Topics Time

Question What was before the beginning of time? Or perhaps I am asking the wrong question because "before" is a measurement of time, and what I want to know is what was there when there was no time. So I should be asking: What is time? Right?

Accepted:
October 16, 2005

Comments

Can't do much better here than to quote from St. Augustine:

My answer to those who ask 'What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?' is not 'He was preparing Hell for people who pry into mysteries.' This frivolous retort has been made before now, so we are told in order to evade the point of the question. But it is one thing to make fun of the questioner and another to find the answer.* So I shall refrain from giving this reply. For in matters of which I am ignorant I would rather admit the fact than gain credit by giving the wrong answer and making a laughing-stock of a man who asks a serious question.

... A fickle-minded man, whose thoughts were all astray because of his conception of time past, might wonder why you, who are God almighty, Creator of all, Sustainer of all, and Maker of heaven and earth, should have been idle and allowed countless ages to elapse before you finally undertook the vast work of creation. My advice to such people is to shake off their dreams and think carefully, because their wonder is based on a misconception.

How could those countless ages have elapsed when you, the Creator, in whom all ages have their origin, had not yet created them? What time could there have been that was not created by you? How could time elapse if it never was?

You are the Maker of all time. If, then, there was any time before you made heaven and earth, how can anyone say that you were idle? You must have made that time, for time could not elapse before you made it.

But if there was no time before heaven and earth were created, how can anyone ask what you were doing 'then'? If there was no time, there was no 'then'.

(Sections 12, 13, Book XI of The Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.)

So, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there was no then then.

I have always been struck by two things here: (1) how, if you were to substitute "Big Bang" for "God" in the above, what you'd get would not be far from what a contemporary physicist would tell you; and (2) that there's something in the very situation Augustine is trying to describe that makes it impossible for him to describe it (there was no time before [!?] God brought heaven and earth into being).

___________________

*In this connection, the reader might also look at Question 227.

Question What was before the beginning of time? Or perhaps I am asking the wrong question because "before" is a measurement of time, and what I want to know is what was there when there was no time. So I should be asking: What is time? Right? Accepted:October 16, 2005

Question What was before the beginning of time? Or perhaps I am asking the wrong question because "before" is a measurement of time, and what I want to know is what was there when there was no time. So I should be asking: What is time? Right?

Accepted:
October 16, 2005