could ask various questions: Why are there fleeces in my garden?, Why are there 8 in total? Why are there 2 copper? etc etc
And in everyday life we can bundle these questions up into “Where did the fleeces come from?” or “What caused them to be there?”
But if I were to answer: “They’ve always been there”, did that answer anything?
It’s why, for me, I don’t care if time is finite or not. It doesn’t do anything, in terms of explanatory power. And yet you can hear debates between atheists and theists that go on for hours trying to argue whether there was a start point.
FYI, the Big Bang as the “origin” of the universe is an old theory. It’s now almost certain that before it came inflation, where a De Sitter universe expanded at an exponential rate and ended when the potential energy of the inflation field decayed into other particles, which then kicked off the Big Bang.
There are only two possible options: either a) something came from nothing or b) there was never nothing and always something.
I don’t know if there can be an explanation for (a), but perhaps (b) can be explained by nothingness being impossible (and maybe even incoherent).
The debate between the theist and the atheist concerns the nature of this first or eternal thing; is it an intelligence or is it a mindless phenomenon?
I think the best explanation is that this thing is a false vacuum with regions which then decay into bubble universes.
You think Atheists should avoid relying on purely speculative theories to argue against theists and you see any untestable theory of what happened before the big bang as speculative?
I think thats reasonable enough although if people want to advance a theory of origins they are entitled to do so provided that they don’t overstate its claim to be the truth.
For (a) I would prefer to just phrase it as time being finite. “Something from nothing” is inherently loaded, and I think you are right that conceiving of a time where there was nothing is inherently paradoxical.
I think we tie ourselves up in knots in English, simply because we have this noun: “nothing”. So we have these nonsense statements of “nothing is still something” “we have no evidence of nothing existing” etc.
I have not seen any logical problem with the possibility of: Logical_NOT( some time/space/matter exists )
Right.
Generally I think admitting we don’t know something is really important, in every context, not just here.
And of course I agree with people advocating a particular position while acknowledging it’s largely speculative and don’t have misconceptions about what that position would even explain.
To me this is more about human behavior and specific motives. It’s safe to talk about this stuff because even if someone challenges their opinions, they have communities or other works to rely on. When your goal is to look like a credible source, this becomes important. At the end of the day, these people are usually just voices, not brains. They’re just parroting the achievements of others, usually for fun and entertainment value. As for why they do it, it’s because sometimes there are emotional rewards that come from finding a comforting certainty, much like the psychological comfort people find in divinity, to the rewards of publishing a self help book that many would argue is simply having common sense.
And I don’t understand this objection. The existence of a universe is arguably more wild than some bric-a-brac in my garden, and in any case, how remarkable something is is tangential to our explanatory power. e.g. yawning is pretty unremarkable, yet there’s no consensus yet on why we do it, and no model with good predictive power (yes there are some associated things, like how long you’ve been awake, how bored you are etc. But such correlations aren’t a model).
Of course it’s a logically possible state of affairs. I am just saying, in the context of first cause arguments it doesn’t add any explanatory power. Because, while a lot of debate gets preoccupied with talking about the t=0 instant, and whether it exists, it’s actually only a means to an end. Positing that there was no such instant doesn’t tell us anything, in itself.
I meant to cover that in (b). Perhaps it’s best to split (a) and (b) into three options:
Something came from nothing (e.g. there was a time when there was nothingness)
There was never nothing, and the something has an infinite past
There was never nothing, and the something has a finite past
Regardless of which is true, I don’t see how an explanation of it is possible; we may be able to determine that it is true even if we cannot determine why it is true.
So that’s an accepted position even within certain theological circles, particularly Mormons, but probably others.
That is, not every religion holds that God created the universe, but some just that he created order from the chaos.
This arises in Abrahamic traditions because a likely more accurate translation of Genesis 1:1 is When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void."
Indeed, the Stoics believed in eternalism. That there was a series of conflagorations after which the Universe was reborn.
Cyclical universes (the big bounce) was a mainstream hypothesis ( one of several) before calculations revealled that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating.
Do we need a sustaining ground of the existance of contingent things? The problem with “God did it” is that it doesn’t really provide an explanation; it simply gives us a placeholder that potentially halts the causal infinite regress. That seems to be its key function. If you accept this mysterious answer, an unknowable power, or a magic space wizard made it all, depending on whether you are critiquing classical theism or theistic personalism.
Isn’t the notion of the Big Bang really an explanation of the early evolution of our observable universe; by itself, it says nothing about what, if anything, may have existed before it?
As an atheist, I have no particular interest in the origin of existence. Firstly, it requires significant expertise almost no one you’ll ever meet has, and secondly, I struggle to care. I see no good reason why we should not consider the possibility that something has always existed before our current universe began, perhaps even an eternal reality. But how could we know, and why should a non-specialist have a firm view on the matter? Is this hand waving?
I also wonder about the rather determined effort philosophy puts into finding a sustaining ground for the existence of contingent things. The God hypothesis seems to “work” mainly if we already have a conceptual framework in which a creator or sustaining ground makes sense. Perhaps the problem is that we simply lack the conceptual framework needed to make sense of what underlies existence.
No, it’s not hand-waving at all, and my position is pretty much the same as yours: I don’t really care whether time extends finitely or infinitely into the past; compared to my may fly like existence, what does it matter if it’s billions of years or infinity?
The thing that causes my annoyance is the common assumption at the moment, that an infinite regress clears some kind of explanatory gap. And hence, every time a theist brings up the cosmological argument, we then get 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, of the atheist trying really hard to advocate for an infinite regress.
When it honestly doesn’t do much, and they would be better placed just refuting the cosmological argument.
Of course, part of the issue here is the format of youtube debates. While the aforementioned channels are all very patient hosts who respond to polite callers with politeness and respect, you never hear the host cede ground. This isn’t an atheist thing, it’s basically all call in shows that allow opposition callers.
IMHO there’s the physicist’s view of time and then there’s the ordinary person’s view of time. Unfortunately for me I missed out on a doctorate in physics or math and I have to comment as a layman.
According to BBT, time and space had a beginning. Consider that I had a beginning (my birth, say the year 1999). You can ask questions about me in or after 1999 but any question that predates 1999 is invalid because I didn’t exist before 1999. The same with time in BBT.
To my simple mind Einstein’s time dilation also helps make sense of the statement “there is no north of the north pole”. At the BBT the entire mass of the universe was concentrated in a single point. Time dilation was infinite i.e. time stopped flowing, which is to say there was no time. Space too was curved to a single point i.e. there was no space either.
An eternal universe?
That’s possible but unlike the BBT as such hypotheses can’t be tested.
That’s interesting. Is there a current trend towards accepting an infinite regress? An infinite regress may well be possible, right? It’s untidy, and our brains resist it because our ordinary experience leads us to expect things to have causes.
On the subject of speculative fancies, what does it mean to say that reality itself has a cause, if reality is not ultimately physical but somehow grounded in consciousness?
An eternal consciousness, for example, may not require a starting point. More fundamentally, causality is a concept we derive from relations within reality, so it is not obvious that we can meaningfully apply it to reality as a whole, or to whatever ultimately grounds it.
I feel the same way. Handwaving nonsense is handwaving nonsense. In my view, culture war identity can obscure such nonsense. I’m an atheist like you, but I find myself “stuck in Sunday school” again when I run into the same pious complacencies. “Experts say” [ nonsensical non-scientific etc. ]
Existence as a whole looks inexplicable in principle, given my understanding of scientific explanation. To me the honest approach is to see where empirical science ends and what it has to take for granted to begin.
Thanks ! “Pragmatism” is one good label. I’m just as attached to “phenomenology” and “positivism.” The ethical component here is a quest for semantic integrity. I don’t want to regurgitate phrases that I don’t personally understand. I’d connect this to constructivism in mathematics.
