Two Questions relate: What was before God (For religious types) and What was before the Big Bang (For Science types).

just….magic! (either way)

Optional answers:
1) The Big Bang was the beginning / There was nothing before the Big Bang
2) God’s creation is a continuous cycle / The universe is created and destroyed by God over and over again, because he’s just that mean.

I remember being told that God always has existed, and was the first anything to ever be (and is supernatural, thus is not restrained by the laws of that which is natural).
also, in b4 “Religious people can believe in science”

Nothing is BEFORE God and nothing is AFTER him, that’s why He is GOD.

The Big Bang seems to be the beginning of OUR universe, but don’t limit your mind to that, because the concept of time itself is created by GOD.

Impossible to tell. Before the big bang we’re unable to tell.

@Blondesjon has solved the mystery….It was and is “Kevin”....I shall find and provide the link.
Here you go (scroll down to his post near the bottom).

God lives in infinity/eternal realm, He is not bound by our dimension (time x length x width x height) . He is omnipresent meaning He is everywhere without any difficulty.

Nothing and… nothing.

If time and space are linked, and both started at the big bang, then the big bang must have been initiated by some force outside of the space-time continuum.

The question of how God could have lived forever and have always existed is solved by assuming that God exists outside of the space-time continuum, thereby not being affected by the dimension of time. Also allowing God to see all of time simultaneously, therefore being all knowing.

Exodus 3:14
Colossians 1:17
Revelation 1:8
Revelation 22:13

God has and always will be.

Time is a dimension like space, and these dimensions make up the universe. The universe does not exist in space or time, it contains and is composed of them. There is no space outside of the universe, nor is there time outside of the universe. The question of what happened before the big bang is entirely nonsensical. There was no before. It is impossible to image a lack of time, of course, the best we can do is to imagine a place where nothing happens, but not being able to imagine something is no reason not to believe it.

@Jayne you just blew my mind.

@tested9111 Why would you rule out two answers right off the bat when they could be the truths?

you are also assuming that the sort of causal/time context (there is always a something before everything) is a native state of the universe, rather than an invention of humans in their attempt to understand the world—-which it may very well be; much like “logic”, “reason”, and/or “space”. the answer if there is one (if there needs to be one) may be beyond such.

before god- mankind was at a lost, often barbaric and live only with the most basic instinct of survival.

before big bang- no life, just atoms wondering around in space pissing around.

Before the big bang was Adam and Eve, they ate the apple from the tree and were sent to hell.

I believe that’s what happened

wow a big clash between the two. I am having a big headache now.

@troym333 I like that.
I think he meant a different kind of “bang” though…

in a sense, the concept of God as Creator gives meaning to the word “existance”. And as the Creator, God defined the rules of existance in this universe. How though does the word “exists” apply to God?

@avalmez

I think that the thread starter actually define god as someone created from the minds of human being. God is there when we trust him to be there. Therefore he cease to exists when we stop believing him or when the idea of god is not there yet which probably dates back to the time where humans are still very very primitive.

@mea05key; I think you need to read up on your physics. The big bang is the postulated beginning of the universe, space, matter, energy, time, the whole deal, not just life and order.

@Jayne

To me in general terms the universe has a finite but unstable energy. Before big bang, energy is contained and big bang is the sort of instability in the universe the starts everything we see today.

@mea05key if a tree falls in the forest…

@mea05key; Perhaps, but there certainly weren’t “atoms pissing around in space”; there were no atoms, and no space, and certainly no piss :)

@Jayne

Oh yeah definitely no piss no piss just being funny with my previous statement thats all. XD

Q#1… Absolute Nothingness

Q#2… Absolute Thought

@Jayne
I used to believe as you suggest, that time is a dimension, like space. Some even form it into one concept calling it spacetime.

But I’ve come to a completely different perspective on what time and space actually are. I’d like your considerate comments on it.

This short course on the most debated theories suggests various interpretations…
http://www.iep.utm.edu/t/time.htm
http://www.iep.utm.edu/t/timetrav.htm
http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/phe-time.htm

Yet my own interpretation of time and space is something quite different.

Fondly, Wikipedia’s first sentence about time gives a clue to my own…
“Time is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time

Measuring system means tool. A man made tool. This much is true, but I also believe it is more than that, and much more than a mere property of the universe like gravity is.

Time and Space are part of the humans sensory perception grid, just like taste, sight, touch, hearing, and smell. But instead of being physical senses like the classics taught in grade school, they are more akin to the advanced senses like equilibrioception, proprioception, nociception, and synesthesia.

I personally believe that humans also have a sense of intuition, sense of deception, sense of truth. Emotions can also be included with a sense of fear, sense of joy, sense of anger, jealousy, lust, honor…

A good sense of time or personal space and distant relations is more of the same. The tool of time says the movie was 2 hours and 23 minutes. But your sense of time “felt” it go by quickly while mine lasted an eternity. You “felt” the theater was quite large and accommodating. I “felt” it was cramped and confining.

If a God is Truly a God, it does not swim in temporal corporeal pools of men. There is no faster or slower or larger or smaller in the waters of eternity. By the same candle, we learn of nothing that beings of eternity are in need of.

It is the physical nature of man to go against the essence of eternal conceptualizations. It is the spiritual nature of man to embrace them.

Haven’t read all the posts, but you’re assuming time itself was not created. Hope I didn’t repeat another answer.

Time, as the concept exists to us, started at the big bang. So to contemplate what happened “before” the big bang is sort of nonsense.

Time before the Big bang is not nonsense, just very hard to explain. What came before the big bang was another universe which reached entropy and collapsed upon itself causing the big bang we know and love. And before that another Universe which expanded and collapsed from its Big bang, ad infinitum. This was cleverly explained in the movie the Matrix, Reloaded. (The second Matrix movie).

You really need some serious imagination for these more difficult questions.

Yeah, the Big Crunch theory has been rejected.

Just because a theory is rejected doesn’t mean squat. they rejected the theory that the Earth was round for eons. And how about the one where the Earth is the center of the Universe? Or that the Sun revolves around the Earth?

Who’s “they”? Certainly not the scientific community.

@Ivan Of course “they refers to the scientific community…which at the time was probably priests and scribes.

Before the Big Bang, there was the Small Whimper.

Before God, there was a lack of imagination.

@Bluefreedom

Instead of foreplay?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies. Of course. I think.

@Zendo; They hardly followed anything resembling the scientific method, and can not be considered a scientific community. They studied the same thing scientists now study, and wielded the same authority, but they were not scientists. Nor can their intellectual failings be used allegorically to predict the failings of today’s scientific community.

@Zendo

Priests and scribes never practiced science. Please, this is ridiculous.

Nonetheless, The scientific community today often is no more than priests and scribes adhering to ridiculous notions with little or no proof at all. The Big Bang does not continue on in endless expansion.

They sure as hell speak, on aggregate, with more authority than you or I, and they disagree with you.

Stop making ridiculous assertions about something you obviously know very little about. I am done with this.

Wow. Wht a tantrum dude. Like you know it all and no one else is right. LOL….baby

Then how did they perfect their hocus pocus? Some science must be behind that magic powder that goes poof! I have no evidence beyond drunken memories of late night discovery channel reruns, but didn’t some priests predict eclipse’s and solstice’s…

Not really science but not really the magic they would have us believe either…

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Sometimes you just need to come up with your own theories and ideas without relying on people who may actually be wrong.

Isn’t that called “art”?

@Zendo

Please stop tainting the word “theory”. Scientific consensus may very well be wrong. But it is far less likely to be wrong than the random crap that you just come up with.

@Zendo

Yes I agree to a certain extent, hence my personal theory of time and space as listed above to @Jayne

But it still has to conform to evidence. I don’t see any evidence to support the Big Crunch. The universe is accelerating and is expected to poof into nothingness.

Oh please dude. What’s your problem. Did a house fall on your sister today?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Poofing into nothingness is only something that happens to old wis.dmers. We all know when the juice runs out which is propelling any further outward expansion of this universe (probably 5,000 years hence) that everything will come tumbling down onitself until we reach critical mass….again….

What is wrong with you people? Is not Matrix, Reloaded adequate evidence?

Firecrackers and grenades have never been shown to reach maximum expansion and then reverse trajectory to reassemble themselves.

Unless there is a balloon like principle at play, but then we’d have to stop with the Big Bang, and go with the Big Blow.

@Zendo

I had to pull this paragraph from the book because I don’t believe in it any longer…

“The granddaddy of all firecrackers spewed forth a few participating particles into a frenzied charge and from the raucous rage were born triplets named Ion, Positron and Electron. Must have been some crazy night! But these kids didn’t exist before the big boom-boom. They became the bombastic brood birthed by the big boom-boom. Legend has it that the promiscuous parents who started it all up went by the names of Energy and Matter. Seeing as how they were all alone in the pre-cosmos days, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. A wink, a nod, a few gropes later and BAM! To this day, they’re still blowing it up, ever expanding the known universe. Physicist warn however that in a few thousand eons, everything will slow down, come to a complete stop and then reverse direction inward upon itself, racing back towards a final fatal implosion. The triplets are coming home to nest and they’re bringing all their stuff with them. They’re bringing so much stuff they’re bringing their stuffs‘ stuff, and they’re coming fast. In the blink of a wink, every “thing” will be bliffed out of existence. Only Energy and Matter remain. Second honeymoon? Who knows? The sad story is that only Energy and Matter were present before every-thing happened, and in the end, that’s all that’s left.”

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies….Precisely!

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I likee. Very intense. But the question is, what happens to everything when it falls in on itself? All those neutrons and electrons? Does it all end up just one giant Hydrogen atom geocentrically rotating in a black hole, suddenly blowing up and outward in replication of the previous reality…and what of all those dimensions and strings and genes? Will they all jumble up to create a completely new thing, or is all there is simply what it is and not a nuance to be had?

You’ve misunderstood me…

This paragraph was pulled OUT of the book, because I don’t believe it to be the case any longer. I don’t believe in the implosion scenario any more.

1. Before God people lived without much of an explanation as to how and why things happen.

2. “Before” the Big Bang is a nonsense term, as time began with the Big Bang.

Your conditions are silly.

Lets all use some god and the literal and non literal teachings of the bible to explain science

I believe that Asimov determined that before both was Multivac

We measure time by the events or occurances that happen in it. The idea that time began with the big bang is derived from this concept because before the big bang there were no events to measure time by. However timelessness, or the absence of time because of the absence of events by which to define it still leaves the idea of eternity in tact. Before the big bang was eternity itself. To ask how long this eternal nothingness lasted before the big bang happened and the clock started ticking is counter-intuitive because eternity has no beginning and no end and therefore cannot be measured. The pre big bang state could have lasted for an inconcievable amount of time, or it could have lasted less than a fraction of a second. Either way it was still an eternity because time had no meaning before events began to define it.

Oh and if nobody pointed this out beofre

you will have to come up with a Theory
Theory =/= Hypothesis. Learn to science.

Non science man created “God and Gods” to explain things they don’t understand. They don’t understand the Big Bang Theory and Evolution and they simply do not want to grasp the fact that we as humans evolved into what we are today. The cool part is that we are still evolving.
God people do not want to embrace science due to arrogance and lack of knowledge.
Science people want to explain why we are here with out those entities known as God or Gods. So we created the Big Bang and evolution because we do not want to acknowledge that God may exist. So this is my conclusion, something had to create something. The Big Bang started man came forth and the second creation started we created God. So even this conclusion is still a stalemate why I say that is who made the material for the Big Bang? and who made God if man did not make Him? Something had to make something…
So lets marry God and evolution…

@antimatter So lets marry God and evolution

No thanks. Occam’s razor doesn’t like it and furthermore science doesn’t give qualitative judgements, which are always a prerogative of gods.