If the universe began as a singularity, these statements are both equally true:
the universe has no center
everywhere in the universe is the center
It’s just geometry – and that is enough to confirm it; mathematically, it just doesn’t appear that we are at the center because everywhere is the center.
Or if you want to shift to some theology, of course every point in the universe is equally the center, because God is present and equally upholding the existence of the universe at every point; or to go a bit mystical, God cherishes every point and wherever it is that He is cherishing something, there is the center.
NO HEAVENS THERE BEFORE HENCE GOD CREATED SPACE ITSELF
and the earth
NO MATTER THERE BEFORE HENCE GOD CREATED MATTER
and God said, “Let there be light.”
NO SUCH THING BEFORE - God employed it to make the rest of the visible universe, which then wound up sliding across the vault of the sky beneath those Day Two waters.
Or in other words “Let there be light” was God speaking the universe into being. Creation is complex. Humanity has spent the past 250 or so years decoding and deciphering the speech spoken by the skies night after night (Psalm 19:1-4a)
Creation includes Planet Earth orbiting the nearest star; or in other words Genesis papers over thousands of pages of actual science to cut-to-the-chase, GOD MADE THE UNIVERSE FOR US AND ON PURPOSE.
That is interesting since it is hard to see in what time consists apart from as an aspect of the perception of creatures who persist through time like us. If one merely became continually without extension through time we would not be aware of it at all. So maybe it wasn’t necessary to ‘create’ time, only beings who endure.
I don’t think the heavens in the Bible should be equated with the physical universe. The usage in Bible doesn’t agree with this. And I don’t think the heavens of the Bible are part of the same space-time continuum as the physical universe.
I think God created the angels as inhabitants of the heavens before He created the physical universe.
Obviously matter and light came before the earth.
And I don’t think God spoke anything into existence. God is not a wizard or necromancer casting spells or giving commands to greater powers to do things for Him. The Bible just tells the story in terms people could understand and relate to. If it spoke of Gravitational field equations, vacuum decay, and Grand Unified Field epochs I don’t think it would have been meaningful to people at the time. Yet I think these have more to do with how God accomplished things than “speaking.”
Yes and all the things which seemed wondrous to us (inspiring many to worship them): sun, moon, stars, earth, oceans, plants, animals, and people are not gods but all things which God created.
The list - time, space, matter, and light is written serially due to the limitations of human language. But with God, what was that? - yes, All things are possible.
The Big Bang had all the necessary parts as of the first non-zero moment. It feels safe to assume that God put them there.
Well let me break it down for you. I’m proposing that time isn’t something that exists and needed no creating. Time is no substance, no ‘thing’ of any kind. All time is is a way of marking before, after and duration for beings with powers of perception and cognition who have extension through time. For those with the conceptual bandwidth to recognize our mortality, time takes on special importance.
I had a rude awakening recently with the Big Bang. I made the mistake of thinking cosmologists were talking about the universe expanding from a single point like a firecracker exploding, rather it’s claimed there is no center and the beginning occurred everywhere in the Universe… so taking this reasoning to its natural conclusion, the beginning also occurs at all times, including the present
I don’t think that works, using the surface of a balloon analogy again. At t = 0, there is nothing, no time or space or spacetime. Since there is no center of the surface, any observer anywhere always has the perspective of being central. But that is not where time is measured from – time is measured from when inflation began and the volume was zero. (Those better versed in physics and cosmology than I please chime in! Oops, or not, since this is off-topic now it’s back on topic – thanks, @Christy, not that I have anything more to say. ; - )
The only Being to whom sequential time does not exist is our omnitemporal God.
Thanks, Mark. I hear your proposal but sense that having “existence as material” and “having material existence” are a redundancy for you.
We experience time; to me that confers existence on it as both measurable and influential. We track time all the way back to a point of singularity 13.78 billion years ago.
There is no way of “marking before” when it comes to the moment of singularity we consider the beginning of this universe, and of time itself. “Before” is meaningless with regard to that moment.
Yes we have the bandwidth to recognize our mortality; all well and good. But the idea of a universe constantly and eternally preexisting makes even less sense than time having a starting point a finite distance in the past.
This model (“there is no center”) provides not just a match to observations, but predictions about what we expect to see. We expect to see (and do) objects at different stages of evolution as we peer into the distance (and hence the past).
