"Did the world have a beginning?" he asked.”I replied,"The 'world' here refers to the universe. Modern astronomy and cosmos have proved that our Earth, the solar system to which the Earth belongs, and the Milky Way to which the solar system belongs all have a beginning and an end. However, the Milky Way was only a very small part of the universe. Did the entire universe have a beginning?
It seemed inconceivable that there was no beginning. The life of each of us, the entire human race, and everything in the world has a beginning. How can the world itself not have a beginning? The absence of a beginning meant that the world had already traveled an infinite distance before reaching its current state, and the infinite distance was also an endless distance. How could the world finish this endless distance?
Therefore, out of common sense, early philosophers often liked to find a beginning for the world. For example, Heraclitus believed that the beginning of the world was fire, and that fire formed everything in the world as it cooled. But we can immediately ask: Where did the fire come from? There were only two possible answers. One answer was that the fire did not originally exist, but one day it suddenly appeared out of thin air and burned, and thus there was a world. Creating something out of nothing was obviously absurd, and to avoid this absurdity, a creator had to be set up, which was what the Christian religion later did. Heraclitus used another answer: This fire existed eternally, and it would extinguish and burn according to a certain cycle, thus forming all things and causing all things to return to fire. Obviously, this answer meant that the world did not have a beginning. It was an eternal cycle.
The most insistent advocate of a beginning for the world was the Christian religion. According to the Christian belief, the world and everything in it was created by God in six days. Someone asked: What did God do before he created the world? Augustine, a theologian from the 5th century, replied," Time was a property of the world created by God. It did not exist before the world was created. This answer only cleverly avoided the question, but it did not answer the question. What it meant was that there was no time before God created the world, so there was nothing that could only happen in time. Therefore, you could not ask what happened before God created the world. However, the so-called " world " should be all-encompassing, including all existences. If there was a God, then God was included. Therefore, since God existed before creation, creation cannot be considered the beginning of the world. We have to ask: Where did God come from? Did it have a beginning? In fact, the true meaning of God's creation was that the world that we could understand must have a beginning. Before this beginning was an eternity that we could not understand. We should not ask anymore.
God was a name that symbolized this mysterious eternity.
Generally speaking, scientists and philosophers with a scientific spirit tended to believe that the world had no beginning. However, this situation seemed to have changed recently. Modern Cosmologists have proposed a shocking hypothesis about the beginning of the universe. According to this hypothesis, a "Big Bang" that occurred about 15 billion years ago was the beginning of the universe. However, readers who are interested in this hypothesis might as well read the most authoritative contemporary Cosmologist Hawking's A Short History of Time. He clearly tells us in this book that the Big Bang is the beginning of the universe simply because the Big Bang completely wiped out all traces of events that might have happened before it, making them forever lose any observable effect on us. Therefore, strictly speaking, even if there was a Big Bang, it was not the beginning of the universe, but only the beginning of the history of the universe that we might observe.
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