QuestionsDoes God exist?Time begins with the Big Bang: there is no 'before' in which a creator could have acted
Does God exist?AtheismCosmological

Time begins with the Big Bang: there is no 'before' in which a creator could have acted

No time before the Big Bang (Hawking)

Stephen Hawking 1942 · 2018A theoretical physicist who sees the origin of the universe in the laws of physics rather than in a creator.
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What it claims

The universe has no cause, since there was no time for a cause. There is no possibility of a creator, and the question 'Did God create the universe?' makes no sense.

Why

Time itself begins with the Big Bang: with no 'before', there is no moment in which a cause, or a creator, could have acted.

The same idea through history
Augustine of Hippo400Augustine already writes that God made time itself: there is no time before creation. But he concludes that the creator is outside time, not that there is no creator.
Stephen Hawking2018Hawking draws the opposite conclusion: if time begins with the universe, there is 'no time for a creator to have existed in'.
In short

"Time begins with the Big Bang: there is no 'before' in which a creator could have acted" is an argument by Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions, 2018, chap. 1 and 2, 2018) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: atheism). Its claim: The universe has no cause, since there was no time for a cause. There is no possibility of a creator, and the question 'Did God create the universe?' makes no sense. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3, P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions, 2018, chap. 1 and 2
Valid with an implicit premise

In his last book, published after his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking takes up the question 'Is there a God?' with a physicist's argument. According to Einstein's relativity, time slows down near a black hole and stops at its centre. If we run the history of the universe back towards the Big Bang, it shrinks to a similar point, and time stops there too. So we cannot go back 'before' the Big Bang, because there is no before. Yet a cause comes before its effect. Hawking concludes that the universe has no cause, and that there is no room for a creator.

P1The laws of nature (Einstein's relativity) say that at the start of the universe time itself began, just as it stops inside a black hole.
P2So there was no time before the Big Bang: asking what happened before makes no sense.
P3 · implicit premiseA cause acts before its effect: for one thing to cause another, there must be time in which the cause exists.
P4 · implicit premiseA creator of the universe would be the cause of the universe: it would have had to exist and act before it.
So the universe has no cause, since there was no time for a cause. There is no possibility of a creator, and the question 'Did God create the universe?' makes no sense.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3 and P4, the computer finds a case where time begins at the Big Bang and the universe still has a cause that does not come 'before' it in time.
Valid with P3 and P4. Without them, one could accept that time begins at the Big Bang and still believe a creator acts in another way. That is exactly where the objections strike: Augustine and Kant deny that creating or causing needs time before (P3, P4), and physicists deny that time really begins at the Big Bang (P1).
Analogy. Asking what happened before the Big Bang, says Hawking, is like asking what lies south of the South Pole: the map stops there and the word 'south' no longer means anything. Critics answer that a mapmaker can still tell who drew the map. The second image is ours.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Augustine of Hippo 400 · attacks premise 4

In the Confessions, Augustine answers those who ask what God was doing before he made the world. For him, God was never idle, because he made time itself. Creation therefore does not happen at a moment of time, and God needs no 'before' to be a creator. This is not a reply to Hawking, but it is the classic answer to his reasoning.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Hawking in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) A defender of Hawking would say that 'God made time' settles nothing: it says how a cause might act without time, without showing it, and the word 'cause' loses its usual meaning. A defender of Augustine would answer that this use of 'cause' is no worse than the physicists' own when they speak of the origin of time (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement: must a cause really precede its effect in time? Hawking says yes, Augustine's tradition says a cause can be outside time. No agreement (our summary).
Immanuel Kant 1781 · attacks premise 3

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that most operating causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects. A leaden ball lying on a cushion makes a hollow in it: cause and effect are at the same time. What makes a cause is the order of dependence, not a stretch of time. A cause therefore does not necessarily need a 'before'.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Hawking in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Kant wrote long before the Big Bang theory, and he speaks of causes within the world, not of a cause of the universe. A defender of Hawking would say that simultaneity does not help, since a creator would have to exist already at the first instant, when time has no duration yet. A defender of the opposite view would say a creator can produce the first instant at the same time as itself, as the ball makes the hollow (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: the simultaneity of cause and effect is accepted in the philosophy of science, but it is disputed whether it applies to a cause of time itself (our summary).
S
Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen 2004 · attacks premise 1

The physicists Carroll and Chen propose a model in which the universe we see is born from an older one, through a spontaneous inflation that occurs both forwards and backwards in time. In this model time does not begin at the Big Bang: our Big Bang is only an episode. The order of events does not stop at that point.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Hawking in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Hawking does not discuss this model in the book. A defender of a beginning of time would cite the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003): a universe that is expanding on average cannot be 'complete' towards the past, and inflation alone does not describe its beginning. Carroll answers that his model escapes this, because the universe there does not expand in only one direction of time. It is a proposed model, not a confirmed one (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: current physics does not say whether time has a beginning. The theory of quantum gravity that could settle it does not exist yet (our summary).
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