Does God exist?

[Melissa]

That's a strong part of the reason behind the Separation of Church and State.

It appears you need to learn of the origin of that phrase.

[AvatarofTruth]

That's a strong part of the reason behind the Separation of Church and State.

It appears you need to learn of the origin of that phrase.

Yep. It's official.

[mara101]

That's a strong part of the reason behind the Separation of Church and State.

It appears you need to learn of the origin of that phrase.

let remember the new tenant of neo-conservatism "rewriting history one lie at a time".

[FeralChild]

I went to a Christian school for grades 5-8. After lunch we'd have ~40 minutes of bible study.
Anyway, I'm an Atheist. I just don't believe there is a god out there. Even if I wanted to believe, I'd just be lying to myself about the existence of a higher power.

[Melissa]

Yep. It's official.

Do you even know the source of this phrase WITHOUT looking it up?  Where did the phrase originate?  What was the entire sentence?

And, can you explain why there were fears by Christians of that time who opposed any such language even being placed in the First Amendment?  Can you explain how their fears have come to fruition?

[Poppet]

"Does God Exist?"...

No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no, No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,No, no, nooo, nope, niet, non, nein, no,

*sighs* - get with the program people - it's about reality, not superstition

xxx
Pop

[watcher1]

Hmmm...Watcher thinks Pop does not believe in the existence of God.  Hard to tell, though.  Wish she would be a tad more specific....    

[Poppet]

so there we have it - Watcher can see through the fog of subtlety and metaphor..

*grins*
P

[Lois]

That's a strong part of the reason behind the Separation of Church and State.

It appears you need to learn of the origin of that phrase.

*sigh*

Another right wing stooge that seems to think that the origin of this phrase makes it an invalid interpretation of the First Amendment.  On the contrary - these words came from Jefferson himself, interpreting the First Amendment for idiots that could not figure out the meaning for themselves.

"Believing... that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281

Read this before pretending you know anything about Jefferson:
http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

In spite of right-wing Christian attempts to rewrite history to make Jefferson into a Christian, little about his philosophy resembles that of Christianity. Although Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence wrote of the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, there exists nothing in the Declaration about Christianity.

I would also suggest that Melissa read the Federalist Papers, but I suspect she would just skip over the parts that contradicted the beliefs of her tiny narrow mind.

[johnstalone]

i just like to say im a atheist but i would like to throw this out there i believe we are all in breds because i think we mated with the neandathals and we never went to war so to speak what u all think

[Lois]

I bet Melissa believes this crap too.

Limbaugh: Volcanic eruption in Iceland is God’s reaction to health care’s passage.

Yesterday, hate radio host Rush Limbaugh talked about the volcanic eruption that’s affecting air travel over much of Europe, saying it was “God speaking” in response to the passage of health care:

You know, a couple of days after the health care bill had been signed into law Obama ran around all over the country saying, “Hey, you know, I’m looking around. The earth hadn’t opened up. There’s no Armageddon out there. The birds are still chirping.” I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied. This volcano in Iceland has grounded more airplanes — airspace has more affected — than even after 9/11 because of this plume, because of this ash cloud over Northern and Western Europe. At the Paris airport they’re telling people to head to the train station to catch trains out of France, and when people get to the train station they’re telling people, “There aren’t any seats until at least April 22nd,” basically a week from now. It’s got everybody in a shutdown. Earth has opened up. I don’t know whether it’s a rebirth or Armageddon. Hopefully it’s a rebirth, God speaking.

Last month, Rep. Steve King and Fox News host Glenn Beck were similarly invoking armageddon-style language, saying that a “vote on the Sabbath” was an “affront to God.”

[AvatarofTruth]

Jesus H Christ what is this guy high on now?

Yeah, I find it ironic that someone frequenting a sex forum aligns themselves with these retards and hate mongers. What do you tell your GOP buddies that you do in your spare time? "Oh I read rape and bestiality porn, what do you do?"

[Lois]

I was watching a Discovery Chanel program on the 10 commandments.  It seems that there were more than 10, and even the ones referred to as the "10" had varying translations.

The third commandment reads (or the 2nd if you are Lutheran or Catholic):  "Thou shalt not take The Name of The Lord thy God in vain."  So what does this mean?

Most Christians interpret this to mean that you should not use the word "God" while swearing, such as in "God damn it".

But what it really means is that using God's name, as in knowing his mind or intent, is a form of vanity.  That is what makes it blasphemy.  So saying "God Bless America" is the same blasphemy as saying "God Damn It".  Accordingly, Rush Limbaugh or anyone else that claims that God is punishing anybody for any reason, is equally blasphemous because they presume to know God's mind and intent. (Not to mention that after God sent the flood to punish mankind for wickedness, he said he would never do such a thing again - so doubting the word of God is also evident.)

I don't believe this crap mind you, but it does show what hypocrites they are because THEY supposedly do believe it.

[Melissa]

If you ever listened to Limbaugh, you would have heard him explain his use of language.   This would be "illustrating absurdity by being absurd."

You say Limbaugh was making absurd statements.  Was it less so for Obama to run around stating the health care bill must be good because there is no earth-shattering event taking place?

[AvatarofTruth]

If you ever listened to Limbaugh, you would have heard him explain his use of language. This would be "illustrating absurdity by being absurd."

So, according to Mel,

Limbaugh is SATIRE

That is so good to know. Someone should let Colbert know that his job is taken.

[Melissa]

You'll find that with many talk show hosts.  On both sides.

[buddyChrist]

I like how a correlation has been made from one of the commandments (not taking the Lord's name in vain) and what Jefferson stood for. It seems to me that the commandment essentially says to keep your faith to yourself. Well, not strictly so, but do not force it upon others. God will, or God is damning you because you flicked a booger. Things like that. Sure, spread the word, but if others refuse to believe, so be it. That is between them and God. Sounds a lot like what Jefferson was saying, but limiting to the government. The government will not make you believe in anything, that is between a person and God.
Maybe this was obvious to others, but I need caffeine.

[Grm]

Heaven: A fool's paradise

Why do the majority of Britons still believe in life after death? Heaven isn't a wonderful place filled with light – it is a pernicious construct with a short and bloody history, writes Johann Hari

Wednesday, 21 April 2010


John Lennon urged us: "Imagine there's no heaven/It's easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky." Yet the religious aren't turning to Lennonism any faster than Leninism. Today, according to a new book by Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion correspondent, 81 per cent of Americans and 51 per cent of Brits say they believe in heaven – an increase of 10 per cent since a decade ago. Of those, 71 per cent say it is "an actual place". Indeed, 43 per cent believe their pets – cats, rats, and snakes – are headed into the hereafter with them to be stroked for eternity. So why can't humans get over the Pearly Gates?

In reality, the heaven you think you're headed to – a reunion with your relatives in the light – is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across history would find it unrecognisable. Miller's book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, teases out the strange history of heaven – and shows it's not what you think.

Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I'll show you what's lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Koran lived in thirst – so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where "the first would be last, and the last would be first" – so they would be the free men dominating white slaves. Today's Islamist suicide-bombers live in a society starved of sex, so their heaven is a 72-virgin gang-bang. Emily Dickinson wrote: " 'Heaven' – is what I cannot Reach!/The Apple on the Tree/Provided it do hopeless – hang/That – 'Heaven' is – to Me!"
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We know precisely when this story of projecting our lack into the sky began: 165BC, patented by the ancient Jews. Until then, heaven – shamayim – was the home of God and his angels. Occasionally God descended from it to give orders and indulge in a little light smiting, but there was a strict no-dead-people door policy. Humans didn't get in, and they didn't expect to. The best you could hope for was for your bones to be buried with your people in a shared tomb and for your story to carry on through your descendants. It was a realistic, humanistic approach to death. You go, but your people live on.

So how did the idea of heaven – as a perfect place where God lives and where you end up if you live right – rupture this reality? The different components had been floating around "in the atmosphere of Jerusalem, looking for a home", as Miller puts it, for a while. The Greeks believed there was an eternal soul that ascended when you die. The Zoroastrians believed you would be judged in the end-time for your actions on earth. The Jews believed in an almighty Yahweh.

But it took a big bloody bang to fuse them. In the run up to heaven's invention, the Jews were engaged in a long civil war over whether to open up to the Greeks and their commerce or to remain sealed away, insular and pure. With no winner in sight, King Antiochus got fed up. He invaded and tried to wipe out the Jewish religion entirely, replacing it with worship of Zeus. The Jews saw all that was most sacred to them shattered: they were ordered to sacrifice swine before a statue of Zeus that now dominated their Temple. The Jews who refused were hacked down in the streets.

Many young men fled into the hills of Palestine to stage a guerrilla assault – now remembered as the Hanukkah story. The old Jewish tale about how you continue after you die was itself dying: your bones couldn't be gathered by your ancestors anymore with so many Jews scattered and on the run. So suddenly death took on a new terror. Was this it? Were all these lives ending forever, for nothing? One of the young fighters – known to history only as Daniel – announced that the martyred Jews would receive a great reward. "Many of those who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt," he wrote and launched us on the road to the best-selling 1990s trash 90 Minutes in Heaven. Daniel's idea was wildly successful. Within a century, most Jews believed in heaven, and the idea has never died.

But while the key components of heaven were in place, it was not the kumbaya holiday camp it has become today. It was a place where you and God and the angels sat – but Jesus warned "there is no marriage in heaven". You didn't join your relatives. It was you and God and eternal prayer. It was paradise, but not as we know it.

Even some atheists regard heaven as one of the least-harmful religious ideas: a soothing blanket to press onto the brow of the bereaved. But its primary function for centuries was as a tool of control and intimidation. The Vatican, for example, declared it had a monopoly on St Peter's VIP list – and only those who obeyed their every command and paid them vast sums for Get-Out-of-Hell-Free cards would get them and their children onto it. The afterlife was a means of tyrannising people in this life. This use of heaven as a bludgeon long outlasted the Protestant Reformation. Miller points out that in Puritan New England, heaven was not primarily a comfort but rather "a way to impose discipline in this life."

It continues. Look at Margaret Toscano, a sixth-generation Mormon who was a fanatical follower of Joseph Smith in her youth. Then she studied feminism at university. She came back to her community and argued that women ought to be allowed to become priests. The Mormon authorities – the people who denied black people had souls until 1976 – ordered her to recant, and said if she didn't, she wouldn't go to heaven with the rest of her family. She refused. Now her devastated sisters believe they won't see her in the afterlife.

Worse still, the promise of heaven is used as an incentive for people to commit atrocities. I have seen this in practice: I've interviewed wannabe suicide bombers from London to Gaza to Syria, and they all launched into reveries about the orgy they will embark on in the clouds. Similarly, I was once sent – as my own personal purgatory – undercover on the Christian Coalition Solidarity tour of Israel. As we stood at Megido, the site described in the Book of Revelation as the launchpad for the apocalypse, they bragged that hundreds of thousands of Arabs would soon be slaughtered there while George Bush and his friends are raptured to heaven as a reward for leading the Arabs to their deaths. Heaven can be an inducement to horror.

Yet there is an unthinking "respect" automatically accorded to religious ideas that throttles our ability to think clearly about these questions. Miller's book – after being a useful exposition of these ideas – swiftly turns itself into a depressing illustration of this. She describes herself as a "professional sceptic", but she is, in fact, professionally credulous. Instead of trying to tease out what these fantasies of an afterlife reveal about her interviewees, she quizzes everyone about their heaven as if she is planning to write a Lonely Planet guide to the area, demanding more and more intricate details. She only just stops short of demanding to know what the carpeting will be like. But she never asks the most basic questions: where's your evidence? Where are you getting these ideas from? These questions are considered obvious when we are asking about any set of ideas, except when it comes to religion, when they are considered to be a slap in the face.

Of course there's plenty of proof that the idea of heaven can be comforting, or beautiful – but that doesn't make it true. The difference between wishful thinking and fact-seeking is something most six-year-olds can grasp, yet Miller – and, it seems, the heaven-believing majority – refuse it here. Yes, I would like to see my dead friends and relatives again. I also would like there to be world peace, a million dollars in my current account, and for Matt Damon to ask me to marry him. If I took my longing as proof they were going to happen, you'd think I was deranged.

"Rationalist questions are not helpful," announces one of her interviewees – a professor at Harvard, no less. This seems to be Miller's view too. She stresses that to believe in heaven you have to make "a leap of faith" – but in what other field in life do we abandon all need for evidence? Why do it in one so crucial to your whole sense of existence? And if you are going to "leap" beyond proof, why leap to the Christian heaven? Why not convince yourself you are going to live after death in Narnia, or Middle Earth, for which there is as much evidence? She doesn't explain: her arguments dissolve into a feel-good New Age drizzle.

True, Miller does cast a quick eye over the only "evidence" that believers in heaven offer – the testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences. According to the medical journal The Lancet, between 9 per cent and 18 per cent of people who have been near death report entering a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and so on. Dinesh D'Souza, in his preposterous book Life After Death, presents this as "proof" for heaven. But in fact there are clear scientific explanations. As the brain shuts down, it is the peripheral vision that goes first, giving the impression of a tunnel. The centre of your vision is what remains, giving the impression of a bright light. Indeed, as Miller concedes: "Virtually all the features of [a near-death experience] – the sense of moving through a tunnel, an 'out of body' feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories – can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilliser frequently used as a party drug." Is a stoner teenager in a K-hole in contact with God and on a day-trip to heaven? Should the religious be dropping horse dope on Sundays? But Miller soon runs scared from the sceptical implications of this, offering the false balance of finding one very odd scientist who says that these experiences could point beyond life – without any proof at all.

But even if you set aside the absence of even the tiniest thread of evidence, there is a great conceptual hole at the heart of heaven – one that has gnawed at even its fondest believers. After a while, wouldn't it be excruciatingly dull? When you live in the desert, a spring seems like paradise. But when you have had the spring for a thousand years, won't you be sick of it? Heaven is, in George Orwell's words, an attempt to "produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary". Take away the contrast, and heaven becomes hell.

And yet, and yet ... of course I understand why so many people want to believe in heaven, even now, even in the face of all the evidence, and all reason. It is a way – however futilely – of trying to escape the awful emptiness of death. As Philip Larkin put it: "Not to be here/Not to be anywhere/And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true". To die. To rot. To be nothing. We wouldn't be sane if we didn't seek a way to leap off this conveyor-belt heading towards a cliff.

So yes, there is pain in seeing the truth about Heaven – but there is also a liberation in seeing beyond the childhood myths of our species. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Babylon 4,000 years ago, the eponymous hero travels into the gardens of the gods in an attempt to discover the secret of eternal life. His guide tells him the secret – there is no secret. This is it. This is all we're going to get. This life. This time. Once. "Enjoy your life," the goddess Siduri tells him. "Love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace." It's Lennon's dream, four millennia ahead of schedule: above us, only sky. Gilgamesh returns to the world and lives more intensely and truly and deeply than before, knowing there is no celestial after-party and no forever. After all this time, can't we finally follow Gilgamesh to a world beyond heaven?

To follow Johann's Twitter updates, go to www.twitter.com/johannhari101

To watch Johann on the BBC calling for the arrest of the Pope, click here.

[watcher1]

Wow, Grm.  Some heavy stuff.  Been celebrating 420, have you?    A WOO for informing me, and I am sure others, of the "history" of heaven.  Cool.

[AvatarofTruth]

If you accept current science, then you must accept the Big Bang Theory. It was proven a fact by the COBE mission, led by George Smoot. This mission, its data and conclusions about the universe won Dr. Smoot and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in physics. Basically, they measured background microwave radiation in the universe, and found that it correlated to an explosive beginning, and subsequent cooling of our universe.

Many questions remain unanswered, and for metaphysics the most important one is "What caused the Big Bang?" After all, devout persons of faith can still extrapolate that God caused the Big Bang. Pope John Paul believed this. Another important metaphysical question is "What was the universe like before the Big Bang?" One hypothesis in physics is that our universe is the result of the collapse and re-expansion of another universe. Hypotheses about alternate universes also pervades physics and metaphysics alike.

One hypothesis about the universe before the Big Bang essentially states that there was nothing before it, that the Big Bang caused space-time, and before it there was only space and time, but not the two together.

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies:

Well, what did happen before the big bang?
Few schoolchildren have failed to frustrate their parents with questions of this sort. It often starts with puzzlement over whether space "goes on forever," or where humans came from, or how the planet Earth formed. In the end, the line of questioning always seems to get back to the ultimate origin of things: the big bang. "But what caused that?"

Presto

Children grow up with an intuitive sense of cause and effect. Events in the physical world aren't supposed to "just happen." Something makes them happen. Even when the rabbit appears convincingly from the hat, trickery is suspected. So could the entire universe simply pop into existence, magically, for no actual reason at all?

This simple, schoolchild query has exercised the intellects of generations of philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Many have avoided it as an impenetrable mystery. Others have tried to define it away. Most have got themselves into an awful tangle just thinking about it.
The problem, at rock bottom, is this: If nothing happens without a cause, then something must have caused the universe to appear. But then we are faced with the inevitable question of what caused that something. And so on in an infinite regress. Some people simply proclaim that God created the universe, but children always want to know who created God, and that line of questioning gets uncomfortably difficult.

One evasive tactic is to claim that the universe didn't have a beginning, that it has existed for all eternity. Unfortunately, there are many scientific reasons why this obvious idea is unsound. For starters, given an infinite amount of time, anything that can happen will already have happened, for if a physical process is likely to occur with a certain nonzero probability-however small-then given an infinite amount of time the process must occur, with probability one. By now, the universe should have reached some sort of final state in which all possible physical processes have run their course. Furthermore, you don't explain the existence of the universe by asserting that it has always existed. That is rather like saying that nobody wrote the Bible: it was. just copied from earlier versions. Quite apart from all this, there is very good evidence that the universe did come into existence in a big bang, about fifteen billion years ago. The effects of that primeval explosion are clearly detectable today-in the fact that the universe is still expanding, and is filled with an afterglow of radiant heat.

So we are faced with the problem of what happened beforehand to trigger the big bang. Journalists love to taunt scientists with this question when they complain about the money being spent on science. Actually, the answer (in my opinion) was spotted a long time ago, by one Augustine of Hippo, a Christian saint who lived in the fifth century. In those days before science, cosmology was a branch of theology, and the taunt came not from journalists, but from pagans: "What was God doing before he made the universe?" they asked. "Busy creating Hell for the likes of you!" was the standard reply.

But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made "not in time, but simultaneously with time." In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no "before," no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation.

Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or "singularity," at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity.

If the big bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the big bang, or what caused it-in the usual sense of physical causation-is simply meaningless. Unfortunately, many children, and adults, too, regard this answer as disingenuous. There must be more to it than that, they object.

Indeed there is. After all, why should time suddenly "switch on"? What explanation can be given for such a singular event? Until recently, it seemed that any explanation of the initial "singularity" that marked the origin of time would have to lie beyond the scope of science. However, it all depends on what is meant by "explanation." As I remarked, all children have a good idea of the notion of cause and effect, and usually an explanation of an event entails finding something that caused it. It turns out, however, that there are physical events which do not have well-defined causes in the manner of the everyday world. These events belong to a weird branch of scientific inquiry called quantum physics.

Mostly, quantum events occur at the atomic level; we don't experience them in daily life. On the scale of atoms and molecules, the usual commonsense rules of cause and effect are suspended. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos, and things happen spontaneously-for no particular reason. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialize in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. Again, these are real effects occurring on an atomic scale, and they can be demonstrated experimentally.

A typical quantum process is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. If you ask why a given nucleus decayed at one particular moment rather than some other, there is no answer. The event "just happened" at that moment, that's all. You cannot predict these occurrences. All you can do is give the probability-there is a fifty-fifty chance that a given nucleus will decay in, say, one hour. This uncertainty is not simply a result of our ignorance of all the little forces and influences that try to make the nucleus decay; it is inherent in nature itself, a basic part of quantum reality.

The lesson of quantum physics is this: Something that "just happens" need not actually violate the laws of physics. The abrupt and uncaused appearance of something can occur within the scope of scientific law, once quantum laws have been taken into account. Nature apparently has the capacity for genuine spontaneity.
It is, of course, a big step from the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of a subatomic particle-something that is routinely observed in particle accelerators-to the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of the universe. But the loophole is there. If, as astronomers believe, the primeval universe was compressed to a very small size, then quantum effects must have once been important on a cosmic scale. Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific. In short, it need not have been a supernatural event.

Inevitably, scientists will not be content to leave it at that. We would like to flesh out the details of this profound concept. There is even a subject devoted to it, called quantum cosmology. Two famous quantum cosmologists, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, came up with a clever idea that goes back to Einstein. Einstein not only found that space and time are part of the physical universe; he also found that they are linked in a very intimate way. In fact, space on its own and time on its own are no longer properly valid concepts. Instead, we must deal with a unified "space-time" continuum. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is a four-dimensional continuum.

In spite of the space-time linkage, however, space is space and time is time under almost all circumstances. Whatever space-time distortions gravitation may produce, they never turn space into time or time into space. An exception arises, though, when quantum effects are taken into account. That all-important intrinsic uncertainty that afflicts quantum systems can be applied to space-time, too. In this case, the uncertainty can, under special circumstances, affect the identities of space and time. For a very, very brief duration, it is possible for time and space to merge in identity, for time to become, so to speak, spacelike-just another dimension of space.

The spatialization of time is not something abrupt; it is a continuous process. Viewed in reverse as the temporalization of (one dimension of) space, it implies that time can emerge out of space in a continuous process. (By continuous, I mean that the timelike quality of a dimension, as opposed to its spacelike quality, is not an all-or-nothing affair; there are shades in between. This vague statement can be made quite precise mathematically.)

The essence of the Hartle-Hawking idea is that the big bang was not the abrupt switching on of time at some singular first moment, but the emergence of time from space in an ultrarapid but nevertheless continuous manner. On a human time scale, the big bang was very much a sudden, explosive origin of space, time, and matter. But look very, very closely at that first tiny fraction of a second and you find that there was no precise and sudden beginning at all. So here we have a theory of the origin of the universe that seems to say two contradictory things: First, time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time. Such are the oddities of quantum physics.

Even with these further details thrown in, many people feel cheated. They want to ask why these weird things happened, why there is a universe, and why this universe. Perhaps science cannot answer such questions. Science is good at telling us how, but not so good on the why. Maybe there isn't a why. To wonder why is very human, but perhaps there is no answer in human terms to such deep questions of existence. Or perhaps there is, but we are looking at the problem in the wrong way.

Well, I didn't promise to provide the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but I have at least given a plausible answer to the question I started out with: What happened before the big bang?
The answer is: Nothing.