Then creationists have little to no evidence for a god.
If time did not exist before the Big Bang then no god could exist prier to The Big Bang. Yet they still claim that a God created the universe.
We don’t know what happened, but we are pretty sure a god did not cause the Big Bang.
The creationist position is that God exists outside of time and is not subject to it or the other laws of the universe. Therefor your argument would not sway them. To be noted here is that you are preaching to the choir, but to say that God could not have existed if time did not exist will not be an affective argument against a creationist. A better one, IMO, is that if God could exist before time, if He could be something before there was anything, then why does that same argument not convince them of the possibility that a singularity could have existed before time and before there was anything. A singularity outside of space and time resulting in the Big Bang that ultimately caused our expanding universe. Why can their god exist without being created, but everything else MUST have a creator?
FievelJAtheist
You just make a horrible anti-theist. You need to stop making assertions. “The Christian God exists beyond time and space.” Now what? Mr. smarty pants?
You do not understand apologetics enough to begin making assertions.
Learn to ask questions. "Can you demonstrate there is a “before the Big Bang?” "If there is no space, what is this beyond space thing you are speaking of? God exists in a space without space? Isn’t “to exist” to have “space?” What are you talking about?
Time is the measurement of the action of an object from point A to point be. It would be the measurement of the blink of an eye or the origin of a thought. Can you explain how this God thing can have an idea while exiting without time?
What do we call a thing that exists for no time and in no space?
Finally, “What makes you think the universe itself had a beginning?” If it had a beginning, “How did you rule out completely natural causes.”
LEARN TO ASK QUESTIONS.
Absolutely right. Ask them seemingly innocent questions that cause them to stumble over the contradictions in their own answers. “If god is timeless and changeless, why did he create the universe? What changed to make him do that?”
Lead them by the nose in ever decreasing circles till their heads get stuck up their own fundaments.
This is not going to make the theists happy at all.
But then Lemaitre did warn his pope not to declare the big bang as the creation because he knew his research was just a mathematical model of possible physical events and he didn’t want his faith tethered to a calculated hypothesis that might yet prove to be wrong.
And then Penrose starts up about Hawking Points, actual physical places in the universe that point to a bizarre relationship between black holes and past and future universes…I haven’t got my head around this at all, I’m still struggling with the wave/particle duality of light…so here…read this…then have a lie down…Sir Roger Penrose.
(the article was reposted 6/10/20 from five years ago, still relevant I assume, if you haven’t fallen into a wormhole.)
I just think that is so doubtful.
Yes I will place things more in a question as I do have a problem with that.
If It is doubtful… let the theist make the assertion and then simply ask them “How they know?” You don’t know it is doubtful until you hear their response without being engaged in fallacious thinking… (Black Swan Fallacy) Just because every single argument for the existence of god you have listened to your entire life has not been convincing, does not mean the next one will also be unconvincing. Wait for it… wait for it… wait for it… THEN FLING THE POO!!! TIMING IS EVERYTHING!
Fievel, get them coming out of the gate, don’t allow theists to gain traction. As soon as the “god” word is used, request proof of this “god”.
Before we can engage in time, space, and the big bang, first they must prove a god.
I don’t know if Fievel is ready for that… You know the next step is dealing with… “Moral Arguments” “Ontological Arguments” “Argument from Consciousness” “Argument from Design” “Teleological Argument” “Irreducible Complexity” “The fine tuning of physical constants.” “Argument from Personal Experience” “Argument from Miracles” “Argument from the death of the Apostles” “Argument from NDEs” “Argument from answered prayers” “The Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation” “The Argument from Free Will” “The Argument from Altruism” “The Argument from Life Meaning” “The Argument from Global Consensus” “The Argument from Holy books.” “The Argument from perfect justice” “The Argument from the Survival of the Jews” “The Argument from the Impossibility of the Infinite” “Pascal’s Wager” “The Argument from Faith” “Presuppositionalism and the unreasonableness of reason.” “Argument from Look At The Trees” and I probably left a few out.
So I will expand on David’s gem. Insist on “Observable, Empirical evidence, not argumentation.” They will talk your ear off if you let them. The Theist Creed: (If you can not convince an atheist with “Faith and Emotional Appeals” baffle them with bullshit. )
“Time” is to me one of the most misunderstood concepts there is. I put a lot of this blame at the feet of fiction, hollywood, religious teachings etc.
Time is simply the measurement of “activity” compared against it self.
Think about the atomic clock used by NIST in Boulder Colorado. The “most accurate” time keeping device in the world, it is “accurate” simply because it is highly “consistent.” In this case a single aluminum ion trapped in magnetic field that reacts to ultraviolet light. They measure the reaction of the lasers light wave, to count out time in a highly consistent manner, then compare all other “actions” to that.
Like the meter or kilometer is to measuring of distance. Can you go a “negative” kilometer? No of course not.
When people assert “before time and space” what they are really asserting is that there was absolutely “nothing” happening, (no activity,) before the big bang. Since there is no activity to measure, or to compare measurement with, there was no “time.”
Again what they really saying is: there was “nothing.” But most people when they say this confuse this with erroneous understanding of the word “time.”
“Before time” falls under the umbrella of “nothing,” when they say “outside space and time.” All they really are saying if they understood what they are saying, is: there was “nothing.” Just like there was no “kilometer” or any other measurement of distance, because again, distance requires “something” to compare to “something” else.
An impossible, (by definition!) assertion/claim to evidence in any way. (You cannot “evidence nothing” as that would break the commonly held definition of the word “nothing.”
However! claiming some deity existed “before time and space” actually breaks the definition of “before time and space” aka, before “nothing” if there was something before “nothing” then it is something, not nothing. By literal commonly held definitions.
Just another example of a huge contradiction that many religions love to employ, hoping peoples confusion over commonly misunderstood words hide this giant contradiction. Saying their unevidenced “god” idea existed before time and space is simply making up rules that is convenient to the people that say it, but has zero bearing on reality. And sets two different word definitions into a contradictory course where one of them must be false or word definition changed.
A bit like a bunch of 6 year old’s in recess making up random new rules as they go along in a game of tag. It is nonsensical, an alternate reality that is not useful, and quite often damaging to the understanding of actual reality.
This is also why actual “time travel” is impossible. All the fictional, Hollywood, etc depictions of time travel that I have ever seen or heard of is actually not time travel at all.
It is simply the rearranging of all atoms and atomic states and levels of energy and interaction with each other, in the entire universe, to mimic a certain point in the past or future, except for the all the trillions upon trillions of atoms in the object doing the “time travel.” (More like one object remaining unchanged while everything else was forced to change to a new state of action/interaction.)
If somehow humans or some unknown powerful deity like entity was capable of rearranging all the atoms and accompanying interactions to the universe as they see fit, it is still not time travel, it just massive transformation of the universe.
Also: with that kind of power to change the surroundings to the extent of, “time travel” and the concept of time it self would be a silly, useless endeavor.
In a rough comparison that we may be able to understand, it is like earning 100’s of trillions of dollars a second, every second you are alive, and being concerned about giving exact change at the fast food drive through.
There would be no “grandpa paradoxes,” also toss out a bunch of other sci-fi tropes around time travel too, like bad things happening if you run into a “past version of yourself.”
Yeah, time travel into the past seemingly violates just about every symmetry/conservation law that is currently endorsed in the field.
It also seems to contradict many other commonly held assumptions in physics; such as assumptions about even what it means to measure something. When we say that we measured a system to have attribute A, what we really mean is that if you quickly measure it again, there is a 100% chance you will get the same result. Introduce time travel to the past and suddenly you have a huge problem. Between these measurements something could “time travel back” (or whatever) and make changes to the system where it no longer has a 100% chance of agreeing with the first measurement. In short: if time travel to the past is possible; pretty much everything else you’ve been taught is essentially guaranteed to be wrong.
First of all, this nonsense about “space and time didn’t exist before the Big Bang” is not a part of modern thinking in the field of cosmological physics, and only uninformed mythology fanboys think it is. This might have been the case in the field over 50 years ago, but progress has been made since then. However, since mythology fanboys think that the assertions of a Bronze Age mythology dictates how reality behaves, no matter how much reality pisses itself laughing at this pretentious and pompous presumption on their part, it’s not surprising that they never learned anything new.
Indeed, on the old version of the forums, I provided a detailed exposition of two relevant scientific papers from Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, covering a pre-Big-Bang cosmology in which time and space are not only present, but essential pre-requisites for the mechanism presented in their papers. I might reprise that exposition here, now that this new version of the forum permits proper formatting of equations. 
As far as I am aware, this is not the only pre-Big-Bang cosmology presented in the discipline of cosmological physics, it’s merely the one I am most familiar with, and one that possesses three elegant virtues, viz:
[1] It eliminates the singularity problem from standard Big Bang cosmology;
[2] It provides a mechanism for the donation of matter to the newly instantiated universe, to facilitate matter synthesis;
[3] It includes a testable prediction, in the form of the power spectrum of primordial gravitational waves, which is one of the reasons scientists are busy building gravitational wave detectors, so that they can determine if this prediction is correct.
However, one problem with the current forum setup, is that the character limit on posts is woefully short, from the standpoint of providing proper, detailed expositions of scientific papers. I presume the limit was chosen to stop duplicitous mythology fanboys from spamming the boards, but it might be helpful if those with a past record of discoursive honesty were given more largesse in this regard …
My favorite miscalculation is that time is somehow moving forward. That it is somehow a force that changes things. You hear this in all our language. “Time marches on. Time flies. Etc…” Time is not doing a damn thing. It is a mental construct and it is ‘I’ who am moving forward. The clock is moving, the world around me is moving, the mountains are eroding, but time is just this idea I have about how long all things interact in relation to myself or each other. Time is doing nothing. I am moving through this world. Time is not an acting force but it is pretended to be one, in my opinion, to avoid dealing with the fact that we are finite beings in the constant process of ending.
There’s only one problem with throwing poo. I am into some of these fetishes. LOL.
Never mind I will make Time a subject.
Our understanding of Einstein’s space-time cosmos is that time is connected to mass. And after Hubble’s discovery that the universe came from one point, many “concluded” that before the event there was nothing, that this one singularity just poofed into existence. But that is not probably the true situation.
Of course, this is where theists inject the thumb of god, but rationally, we just need to learn what went on before the big bang. Because something was going on. We just do not know yet.
Agreed, I imagine there is an admin menu option to change max post length, but I do not know if there is such an option do so on a user basis.
I have noticed the remnants of user ranks and “achievements” within these boards, but understandably it looks like it is setup to shy away from a “rank” system.
I probably would make extensive use of hyperlinks. I don’t think extensive linkage to a google shared document would be frowned upon here. May be worth asking about.