Eternal the originator of time - proof.

[LostLocke]

We don't know that time started.   There may have been time before the Big Bang.

I've provided three arguments as to why time did start. 

Firstly, you did?
Secondly, even if you did, can you demonstrate that this is true? I don't want philosophical arguments or thought experiments. Can you physically demonstrate this? Or at the very least, can you provide physical evidence to back up this this claim?

[Mystic]

 Or at the very least, can you provide physical evidence to back up this this claim?

Although what I've shown is a proof, and just like things in mathematics can be proven but don't need physical evidence, the same is true of this, but here is physical evidence that there was a beginning to time:

Eminent physicist Alexander Vilenkin recently presented the results of a new paper at an event in Cambridge in honour of Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday: Essentially, modern physics points to a beginning of creation. We already knew this with the Big Bang Theory, but Vilenkin and others have shown that even with multiverse and cyclical theories, you just physically can't avoid a beginning. The New Scientist reports the results:

Why physicists can't avoid a creation event


The big bang may not have been the beginning of everything – but new calculations suggest we still need a cosmic starter gun

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled "State of the Universe" - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.
One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see "Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension"). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

His first target was eternal inflation. Proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, inflation says that in the few slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe doubled in size thousands of times before settling into the calmer expansion we see today. This helped to explain why parts of the universe so distant that they could never have communicated with each other look the same.

Eternal inflation is essentially an expansion of Guth's idea, and says that the universe grows at this breakneck pace forever, by constantly giving birth to smaller "bubble" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse, each of which goes through its own initial period of inflation. Crucially, some versions of eternal inflation applied to time as well as space, with the bubbles forming both backwards and forwards in time.

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn't work (, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). "You can't construct a space-time with this property," says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. "It can't possibly be eternal in the past," says Vilenkin. "There must be some kind of boundary."

Not everyone subscribes to eternal inflation, however, so the idea of an eternal universe still had a foothold. Another option is a cyclic universe, in which the big bang is not really the beginning but more of a bounce back following a previous collapsed universe. The universe goes through infinite cycles of big bangs and crunches with no specific beginning. Cyclic universes have an "irresistible poetic charm and bring to mind the Phoenix", says Vilenkin, quoting Georges Lemaître, an astronomer who died in 1966. Yet when he looked at what this would mean for the universe's disorder, again the figures didn't add up.

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.
One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn't increase, so needn't reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

Vilenkin's final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally "cracked" to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed - and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

"This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe," Vilenkin concludes. "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

http://www.newscient...tion-event.html

NOTE: He doesn't say 'some of the evidence we have' or 'on balance the evidence shows', rather he says 'ALL of the evidence'. And that's not even taking into account philisophical arguments.

So we see scientific evidence verifies philosophical arguments in this case.

[Aoi Magi]

Time started, whether we can say there is a before or not, doesn't really matter. It just couldn't have started from nothing.

Which time? Time, as we know it in our universe, started with the big-bang. We have no knowledge of the nature of time outside that, and so cannot claim anything about what is possible outside it. Also "nothing" is a very vague term over here. Time isn't "everything" and it is not certain if some form of existence cannot occur without time. For a photon, time is almost non-existent.

Physical things could not have made time appear from nothing.

Unless you consider the big-bang a non-physical event, time as we know it DID start there.

Therefore it makes sense a Creator with will and power created it.

No it doesn't. It might make sense that there is an "unknown" cause, but there is no indication of any "will" being involved

[Thumpalumpacus]

Calling a cause a "Creator" is a non sequitur. The latter term implies a personage that is not inherent in the word "cause".

Also, time is a physical property of the Universe, and came into existence along with it.

[downbeatplumb]

I already stated that this a proof for a Creator, not God. However, if we were to ponder over our own nature and the world, we would see benevolent will, yet we would see a trial in a world where we are tried by good and evil, blessings and affliction. The very nature of love, goodness, and honor shows we been given opportunity to become something worthy and this is obviously not from a neutral or evil being. The honorable possible ranks we can walk through is obviously a possibility. It's not far off to see that morality was not just created from nothing but has a basis in an eternal reality, the creator himself. God himself cannot decide the nature of goodness, but he himself is rather the ultimate nature of goodness by which he has knowledge of it and the opposite of it.  When we realize the origin of goodness is God...then this is not far off to see.  It's not far off to see praise belong to God, God being the source and basis of it, and by which it get's it's reality. Seeing benevolent will in creation, it's not far off, that as humans stray off the path, become irrational, do not think and reflect properly, books reminding us of our spiritual reality, our purpose, emphasizing advice and reminders, be sent by the creator. Aside from that, it's not far off to see God help his elite friends in guiding to the truth by manifesting their leadership and appointing them as guides.  They being the most fit for leadership and having the wisdom, it's not far off to see God guide us by them.  In fact, everything becomes easy to see once you acknowledge a creator. The nature of darkness and light becomes obvious when you accept a spiritual creator to the universe, and light having infinite possible ranks points to the Creator being the utmost absolute light possessing all possible light.

I like you Mystic but find your posts to be getting less and less grounded in reality. Suffice it to say that I disagree with all the above at a fundamental level.

[Esquilax]

Hey MK, maybe rather than just look for whatever confirms what you already believe and then posting that, you could take like five minutes to actually look up the work of the physicists you reference? Because if you did that in this case, you'd get an entirely different result than what you're claiming here.

Like, did you actually read any of what you posted here? It makes this big claim, that physicists "can't avoid a creation event," but it then goes on to completely ignore that what the physicists are talking about, there, is universal inflation needing a beginning, not the universe itself. That's literally all they're talking about, in the thing you cited; how it then spins off to talk about the universe having a beginning, I don't know.

Now, Vilenkin is also on record as saying that his work does not favor or even imply theistic creation, so I guess if you're taking Vilenkin's work as authoritative then you need to abandon the idea that what he's saying helps your case, or else I guess Vilenkin is only a good source when he's saying things you already agree with, and untrustworthy the rest of the time, but actually looking at Vilenkin's work provides some non-trivial subtleties that also puts the lie to what you're claiming. Have you heard of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem? It's Vilenkin's thing, written with Alan Guth and another physicist, and being that it's his professional work it sheds light on what he actually thinks pretty well. The "chief result" of that paper, which can be read here, is that "inflation alone is not sufficient to provide a complete description of the Universe, and some new physics is necessary in order to determine the correct conditions at the boundary." Not that the universe had a beginning, just that, at the point that universal inflation began, we require new physics models to describe what goes on beyond that boundary. There wouldn't be anything to measure beyond that boundary if your assertion that Vilenkin favors a creation model in his work were true. Vilenkin is merely discussing the beginning of universal inflation though, not the universe itself; he's on record as saying he doesn't know whether the universe proper had a beginning.

Seriously, did you look into any of this before you posted, or was it enough that you'd found something that seems to confirm what you already believe at first glance?

[Mystic]

Twist what is stated, just to deny. Alright suit yourself.

[Silver]

Twist what is stated, just to deny. Alright suit yourself.

Oh, grow up.  

[Alex K]

The whole of time is not eternal (ie. present, some of the past is not eternal)

You don't know that, but let's assume that for the sake of argument

No point of time existed eternally (fact, a point of time passes from another point of time)

Now it seems to get muddy. You are now treating points in time as objects that live in time? Seems like an inconsistent mix of categories to me

It's hence illogical to state time is eternal when none of it is eternal,

It could be an eternal thing made up of an infinite amount of finite pieces?

and the past present and future didn't always exist either.

Isn't this a trivial statement? Isn't the future no existing yet kind of by definition?

To say time always existed is hence refuted as is saying a point of time always existed, and would be attacking the conclusion instead of the argument.

Now when you say "always existed", you must presuppose some other time line with respect to which you can make this statement, otherwise the word always is meaningless. How do you respond to this?

The logical conclusion is that it has beginning. 

This is already such a mess that I stop here. Pls clarify above definitions.

I also thought of adding the following argument:


1. A time always has time preceding it except for perhaps the start of time.
2. If there is no start of time, each point of time would be preceded by another point of time.
3. If there is no start of time, no point of time can come into being without a time preceding.
4. If there there is no start of time, every point of time needs time preceding.
5. The whole of time is every point of time.
6. There would be no time preceding the whole of time where it had no beginning.

I don't understand the meaning of this sentence starting at "where" in the last point

7. Thus it's a paradox showing time indeed has a start from an eternal being.
[/quote]

[Esquilax]

Twist what is stated, just to deny. Alright suit yourself.

Wow, seriously? The chief result of the work of the physicist you cited states something that would be impossible if what you claim is true, his own words unambiguously state that not only are theistic conclusions not endorsed by his theory, but that he doesn't know what you're claiming he does know, and I'm the one twisting?

You're literally just flat out lying, at this point.