I am not attempting to be condescending but, instead, respectful of other views. The title. "Catholic" implies what it says -- especially when it is a self chosen pseudonym.
So, what is it you think about Catholics that would make them have trouble grasping this stuff?
When you are discussing the origins of the universe, you are entering a netherworld where science and non-science collide. So, even in a science forum, some tolerance of non-science is needed.
I dunno, non-science doesn't ever really produce much to
collide with. And you don't have to have any tolerance of non-science if your just willing to say "I don't know".
According th Big Bang theory, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. This would mean that it has existed for that length of time and not 'all points in time' -- unless you meant something different by that term than what I am understanding.
Because time is a part of the Universe, itself, then it would have "begun" with the Big Bang too. So therefore, there would not be any points in time in which the Universe did not exist (because time doesn't exist there either).
Now, when you get into a finite past is when it gets a little trickier... That's when we start getting towards the
Hartle-Hawking no boundary proposal ~clicky
That posits a universe that is finite,
yet unbounded. The surface of a sphere, just the surface and not the inside of the ball, is also finite and unbounded. An ant on the ball could walk in the same direction forever because he'd just keep going round and round, so he'd never find a boundary to his 'universe'. And you need a boundary to have a proper 'beginning'.
If you don't have any time for the Universe to not-exist in, then you don't really have anywhere for it to begin
from.
In addition, that speculation will consist entirely of some combination of space, time matter and energy. Anything else is beyond imagination. Try it.
I'm imagining a universe consisting entirely of blurple mattergy....
The Source of Creation is transcendent and experiential but that is probably too much for discussion in a conventional scientific forum.
Well how do you know that? Doesn't that contradict your claim that we can't know about things outside our universe? And aren't you using terms for inside to describe this thing on the outside?
I am not claiming that time is not real -- just that it is relative to the other elements and, as such, does not exist independently as, for all practical purposes, such is true in the here and now.
But the same goes for the spatial dimenstion...
The universe is a 4 dimensional
manifold of which time is a part. If you could view the universe holistically, you would see some particular shape which incorporates the objects in space and how they change through time. So, for instance, a star would not look like a point (like we see them from within) but rather it would look like a
line (the path its taking through its galaxy).
Start chewing on that