The current scientific standard of big-bang cosmology is fascinating, but it raises some very basic questions that must eventually be answered. If the universe began with a big bang from an infinitesimal point of singularity that contains all matter, time, and space, and continues to expand exponentially, then:
- How did the original material that ‘banged’ come into being?
- What exactly is expanding, matter and energy or matter, energy and space?
- If space is created along with matter/energy and is expanding with them, what is the universe (including space) expanding into?
- If the answer to that is ‘nothing’, then is nothing different than empty space?
- Or are they the same, meaning space is not a creature or substance but rather just a word we made up to signify nothing or no-thing?
- How can the universe be ‘infinite’, as some cosmologists claim, if it was banged into existence and continues to expand? Wouldn’t that, instead, mean what is outside the universe is infinite?
I wonder if answers to any of these kinds of basic questions relating to space-time and its three dimensions (four, if you include time as a dimension) can be made intelligible without taking into consideration a fourth and most foundational dimension of reality, eternity. That is, the realm of the divine. Will temporality, and the universe itself as a whole or in its parts, ever become intelligible to us without an understanding of it being grounded and enveloped in the unchanging realm of the eternal and infinite?