Kevin G. Brady at Spiritual Research Workgroup (guests@sgmt.at) wrote:
>The reason I even bring this up, is that even in these very advanced
>theories, no explanation seems to be forthcoming about how a universe
>can suddenly expand out of nowhere.  

     Questions that beg the question usually result from questions
that beg the question :)

     The idea that a space/time universe could 'expand' out of nowhere,
implies a preexisting time in which this space/time universe at first
wasn't and then was.

     Not only is the present human mind limited to 3 spatial dimensions,
it also seems to be limited to one time dimension and its temporal
constructs: followingness, dependable followingness, and necessary
dependable followingness (cause).

     That 'time could arise' is itself a contradictory statement in any
grammaticon (word matrix) you might choose to clarify it, and thus
asking "How could time arise" is a meaningless pursuit much on the order
of contemplating "the sound of one hand clapping."

     One hand can not *BY DEFINITION* clap, and just so time can not by
definition 'arise'.

     One can postulate the existence of a higher time line, where in
lower space/times could come and go, but that merely removes the problem
up one level, for where did that higher universe of time come from?

     Steven Hawkings struggles with the problem in his book on Black
Holes, his statement, elegant and austere as it is, is that the entire
sequence of existence called space/time just IS, forever.  Where it came
from is not a valid question, because in the context in which that
space/time exists, there is no before nor after, there is only 'IS'.

     From a vantage point WITHIN a space/time universe of course, things
appear to start from nothing or a big bang or whatever, grow, expand,
contract and perhaps repeat.  But from the outside, the whole thing is
complete, stationary and eternal.

     This view conflicts heavily with our personal experience of
agency and 'free will', meaning we do not feel that everything is
already created and that all of the past and future exist as a self
contained pre-existing whole, and the soul is merely *VIEWING* it in
sequence.  We feel there is more to life than mere VIEWING, and this
is causing or personal agency.

     Some try to get around this by claiming that ALL possible pasts
and futures exist as a self contained 'super whole', of which our
experience is but one track through the various possiblities.  Thus
although the super whole is already complete and eternally 'created',
our track through it can be changed and/or determined by the vagaries
and decisions of our 'free will' while traveling through it.

     Although our track is ever changing each time we pass through the
super whole, the possibilities available to us are already laid out.
One can admit to the possibility that the possiblities are infinite in
number, for example even if you turn left instead of right, there are
a infinite number of shades of turning left you can do, which will
ultimately affect how your future turns out.
 
     The human mind, which loves the facility of finiteness, balks at
the concept of a *ALREADY EXISTING* super whole consisting of an
infinite number of possibilities at each decision point.  The mind
tends to think of creation as a 'creating of this instead of that',
and looks with a squinted eye at the idea of the creation of
*EVERYTHING* that could be created all at once.
 
     This moves the problem of creation from the creation of a mere
specific something, to the creation of an all encompassing
*EVERYTHING*, or at least an everything that could be, granting that
somethings just can't be, period.  So one envisions a universe
consisting of everything that COULD be, and souls traveling through it
taking left's and rights at each decision point along the way, thus
creating IN THEIR EXPERIENCE the various different specific universes
that we have.

     Some go further and claim that each soul splits at each decision
point and part of the soul goes right and part goes left, so in fact
all possible tracks through the super whole are being experienced by
the soul concurrently.  Each part of course is only aware of his own
path, but all are taking place none the less.

     This tries to solve the problem of having a group of souls
entering the super whole, and some going left and some going right,
and after a while each soul would end up alone in his own corner of
the super whole, with everyone else around him perhaps an uninhabited
projection in his mind.  Emotionally one wants to know how do we take
our friends with us so we all end up in the same slice of the super
whole together.

     Such concepts tend to leave the human mind dissatisfied, or even
outraged with preposterousness, perhaps they are at best really bad
allegories to what the truth might be.  It is conceivable that the
human mind can not actually understand the truth of what is going on,
any more than it can grasp higher dimensional space/times.  Like
mathematics, one may be left building theoretical models of the
universe that work on paper to produce a result, but leave the mind
blind and unsatisfied as to what it's really about.

     The human mind finds THAT idea unsatisfactory also, so it keeps
looking.

      Homer