Dear reader, With Richard, you see someone who is so dedicated to his worldview of philosophical naturalism that he even denies science. For millennia, scientists thought that the universe was eternal past. Then Einstein’s relative equations implied that it had a beginning. He didn’t like this result, and put in his famous “fudge factor” to make the equations work this way. He later regretted this decision and concluded that the universe was not past eternal but finite with a beginning. Experimental evidence from Hubble and others verified this conclusion. So cosmology has known for over one hundred years that the universe had a beginning. Naturalists like Richard S. Russel conclude a priori that God cannnot exist and refuse to look at the arguments. But the whole point of the big bang is that it is when all time and matter and energy and everything came into existence. In spite of Richard’s “Science of the Gaps,” there was NO THING before the big bang. That’s the science.
Hey, Richard. There was NO THING before the big bang. No imagination. Just science.
There are two types of causes, event causation and agent causation. Science shows that there was no thing before the big bang, therefore eliminating event causation. There is only one other logical alternative.
“You can’t have a Big Bang without something to “bang.”" There was NO THING before the big bang. No matter. No energy. No time. No thing.
As for multiple bangs, it could not happen. If the universe was eternally old, then all energy would have dissipated by now. The universe would have reached thermal equilibrium.
In addition, there are the philosophical issues of it being impossible to have an actual infinite and the impossibility of reaching “today” through an infinite number of finite times.
“Going on… before…” both require time. Richard, the big bang was the beginning of time. There was no time before it. There was no matter. There was NO THING.
Not for the soul.