Although I have spoken about some of these things in other posts, I’ll put together here three questions that, for now, don’t have a scientific answer, and perhaps never will.
- Did the universe begin to
exist at the Big Bang, or was there something before? This controversy is much older than many
think. Three quarters of a millennium ago, Thomas Aquinas wrote this in
his Summa
Theologiae (Part I,
Question 46):
It cannot be proven by demonstration that the world
has not always existed.
In other words, according to Aquinas, the question of creatio originans (that the world had a beginning) cannot be solved by human reason. It should be noted, however, that creatio ex nihilo (the fact that the world was created) would be within the reach of reason. In other words: reason would let us reach the conclusion that the universe was created, but we cannot prove that it had a beginning.
