I’ve read most of the comments and they seem to point out to another question, When did time start? When Big Bang happened?
**Did the “Big Bang” happen? **
There’s no reason to think that it didn’t.
Religion preaches God is the creator of the universe, is the “Big Bang” god or vice versa?
My Aunt Martha used to bake me cookies, the Big Bang started the change of events that made cookies possible. The Big Bang is my Aunt Martha.
**Do you have any speculations on what was before the “Big Bang”? **
Of all the theories out there, I’m partial to the Brane theory, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.
If the universe is expanding, will it ever stop?
There is the supposed “heat death”, but I don’t know if that applies.
Yes.
Well, the theory goes like this:
Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state…[link]
(It is as good a place as any to start.)
Yeah, but the rest of the song is so pre-1998 discovery of accelerating expansion! Big Crunch, indeed!
There’s too much accumulated evidence that it did.
All religious dogmas are wrong. There are no gods.
There are several cosmological theories that claim parallel universes or multi universes of cosmology, meaning that the Big Bang may be one of myriad or infinite similar events that have been happening and will keep on happening.
See: Cosmology 101 on any neighboring college where you live.
Replies are meaningless if the one asking for them has lost the ability to reason and instead is willing to accept unsubstantiated claims only for ego gratification.
I’m partial to the idea that some day, we’ll disprove the existence of dark matter and it’ll go the way of the luminiferous ether. Perhaps I’m reading it wrong, but doesn’t this recent article (.pdf!) get us closer to that?
Dark matter isn’t as weird or mysterious as something like dark energy. It’s just stuff we can’t see but whose presence we can detect by its gravitational effect.
Dark energy - now* that’s* weird!
I guess I’ll take a crack at this.
It’s the most accepted theory we have right now and so I’m inclined to believe it is true. There’s not really any reason not to as it’s fairly consistent with the rest of science and even most religious beliefs, barring the literalists.
I’d say no. If God created the universe and is separate from it, then it is only an act of God. In that case, it is the most significant act, but it wouldn’t make sense to define him by that act rather than whatever he is that isn’t contained in his creation. If God is in fact part of the universe or the universe itself, then it also doesn’t make sense as that is only the “beginning” of the universe. It would be equivalent to defining a person by their birth rather than by their actions or substance.
I also don’t think it fits with any really useful definitions of God. As someone else said, if we’re just drawing an equivalence with the Big Bang, then we might as well just stick with that because it is more specific and more descriptive in that context. Instead, God usually involves a lot more, where we could say that creation is a part or act of God, but he will usually involve more.
As others have said, this question intuitively makes sense, but very well may not. Time may not really mean anything outside of the context of the universe. I think the North analogy is good, but the intuition of North = up gets in the way. Instead, just think of it as moving in the direction of the North Pole in the same way that “before” is moving in time toward the beginning of time. Sure, if you’re travelling North and you can keep walking in a straight line after you cross over the pole, but you’re no longer walking North because you’re now getting farther from the North pole, so it would be wrong to say that that point is North of North without making North a meaningless concept. Sure, East and West don’t have the same limitations, but they’re defined differently and even still, while you “could” say that New York is 22000 miles West of LA, it’s more meaningful to say its 3000 miles East.
But the whole point there is that any of those concepts, North, South, East or West are useful only in describing points on the Earth’s surface. There’s no way to describe something not on the Earth’s surface with those terms. Time would be the same way in describing anything that doesn’t exist as part of the universe which would, of course, include anything before the universe existed. After all, time isn’t a single entity, but part of the space-time fabric according to relativity, so it wouldn’t make any more sense to separate it out than it would to separate out any of the spatial dimensions as somehow unique. And yet, we have an intuitive understanding of various limitations on spatial dimenions.
There’s several different theories on this and, frankly, I don’t think there’s enough evidence for any of them to strong believe one of the other since we just don’t know enough about what Dark Energy is.
A great book on the subject of the big bang is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. In chapter 8, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe,” Hawking describes a 1981 audience he and some other physicists had with the pope in the Vatican:
So there is at least one respected authority on the Christian deity who has opined that the big bang is not, in fact, god, but was instead just one of god’s works. Considering that the authority is pope John Paul II, I think we might have to consider this dogma. At least as far as the OP’s question is concerned.
It’s pretty old, though. He’s written several since which incorporate major discoveries since that book - accelerating expansion, for example.
He’s also changed his tune on God since then, saying he said what he said for an easy life. He’s currently adamant that there is no God, and that God us not needed as a first cause.
To someone asking “what is religion’s answer to [scientific problem]?” a scientist’s answer is useless.
I am thus not invoking Stephen Hawking as an authority; I am invoking pope John Paul II. Who, I assure you, never changed his tune on God.
As a side note, my quote is from the 1998 edition (“The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition”), page 120. I do not have any older editions and do not know if that passage appears in them.
And as a second and final side note, I do not espouse the views of the late pope and am in fact an atheist. I am merely trying to answer the OP’s question in a way that the OP might find useful and non-patronizing.
I don’t think Hawking changed his mind - he’s always been an atheist, although he didn’t come right out and say so until his most recent book. The famous line from A Brief History of Time was just poetic language, it didn’t indicate an actual belief in a god.
I didn’t say he changed his mind. 
He changed his tune - ie said something else; and admitted the statement in the first book was simply to make his life easier.
What statement are you talking about? In the excerpt I gave, Hawking is quoting the pope, not himself. Hawking’s own opinions are not relevant to the discussion in this thread, as far as I can tell.
No, it’s a mildly interesting drift in the conversation. You’re not obligated to join in if it doesn’t interest you!
As it could also be Ra, Cronus, Buddha, or any other one of thousands of gods. And the adherents of those religions use the same proof that their religion is correct, negating Christianity.
But also consider that back around 500BC, the average description for the place where gods existed, in the region between Greece, Sumeria, and Israel was that atop a mountain.
Greek Mythology: Mount Olympus
Amorites: Unknown, but their god was referred to as Bel Sade - Lord of the Mountain
Moabites: Their god lived on Mount Pe’or
Assyrian Mythology: The Hamrin Mountains
Judaism: Mt Sinai (God’s Epithet El Shaddai also means Lord of the Mountain)
There are many other examples throughout the region, with more or less specificity of which mountain it is that the gods live on.
Moving on to Medieval times, the gods are described as living in the Heavens - a place on top of the clouds.
Now, the gods are being moved to world outside the Big Bang.
Personally, I find it overly coincidental that as mankind discovers more of the world, the gods always move one step past where we can see.
Coincidental? People can’t imagine God’s somewhere they can’t conceive. How’s a medieval person going to place him before a Big Bang?
Those locations are all just reflections of the basic “out there” concept phrased in language they can understand. It’s just words; they all mean “beyond our realm”.
Well so if everything about God - where he lives, how he got the job, etc. - that’s written in the Old Testament can be shown via archaeology to simply be copies of what was popular in the region at the time, then there’s no good reason to believe that there’s any part of the Old Testament which was thanks to divine intervention. At which point, it’s just a book about local mythology, the same as Sumerian Mythology, Greek Mythology, Egyptian Mythology, etc. none of which the OP believes in and yet each with equal claim - if not greater claim since some of them are older and, presumably, closer to the original source of information about any actual gods that might exist - to being just as valid. Why isn’t his proof a proof of Ra? Ra is older.
Holy run-on sentences, Batman! That was tough to parse!
But - I’m not arguing for the existence of any deity. I was just addressing my opinion of the likely etymology behind different concepts of “where gods live” and how they developed.
In short, I disagree that it’s coincidental. It’s exactly the progression one would expect.