None of these question I can answers. Can you? If you don't it is okay with me, I can live with that because I don't feel the need to make up an answer to things I do not know the answer to!
Einstein had a lot to say about time. It is interesting because of the railroad. They needed to improve their concept of time to keep up with the demands of running a railroad on time. For me time is decay. Esp I have spent 50 years of my life doing remodeling and construction work. As buildings get older they decay. So I look at time more from this perspective because that is what I have to deal with. Yet I have been in homes that are very old and in very good almost mint condition.
Anyway, the problem we deal with here is not only the origin of the universe but that of our language as well. To talk about a "being" or "before" any time did exist is meaningless unless we define what we mean with a beginning. In physics the "beginning" of the universe is defined as when time emerged in the universe. Let me illustrate this with this picture:
I have some different theories I am looking into, but your not interested in religion so there is no reason to go into any of that. The talk about cause and effect and God is the Divine Cause for the Universe we live in. The universe could go through cycles of expanding and shrinking. They talk about the entire universe being the size of a mustard seed or even smaller. Most of what we think we see is an illusion. There is very little matter and most everything is energy.
That time point was aprox 13.6 billion years ago.
This number comes from the Hubble and there is really no way to verify it. Still 14 is a significant number. The age we live in could very well be 13.6 thousand years old. That would be the last big extinction when the saber tooth tigers, giant sloths and wholly mammoths died off. If you study the ice cores there is a peak at around 13.6 thousand years ago.
At this point our understanding is limited and there is a lot of truth and error mixed together. There is a women by the name of Kat Kerr that has a lot of video on youtube. She talks about Heaven as a place where our understanding will increase. There will be Universities and different places to go where we will have the opportunity to study and learn without having to sort out the truth and error that you feel compelled to do here on this planet in this world. Theist and atheists seem compelled to have to sort all of this out depending on their perspective. The question is WHY? because we all have the same natural evidence to work with. It seems like the people that work the hardest to gather evidence seem to know very little about the evidence that they are gathering. That is why they say it is a grievous task because they do not have the reward of understanding. Darwin tried to explain his observations but he pretty much failed in his attempt.
I am justified to claim it did not had a beginning in the sense you ask.
Science is dispensational. They have ages or eras or whatever you want to call them with a beginning and a end. These time scales become a map that we would be lost without. Evolution requires a beginning and a end. Both evolution and the Bible talks about how the earth is repopulated with a remnant of what was here in the previous age or era. Like we talked about the dinosaurs and the mammals that were alive at the same time as the dinosaurs. Those mammals later evolved when the climate changed and the conditions became more favorable for them. Then something happened around 6,000 years ago that science has put a lot of effort into understanding. We have the beginning of civilization when there was a transition from a hunter gather to a food producer. This is a transition that took place over a 6,000 year period of time. That is why we say that a thousand years represents a day in the Book of Genesis.
That is why I said your question is malformed. And I needed to use a lots of words, even a picture, to explain why I can answer your "simple" question that way.
You need to define your words. That is why I say there are two dictionaries the one God uses and the one that man uses. For example the world evolution was around long before Darwin came along and decided to give it a new definition. "In classical Latin, though,
evolutio had first denoted the unrolling of a scroll, and by the early 17th century, the English word
evolution was often applied to ‘the process of unrolling, opening out, or revealing’. " The unrolling of a scroll is clearly different then the product of mutation, errors and mistakes. One is random and the other is predetermined at least by the constraints of the natural laws if nothing else.
The point I try to make here (which is the very same point I made previously) is that you are still trying to simplifies reality to fit into your simplified view of what reality "must" be according to yourself.
Actually my objective is to try to figure it out. I would assume you are trying to do the same thing. We either build and create or tear down and destroy. Just like there are those who produce and those who plunder. There was a lot of death and destruction during WW2 and there were people that saw enough destruction. That is why they wanted to build a new world. They use to say don't get in the way of progress. Lead follow or get out of the way. That is the attitude the people had that were here to rebuild and salvage what was not destroyed during the war.
You seams to think the universe must obey some rules of what you have decided make sense to you - but you are wrong because the universe does not need to follow your logic, or any logic at all for that matter.
In church we are taught about the mind of Christ and the Divine thoughts of God. Logic is different than Logo although they are both from the Greek language.
The universe is not obligated, in any way, to have to make sense to us.
Wisdom, knowledge and understanding is a part of the universe. God gives us the ability to be able to understand His Creation. Even we are able to create ourselves to some degree.
I never felt I needed religion for anything.
I do not want to trip over the meaning of the word religion. But I felt a lot of need. I needed solutions and answers and it was in the Bible that I found the solution and the answers that I was looking for. I had issues to deal with and science had no solution. As a child I felt that whenever I reached out to science I would get my arm cut off. So you may not feel any need for what religion has to offer but I do. I am confident that God has the answer for every question and the solution for every problem then we will ever have in life.
You may feel that way, and that is fine with me. So if religion make you feel more complete, yea sure go for it. But frankly, I believe the "need" for religion is a taught thing - you are told you need religion by you culture.
I was not taught anything. I had to learn it all on my own. The school system does not teach religion, my parents did not teach us any religion. It was up to us to decide if we wanted to learn it on our own. If anything I was raised to be a secular humanist with a little bit of Stoic thrown in for good measure.
We don't need religion inherently. In fact we are probably better of without religion.
I hear people say they do not have religion they have a relationship with the God that created them. There are people that believe that religion is a creation of man. It all depends on how you define the word and what dictionary you use. If you have the mind of Christ and the Divine thoughts of God then you use God's dictionary to define the words and not man's dictionary.
However, I realize that some people for some reason or the other want to believe.
I think they want to be a part of the family and so they have to go along with and abide by the status quo. Although I am a fundamental dispensationalist. But people tend to argue among themselves as to what that means. I tend to avoid that because God works on us as individuals before He joins us together with others. Just like construction work where the parts are produced in a factory and then they are assembled into a building according to a plan.
It only become a problem when religion manifest itself like it does in you - when you try press your opinion onto other as "truths". I then reserve my right to wholeheartedly disagree with you.
Here we are on "Easter" sunday. At the trial of Jesus Pilate asked: "What is truth?". Jesus came to testify to the truth. We are to follow the example of Jesus.[/quote]
