Did the Universe begin to exist?

Philosophers and scientists have spent thousands of years debating whether the universe has always existed or whether it came into existence. Is every event preceded by another event, back into the past infinitely, with no stopping (or, rather, starting) point — otherwise known as an ‘infinite causal regress’ of events? Did everything emerge, or did everything always exist?

Heavyweight thinkers from the past two and a half millennia have weighed in. Aristotle argued the world must have existed from eternity past, because for Aristotle matter is eternal and uncreated. This was contrary to the Ancient Hebrews and the Islamic tradition, which developed metaphysical worldviews that supported a key proclamation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). For centuries the competing traditions interacted in debate in a somewhat inconclusive manner — until the twentieth century.

Photo by Pixabay at Pexels

To prevent us from delving into a rabbit-hole of definitions, we can broadly say there are two sources to help us answer this question: (i) the scientific and (ii) the philosophical. Both have seen ground-breaking progress in the last century. Even an introductory survey of the main schools of thought in (i) and (ii) would be too great a task for a piece of this size. What follows is a (very) brief introduction to Big Bang cosmology (the scientific), which enables…