PaulK writes:
Now consider the case of the first moment of time. For everything that exists at that moment of time there is no prior state when it did not exist, and if a cause is needed it is not needed to bring the object into existence, for that simple reason that it already exists. Thus if we take these objects to have a beginning it is one different from the every day beginnings - and in a way that would seem to remove the need for a cause.
To save the argument then, we need a rigorous definition of "beginning to exist", we need to show that it is in fact true that everything that meets this definition has a cause - taking care to deal with the extreme cases - and we need to accept this definition when building on the argument.
I hope I’m following this but it seems to me that in the first paragraph that I quoted you successfully point out that your scenario does not require cause. It also does not rule it out. The concept of beginning to exist only has meaning in an entropic universe where time or change only happens in one direction.
I think that it is fairly mainstream in science, (correct me if I’m wrong), to consider our universe as an emergent property of a greater reality. If this theory is anywhere near correct then it would make sense that this greater reality would experience change differently and likely that it would have more than one time dimension. If we speculate that the greater reality has 3 time dimensions then we could see that just as we can travel around our planet infinitely that we could travel around in time infinitely. This would allow for a finite universe to be spun off from an infinite universe where the finite universe would appear to have a beginning and an end.
I agree that this is highly speculative but it does show how we can have a time=0 in a finite universe when it is an emergent property of an infinite universe. (I think.
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If all this is true then we can argue either that it would require cause or that it wouldn`t. We could reasonably say that it required cause to have our world emerge in the way that it does or that it wouldn`t. It does seem to me however that it would be unlikely to see an emergent universe with intelligence and sentient beings being spun off from a greater reality without intelligence or sentience. It would all come down to a question of belief because it isn`t a beginning in the way that we are our 4 dimensional world experience anything beginning.
I know I’m way over my head here but I hope it addresses the point you are making.
Cheers
Everybody is entitled to my opinion.