Was There Nothing Before the Universe?

It is often thought, often subconsciously, that if our universe began to exist at the Big Bang then reality hasn’t always existed. Before the Big Bang, before our universe existed, there must have been nothing. Some theists claim that to be an atheist one has to believe that once there was nothing and then our entire universe sprang into existence out of this nothingness. This makes it seem like atheists have a hard time of explaining how something can come from nothing, but is this picture really accurate?

In this video I argue that this characterisation is incoherent. There could never have been a time at which nothing existed. If there was never a time at which nothing existed, then it’s not the case that “once there was nothing, and then there was something”. Atheists are not forced to explain how something can come from nothing, because nothing never existed.

This leads to the strange, but accurate realisation that even if the universe has only a finite age, it has existed for all time. There was never a time at which the universe has not existed, so it has always existed!

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