(October 17, 2012 at 8:15 am)Reasonable_Jeff Wrote: Christians get a lot of "guff" for trying to explain the beginning of the universe.
It got me to thinking, what would be your explanation for the beginnings of the universe?
Given that atheism is true, how did this universe begin?
Also please keep in mind that science has proven that the universe did in fact have a beginning.
Three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.
What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the universe prior to the Planck time.
The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called “multiverse” composed of many universes, the multiverse must have an absolute beginning.
Vilenkin is blunt about the implications:
It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning (Many Worlds in One [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006], p.176).
I don't know what predated the big bang, but that doesn't mean that I make stuff up or believe that God must have done it. I understand the Universe is expanding, as shown by the galaxies getting further apart from one another, and we can rewind things to get an age of the universe as something like 13.7 billion years. I think that one day we will understand more, and it won't have anything to do with a God. Maybe as we gain understanding of black holes, we will have a better idea of what started the big bang.
