The Big Bang. The question of eternity and the beginning of the universe has been approached in different ways. It's a mystery, and as human beings, we like to solve mysteries. Maybe this one cannot be solved.
Eternity seems to be approached in two different ways. 1. As endless time (this seems to be the most common way), and 2. As a timeless now. This second idea does not make any sense verbally because 'now' as a concept implies a 'then' and a 'to be', but this is because the concept leaks beyond our ability to imagine, in thought, what it could be, though there are those (me among them) that would say this is a particular kind of experience, which for use of a better term we could call (as in the TMO) Brahman. People experiencing Brahman (or Buddha nature, for another term to describe it) is an eternal now, even though those people having this experience can remember things we call past (memory of the past), and also have an experience we could call anticipation of the future, a thought that imagines an event that is not happening, but will. Maybe an Alzheimer's patient might be the only person who could experience an eternal now without memory of the past or anticipation of something called 'the future'. We of course could not have a meaningful conversation with such a person about the nature of eternity. Alzheimer's usually is not total destruction of all memory, as these patients can remember words, and often seem to speak fairly normally, but they have a very narrow time window of experience. It is a really fascinating experience to talk with such an individual. Scientists, by the nature of science, investigate the nature of change and the relationships that occur with change, so science is a time-based discipline conceptually, they have to think of eternity as extension in time. With the Big Bang, what comes before is meaningless in this conceptual world, and if there is a Big Crunch, the opposite of the Big Bang, the end of the universe, what happens after is also meaningless. This is because space-time comes into being with the Big Bang, so time does not exist before or after. So this concept does not fully match what most people think of as eternity. So you can be in Brahman consciousness, or be a Buddha, and experience eternity of the one kind, but if you have to make a cup of coffee, there is a sequence of changes you have to experience in order for that to work out properly, and for that you need a time-based conception. The point here is these are conceptual mappings the mind makes to understand particular facets of our experience. The conceptual worlds we use vary depending on how we approach what we want to understand. What we want to understand is what we experience from the deepest recesses of our mind to the ends of space outwardly, but the mappings of our understanding are always adequate only to a particular degree and then they fail, in the same way a topographic map might show you the general terrain but cannot show you that there is a particular tree at a particular location, or even what kind of trees are generally found in a location. Experience always has more to it, more data if you will, than our thoughts can encompass with description and logic and mathematics. And we can imagine things that exist only in our minds but have no analogue in the physical world. As for Buddhists, I once was reading a history book in the MIU library that mentioned that (supposedly) when Buddha died, his followers split into some two dozen different sects. It did not provide a time line for that. For example, the Mormon church has split six times since its origin in the 19th century, so if you want to know what an individual Buddhist thinks, probably you should ask them, one at a time. As for the word 'god', it has many connotations. If you have a time-based conception of eternity, then you have to think of things as having to have a beginning in time. If you have a dualistic sense of the universe, then you also probably will have to think that something had to make it. Scientists on the other hand, with the Big Bang, think that time also began with the Big Bang, that is, nothing came before the Big Bang because that is a meaningless question to ask. It just happened. Nothing made the universe, it just happened. There are other conceptions, such as multiverses, etc., which I am not going to wade into. So which of all these scenarios that have been discussed in this thread are 'true'? Show me.
