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Comment by Spkeat | Hacker News Reader

This can further reinforce the idea that the unobservable universe was always there and that the big bang is only a pattern of movement of the cluster of galaxies and it is only the information that has managed to arrive from our position.I want to see how big bang theory falls into an optical illusion.

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I don't know which idea is harder for me to conceptualize.

That something has always existed or that it came to exist out of nowhere-ish.

I suspect this is why simulation theory is popular.

Much like god, that just pushes the question up one level

While I agree that simulation theory pushes the question up a level, that is not the case for the God of classical theism.

Ok, I'm curious. How does the explanation for everything's existence being "God did it" not simply push the question up a level to wondering how to explain God's existence?

The general idea is that the set of all contingent things can only be explained by something non-contingent (ie necessary).

A necessary thing, by definition, is its own explanation. "I am what I am" etc.

From there, classical theists attempt to connect that necessary thing to what you'd commonly understand as God.

I just noticed that if you replace "God" with "Big Bang", it's pretty much the same question.

The answer to Big Bang is that before it, there was no time itself, so there's no notion of "before" (or if you wish, it's an error in the question itself that assumes there was "before").

Once you factor time out of your pre-universal reality, these are compatible.

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