On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 09:27:52PM -0800, Steven Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote: > At 04:48 PM 11/27/2002 -0800, Caliann the Elf wrote: > >Mathmaticians and physicists can mathamatically trace the the expansion of > >the cosmos back to the "Big Bang". The difficulty there is when they get > >to Time = 0. At that point, something, someone or some force outside our > >laws of physics had to make the first push. > If one accepts that Time can equal 0--that is, that there is a point where > there is no motion, or no matter, or no time (equal concepts) then your > conclusion naturally follows. But the big bang theory does not require > this belief, and I know of no evidence to support it. You have to pull out meta-time, in that case, but first-cause is still a valid point against ANY explanatory system. You can always step back and say "But what created THAT?" There is no satisfactory explanation. God is a cop-out in that respect, and vulnerable to the same argument (except that theists define God to be "that which answers the first-cause argument", and think they have said something profound). But regarding the big-bang theory, my understanding is that at the "beginning" (immediately preceding the big bang), all the math we know how to do descends into a singularity that says time did not exist/was not relevant. No one finds this particularly satisfying, but there was this explosion that kinda messed up any evidence of what was around beforehand... -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp