It seems many religious apologists are obsessed with the BGV Theorem, seemingly convinced that it provides irrefutable evidence that physical reality has an absolute beginning at the Big Bang. But does the BGV Theorem really show that the universe definitely began to exist?
In this first video I take a look at a video of an interview of the Muslim author and public speaker Hamza Tzortzis. In this video he presents his rendition of the cosmological argument which he believes is irrefutable. Personally, I found it quite simple to refute.
This is why I say that the universe must contain time. The universe is best thought of as a static 4-dimensional shape of which slices are all we can perceive. What really bites is that we all perceive different slices of this 4-dimensional shape, and how would that be possible if the universe were only 3D?
The Second Premise Having discussed the deficiencies of the first premise in my previous article (Part 1) we can now move on to the second premise. The second premise states that "The universe began to exist". Now I have actually written an article before about why it is exactly that it is misleading to say... Continue Reading →
While I can find no fault with the deductive validity of this argument - the conclusion certainly seems to follow from the premises - I'm afraid this is as successful as the argument gets. Not just one, but both of the premises commit logical fallacies which they hide in the vagueness of their formulation.
It is not difficult to find online forums and blog posts that proclaim facts and arguments as if they were certain. People of all philosophical alignments will do this. Theists will proclaim what they believe to be indisputable facts like: "Something must have caused the Big Bang", and atheists are often guilty of prophetically declaring their favourite origin story for the universe: "Quantum fluctuations produced the universe" or "Many-worlds explains fine-tuning".
It is almost certainly the case that time behaved differently at the Big Bang singularity to how it does now, and that it is not possible to define a time "before the Big Bang". Defining a time before the universe would be nonsensical anyway because time is a part of the universe, not external to it.
The Platonic Realm 