What was going on before everything we now know?

Question

I know that nobody here has the answer, but I sometimes wonder, prior to the origins of the universe as we know it, what existed. Even if there was nothing but gas, what was before that gas, and even if you go back before anything, to a time so far back that there was only a big never-ending expanse. How, and why, did a big empty, never-ending space come to be?

Answer 1

There are only two logical possibilities and both seem highly far-fetched.

Firstly, there might have been no beginning at all. Everything has always been there all the time and they are only transforming or changing to create an illusion of a beginning or an end, because every change in itself is an end to what was and a beginning of something else. Really difficult to appreciate how everything could always have been there in some form or the other.

Secondly, all this must have come out of 'nothing'. This nothing must be pure nothing which need not be created at all. This nothing is not empty, because even emptiness is space which is something. Once again, it is really impossible for us to credibly imagine how anything can come out of total nothingness.

I can't think of any third possibility, even as the two I have mentioned above are merely a logical extension which however do not look feasible to us. So, yes, you are right, we have no credible answers at all. We may never have because we are bound within the realms of time and space and therefore we have no capability to visualize beyond this confine.

Answer 2

I am going to cut and paste 2 things, because they are long, and because they explain it better than I can. Metaphysical Naturalism is the idea that God was not necessary.

"Naturalism, challenging the cogency of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, holds that the universe requires no supernatural cause and government, but is self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing, that the world-process is not teleological and anthropocentric, but purposeless, deterministic (except for possible tychistic events), and only incidentally productive of man; that human life, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, is an ordinary natural event attributable in all respects to the ordinary operations of nature; and that man's ethical values, compulsions, activities, and restraints can be justified on natural grounds, without recourse to supernatural sanctions, and his highest good pursued and attained under natural conditions, without expectation of a supernatural destiny."

http://www.ditext.com/runes/n.html

"Existence is a self-sufficient primary. It is not a product of a supernatural dimension, or of anything else. There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it—and no alternative to it. Existence exists—and only existence exists. Its existence and its nature are irreducible and unalterable."

Leonard Peikoff “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” from

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; Ayn Rand

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Answer 3

No one truly knows.

Answer 4

What was going on was everything we know nothing about now.

Answer 5

"What was going on before everything we now know?" so we don't know! then how can anybody answer this?

how can u know something that u don't know?