Originally posted by One Eyed Jack
Because God created the universe. If you want a scientific answer, ask a scientist. Most of them will tell you the universe had a beginning too.
You are stuck in such a concept Jack. A concept which has been made at one time, but which is a non-sense concept. It violates all known physical laws, and you know that. It can not and never can be fit into reality.
Matter coming out of nothing for no appearent reason is not something that can happen.
Tell me, suppose that at one time there would have been nothing. And with nothing I mean NOTHING. Nothing at all. No matter, no mind, no consciousness, no spirit, no God.
How could the world then ever come 'into existence'? Show me the physcics of that.
Physics can not do that. It does not work that way. It can never happen.
Stephen Hawking writes in his book, A Brief History of Time : "Physics don't know how to make physical laws from nothing". That is a confession. It in fact states that one can not create something from utterly nothing. All motion all transformation and whatever there CAN occur, always require there to be something instead of nothing.
If you would have read the book "A Brief History of Time" well, you would have known that Stephen Hawking is not writing about the begin of time as such. People belief that, and people belief that because they want to belief that, but that is not what Stephen Hawking writes.
His idea is not about the begin of time as such. What he comes up with is a solution to the ugly nature of the 'singularity'. He therefore assumes that time becomes more 'spacelike' near the singularity, and in that way he overcomes the singularity. It becomes then 'calculable'. But in order to do that, when using complex quantummechanical equations, he needs to introduce another thing. He has to assume that apart from time, which he then calls "real time", he has to introduce "imaginary time". Imaginary here means not something of an imagination, as in something that isn't real but a dream, but imaginary in the sense that it is an independend time axis, which is orthogonal to the normal time axis. And he uses imaginary numbers (which are based on
i, the square root of minus 1) to solve the wave equations. Imaginary numbers are used throughout many parts of physical theory, to solve wave equations etc. They are a handy tool for the mathematician, but the term 'imaginary' doesn't mean it is something unreal.
This imaginary time then, does NOT have a begin. In the book Stephen Hawking even says that in fact imaginary time is "more real" then "real time".
So, the "beginning of time" is just a popular translation of that idea. It is based on just one part of it, while trowing away the other. But as such this idea does not and can not state that time as such has had a definite begin. Physics can never work with that. It's a fixiuous idea, which does not belong to the real world.
Stephen Hawking is an atheist. As such he confesses to the idea that the world, the universe, in whatever form has always existed. Nevertheless, Stephen Hawking is a human too. He is dependend for his daily life mostly on his wife, who is a Christian.
For his book to be published, and spread amongst a wide audience, the publisher wanted him to put some theistic ideas in. It would increase the selling of the book. After all, Stephen Hawking is only human.
But if you read the book well, it does not say such a thing as a "begin of time". It can not.
I don't think so. The universe was postulated to have a beginning long before Stephen Hawking wrote his book.
Many philosophers have been contemplated to spread such ideas, indeed. In fact this whole idea is very ancient, and has been discussed over and over throughout history in philosophy.
Amongst them for example was Herr Eugen Duhring, who stated that (based on a idea stolen from Kant, while neglecting the very opposite of that idea, which Kant also mentioned in the same book, and concluding that the one - the universe having a beginning - is as provable as the opposite - the universe having no begin in time) who 'proved' that a universe would have needed a begin in time.
Here is a fabulous critique on that argument, written by Friedrich Engels in the Anti-Duhring (1877)
Chapter V. Philosophy of Nature. Space and Time.
And as a final note. Never get yourself completely stuck in the world of ideas. For as we just have showed, it might appear in your head that the world itself is impossible, and is based on some impossible contradiction. If that is the case then you have to ask yourself which one is impossible: your ideas about the world, or the world itself.
If that happens, then for sure stick your head out of the window, and witness the sun. See! It is realy there!
Some or most ideas about the world might be impossible, but never the world itself. You have to remember that.
All that we can know and ever can find out is that we have at some point make the assumption about the world itself.
Does the world just exist entirely within our own mind, can we know all about the world by our mind alone, or do we have to assume at one point that outside of our mind and of our consciousness there is a real world, which is based on some 'unknown' substance we call matter, that existed always.
We can not and never directly know matter. We can not see matter. We can not touch it or detect it. We can only see the various structures and types of specific formations of matter, which are continuously changing, evolving, and transforming.
But we know there is matter, and there has always been matter, cause matter is the essence and primary substance of the world, and forms and shapes the world, without which the world would not exist.
