Did the universe ever begin?

    Antinomies are the guardians of a threshold.

It seems rather reasonable to suppose that the universe had to begin sometime. Our traditional myths confirm it, they even ascribe authorship to the action, and even modern mythology tells us of an instant cero, (or is it a one?)  anyway, a Big Bang explosion started everything. If we ignore the idea of an instant cero, which presupposes an observer beyond what we are saying that happens, i.e. the universe is the universe plus something else unrelated to it (remnants of older mythologies) it all seems commonplace and obvious. Then philosophy steps in (didn’t it step already?)and asks: is that a metaphor or do you really mean it? Is it not necessary for an explosion to happen that the exploding thing expands in something which is already there, say, space? Then space and time were already there, are they objects? Certainly, if they were there, they cannot be relations among objects for there were not any yet. However, if you say that space and time were created in the Bang, then your explosion is a metaphor, but a metaphor of what? What is the literal referent? A beginning, but how could there be a beginning when there was not time yet? It does not make any sense to say “the beginning of time”, for beginnings and ends are in relation to events, and how could time be an event if events are results, occurrences which presuppose the notion of time? Etc., etc.

   Life in this planet had a beginning, and it will certainly end when the sun becomes a red supergiant, but we cannot project those intuitions of beginnings and ends to the universe as a whole (unless for artistic purposes). If we do, we step into antinomies related to transcendental concepts, concepts that are not in the league of our mathematical logic.

   Kant’s first antinomy proved both that the universe could not have a beginning and that it could not be without a beginning. This was the argument:

A.   It had a beginning.

       1. Then, there is a pre-time which is empty time, where nothing precedes anything.

      2. Since we cannot make distinctions of any kind between its elements, we cannot know whether or not anything exists, nor we can determine the starting point in relation to anything else, so we would not know if it actually was the beginning.

  ∴ Therefore, the universe could not have a beginning.

B.   It had not a beginning.

     1. Then, between any two moments an eternity would have elapsed, and also an infinite series of eternities.

      2. But we cannot complete an infinite series through a successive synthesis of thought.

      ∴ Therefore, the universe could not be without a beginning.

Thus, we obtain an antinomy.

The argument is based on reductio ad absurdum as a consequence of our incapacity to think the universe in both cases. The antinomy is interesting for it points out  not to any theories of the constitution of matter but to the limitations of our rational thinking to the construction of causal sequences.

Let us give another argument for the antinomy:

A.   It had one and only one beginning.

       1. Then, it had to be a single space-time point starting the sequence.

    2. But we cannot think about a single point, for points are not individual objects and cannot be characterized by their properties. In fact, none could observe it or even think about it.

       ∴ Therefore, the universe had not a single beginning.

B.   It had no beginning.

     1. But we can pick a random set of points from such sequence and build a reference frame in relation to an arbitrary set of properties of matter, and boldly declare the set as the beginning. This seems to be a rather non-philosophical decision, but it is precisely the one adopted by modern science.

    ∴ Therefore, the universe had a single beginning.

   It does not make any sense to say that the universe had a beginning, neither that it did not have it, as it does not make any sense to say that Ra’s Eye (the sun, for us) sees everything, neither that it does not see anything at all.