Atheists, do you accept that time had a beginning?

Question

Because if infinity is behind us it is mathematically impossible to ever get to this point in time. Might sound silly at first but the math on that is actually very simple and the math doesn’t lie. Time must have a beginning point.

Think about it before you answer. Go ahead, draw your symbolic timeline backwards to infinity and do the addition to get to today.

Kjelstad - Us theists believe God created time and space and therefore His existence does not depend on time. Therefore time having a beginning point is no problem for us.

garwy - Count forward at any given point with any given fractional increment and you will arrive a three. If you start at minus infinity please explain how that does not make my point.

Dashes - "How does God think or act if god exists apart from time; not to mention if he existed 'before' time?"

You are placing God in the same bottle He placed us in. In theology we describe God as the uncaused cause. God is not a product of time and space, we are.

Sara B - I read that article in it’s entirety. If anything these problems support my view. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

If there is no time then we have similar problems with space. So these questions lead to another questions .. are we even really here? What is here? And so forth. This crosses into the real of metaphysics.

Dashes you said “…for time literally was at a stand-still "before" this point.”

From a naturalistic perspective how did anything ever start if there was no time to move things to a starting point? That’s similar to saying 0+0=1

Answer 1

You can tell yourself that there was no time before a certain point, but you can't imagine such a thing, a beginning point of time. Because prior to that point would be "no time", and you cannot imagine "no time".

Infinity as a concept is paradoxical. Math says that space is infinite, but if that is the case, it is mathematically impossible to ever get to this point in space. Yet here we are. The same with time.

Existence is paradoxical. God is paradoxical. That is the great mystery. People who try to make everything logically understandable make themselves look foolish.

Answer 2

Saying time had a "beginning" is a misnomer. It is far more accurate to say that at some point in the past (roughly 13.7 billion years ago) time "began to progress".


"Us theists believe God created time and space and therefore His existence does not depend on time."
How does God think or act if god exists apart from time; not to mention if he existed 'before' time?

"Therefore time having a beginning point is no problem for us."
It's no problem for us either, actually. Our beef with the believers is their having this need to add an unneeded element to a cosmological argument! If God can exist 'forever' without having to be created Himself, why not skip a step and apply this lack of need to be created to the mass-energy that comprises the universe? Occam's Razor favors this argument over that of the preexistence of a deity.


Addendum1:
"time began to progress"
What I mean by this is our best, sturdiest, most supported theories takes us all the way back to a fraction of a second after the big bang; the Plank Time. To speak of something taking place "before" this instant is where you jump into the realm of uncertainty; for time literally was at a stand-still "before" this point.

Addendum2:
In a deistic sense, your argument for god /does/ hold some water (albeit as well as a colander). To say it lends any weight to a "theistic" god (as in the big-three monotheisms) is non-sequitur speculation if left at that.

Answer 3

The be conscious atheist potential somebody who would not have self belief in any God. for this reason we've not got a "creation tale" so we often settle for the reasons for issues like the beginning of the universe presented through technology. some atheists do not settle for the massive Bang concept. in certainty the reason that it is noted as the massive Bang concept substitute into that when it substitute into first proposed (through a Catholic Priest named Georges Le Maitre) an extremely commonplace atheist named Sir Fred Hoyle used that factor era to ridicule the assumption interior the media, and the call caught. It substitute into initially noted as "a hypothesis of the primeval atom". the massive Bang concept because it is now noted as would not easily state what you declare although, so it could seem which you're making a pretend assumption. The atheists who now settle for the assumption are properly conscious that each physique ability and count have been initially condensed right into a single pinpoint singularity and that the "bang" substitute into easily in basic terms the enlargement of area and time which proceeded as a state substitute. The ability did not start up from not something yet extremely from that single infinitely dense and energetic singularity.

Answer 4

Have you ever heard the problem of Achilles trying to catch the tortise. That is what you are trying here.

Achiles can run 10 times faster than the tortoise so he gives the tortoise a 100m start.
When Achilles has run 100m the tortoise is 10m ahead.When Achilles runs a further 10m then the tortoise is still 1m ahead. When Achilles runs that 1m the tortoise is still 10cm ahead and so on ad infinitum and thus to infinity. Achilles can never catch the tortoise. That is a problem of false reasoning.

Time as we know it began with the big bang. Time only really begins with anobserver capable of measuring time.

Answer 5

Time did, indeed, have a beginning. It is when all the matter of the universe could no longer be contained in an infintely small, infinitely hot and dense point, and exploded in what elementary school textbooks (cutely) refer to as "the Big Bang".

And this proves the existence of invisible spirit gods...how???

Answer 6

Infinity has no beginning. Neither ending.

Everywhere on the infinity line is the center of the infinity.

Your way of proving God is backward reasoning.

Why not let universes has no beginning and no end like your God, then we will have the peace.

Answer 7

The human mind cannot contemplate infinite nor finite without precedent. If time has a beginning, what existed before time? If there was something before time, when did it start and what was before it? If time is infinite, how can there be a flow to it for us to be when we are now? These questions are literally unanswerable.
BTW: this issue has absolutely nothing to do with religion or atheism.

Answer 8

Don't get me started on that. You theists don't have any concept of math or science. You don't know what you are talking about.

Also, no matter what you say, invoking the existence of a God doesn't solve any problems. Where did God come from?

Answer 9

Sure, I will give you that time has a beginning, but will never, ever believe that it was some guy sitting around, snapping his fingers and "creating" all existince.

I like to watch the family guy, and like the explanation of how the universe was created, its a great show.

Answer 10

Then Islam must be vindicated thrice over just from the level of mocking coming from the US??

Add to that the atheist mocking of it (including mine)...

and you can quickly see how religions will try and claim validation via mocking.

It's a basic psychology. The thief is afraid of being robbed....