(January 18, 2020 at 7:20 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(January 18, 2020 at 1:58 pm)AtlasS33 Wrote: Non-believers ignore the question about "what was before" the big bang; theists say otherwise.
Yes, the first to speculate on this question was St. Augustine, in the long discussion of the nature of time in his Confessions.
Of course he didn't use the term "big bang," but he did address the feasibility of talking about the concept of "before" anything was created. He thought that time in the absence of anything else didn't make sense.
I've always suspected that The Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaître probably knew Augustine's thoughts on this pretty well.
Actually people always speculated what was going on before the universe started. Like Greeks considered it was chaos before "creation"/ universe. As did Chinese who thought everything started in chaos. The universe was like a black egg. A god named Pan Gu, wielding an axe, breaks the egg and the heavens begin to expand.
Tahitian thought that god Taaroa existed before the universe, who just was. He was alone and he called in every direction and since there were no replies he changed himself into a universe.
And so on...
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
