Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[polymath257]

Precisely. Usually that phrase means something along the lines of 'at one point, it did not exist, and at a later it did because of some process'.

That is manifestly NOT the case with the universe. Again, since time is part of the universe and causality depends on time, there was no *time* when the universe did not exist.

And isn't the big bang just the point where the known laws of physics started working, meaning that it doesn't mean that there was nothing before the big bang, it's just that we can't know because the known laws of physics weren't working yet?

Like the center of the Black Hole, which is a place where all laws of physics completely break down so it is unknown what is going on there, but it exists, nevertheless. It's not nothing.

Ultimately, we don't know.

In General Relativity, the BB is the limit of how far back you can define time. But, it is quite likely that when quantum aspects are taken into account, that singularity will be 'smoothed over' and allow for time to be defined earlier.

There are a number of results that say with *classical* physics, there are inevitably singularities. What that means when you get away from classical physics is anyone's guess.

As for the 'center' of a black hole, it is possible that it is simply 'not there' in any reasonable sense. In GR, that is essentially what happens: the singularity means that you *cannot* have anything actually at the center. Again, it is possible that quantum effects smooth over that issue.

Until we have a *testable* model, there isn't much that can be said. We have a lot of speculation, but the essential aspect of science: observation and testing, simply hasn't given us enough data to choose between the different proposals we have.

So, ultimately, we don't know.

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One concept I hate theists abusing is Entropy. listen up theists  Entropy is neither disorder nor is it evidence of a finite universe. Hell, we don't even know if our current concept of Entropy even applies to previous states of the universe. Yet I often trot it out like it's some kind of checkmate. It's depressing 

This goes double since entropy is a *statistical* property and not a fundamental one. In particular, there is a time period called the Poincare recurrence time over which the second law is *guaranteed* to be violated.

Now that time period is *huge*, but it puts a limit on anything that can be said based on entropy considerations.

As an example, the probability that all molecules in a room will collect in one corner is very, very, very small. But it isn't zero and given enough time, it will happen. That amount of time would be longer than the age of the universe by *many* powers of 10, but that is guaranteed to happen in the course of an infinite past.