@ebony
What is sequential existence without any entities in motion, without any before and after grounded in actual change? There is no "change over time", as that implies the empty container view of Newton, where time is an omnipresent coordinate space that exists regardless of anything actually happening.
There are no changeless things or thingless changes. That is what time and space are. Things, their mutual sequencing and mutual nestings.
Your Newtonian view of time is just a reification of abstracting from certain regularly repeating events and giving that abstraction some primary reality over particulars.
Time without any relational content, motion, change or entities is nothing at all.
"The universe either began, or it didn't"
"Began" is a temporal concept. To say that the universe began is to say there was a time before which it didn't exist and after which it did. But if time is constituted by relations among entities in motion, then "before the universe" is not a time at all. Just a pseudo temporal location with no content. "The universe began" means something within a temporal framework the universe itself constitutes, in which case it's incoherent to ask what caused it from outside.
Any description of the universe as "beginning" is a description within a formal model. The question of whether that model captures something real about the universe at its boundary or whether the boundary is itself an artifact of applying the model beyond its domain is precisely what the model can not answer from within itself.
The BGV-theorem is a result about geodesic incompleteness in classical spacetime. VIlenkin himself notes it does not describe the quantum gravity regime at the boundary. You are using a result that applies within a model as if it described what lies beyond the model's domain. The BGV does not apply.
"Misapplying Rand"
The man in the void is limitless in reference. There is nothing outside him imposing a boundary, but he remains finite in identity. He is this man, with these attributes, taking these steps. His limitlessness is relational, there is no external constraint. He doesn't become infinitely tall or fast; he remains as he is.
Rand's point about infinity concerns quantitative infinity. A quantity larger than any specific quantity, which means a quantity without identity. The man in the void has identity, he simply has no external boundary. These are not the same thing, and you have conflated them. The universe is analogous: eternal meaning outside of temporal relations, not quantitatively infinite in its attributes or contents. The universe has identity. It is everything that exists, without being bounded by something outside itself, because there is nothing outside itself.
Regarding Physicalism >
My axioms are the axiom of existence (ExEx) and the axiom of identity (A is A). These are not physicalist claims. I'm not saying existence is material. Existence exists, and everything that exists has identity - it is something specific, with determinate attributes. These axioms apply to anything that exists, material or immaterial.
My argument is not "God can not exist because everything is physical", rather "whatever exists, including God if (God exists), must have identity (must be something specific, somewhere, with determinate attributes)
And you can not escape this by calling God immaterial, because immaterial is a property, not a license to violate identity. An immaterial thing that exists is still something specific, it has whatever immaterial nature it has, determinate and particular. (This argument isn't even touching the impossible standards of a supposed God, which, if it were, would make the existence of a god even less likely.)
"To exist is to be particular is your own assertion, not proof"
This is the axiom of identity, and axiomatic claims have a specific logical status: they are not proven by more fundamental premises because there are no fundamental premises. They are demonstrated by the reaffirmation through denial structure. To deny existence has identity - to say that something exists without being anything in particular - yet you're using concepts which presuppose identity. There is no escaping the law of identity. It is an irreducible primary.
And u misapplied "stolen concept"..."
The stolen concept fallacy is not about materialism specifically. It's about existence and identity. To say God exists but is not subject to the concept of existence in the way existents are, is to say: God has being but no location, no time, no particular nature. It is to use the concept of "existence" whole denying the corollaries of it. That is a stolen concept. You can't borrow "exists" while rejecting what existence entails.
So, did the universe begin? If so, why?
The universe is finite and eternal. Eternal, as in no beginning or end.
This can be reframed as: "did existence as a whole come into being from non-existence?" - this is a rather incoherent question. Non-existence is nothing. Nothing has no properties, no causal power, no temporal location. "Before existence" is not a time or a place. Existence is the precondition of all questions, including this one. The question, cause, and answer all presuppose existence.
The question of "what caused it to begin" misses that the universe is a process, not a thing, and its "beginning" is the crossing of a threshold in the underlying dynamics, not a creation event.
Now, for my final argument.
Existence exists. < This is not a hypothesis, but the precondition of every statement, argument or observation.
The claim "existence began", is self-defeating because "beginning" already presupposes existence.
As such does the claim "Nothing created something" contains a contradiction.
Nothing has: no properties, no identity, no potential, no causal powers.
If nothing truly existed, nothing could ever happen.
Therefore: Existence itself cannot begin.
"Why does our universe (universe, as in our present cosmological epoch, NOT all of existence)"
General relativity, cosmic microwave background, etc all indicate that our observable universe evolved from an extremely hot, dense, low-entropy state approx. 13.8 billion years ago.
This is the beginning of our cosmic history.
It is NOT evidence that reality emerged from absolute nothingness.
Physics observes the earliest state that our current theories can describe.
It does not observe "nothing"
"Why did this beginning occur?"
R. Penrose's CCC proposes that what we call the Big Bang is actually the conformally transformed future of an earlier universe.
Previous aeon > Heat Death > Conformal Transition > Big Bang > Our aeon
Instead of creation, there is transformation. For nothing comes from nothing. One physical state evolves into another.
CCC therefore explains the Big Bang without requiring an absolute beginning of existence.
"Why is there irreversible evolution?"
The universe is fundamentally thermodynamic.
Every single process obeys conservation of energy and increasing entropy.
Reality is fundamentally a process, not a static substance. The universe continually generates new forms of organisation while remaining governed by the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
Therefore, the Big Bang represents the beginning of our present thermodynamic evolution, not the beginning of reality itself.
