(April 28, 2016 at 11:19 am)Time Traveler Wrote:(April 28, 2016 at 6:46 am)SteveII Wrote: You still have causes and their effects. Doesn't moving back through that chain you get to the first slice when time began at some point close to the singularity?
What singularity? Cosmologists no longer talk about an actual singularity once quantum effects are taken into account, including Penrose and Hawking who originally put forward the idea. The Borde, Guth, Vilenkin model which many apologists like to sight as proof of an absolute beginning based on a singularity was not only disputed in the same year by Aquirre and Gratton, but as I've stated elsewhere, Vilenkin states their hypothesis merely attempts to prove, "that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning." We are currently 4 billion years or so (by our subjective time measurements) into another expansion phase driven by currently unknown causes (called dark energy), but we wouldn't say the universe "began" 9.8 billion years ago at the beginning of this latest expansion phase.
Here is a good article discussing singularities by theoretical physicist Matt Strassler:
https://profmattstrassler.com/2014/03/21...ngularity/
I did not want to get into a debate on cosmological theories (and so hijack your thread). So you are saying that the universe is eternal in the past so there is no end to the causal chain?
