In a comment to the MySpace version of this blog, one of your friends challenged you by asking, “who created the big bang?” To this you retorted that “[t]he timeline is circular…[i]t’s a never ending cycle that’s start is also the end.” Your friend retorted back that “that still doesn’t explain why it does it…why is the big bang happening?…atheism just doesn’t answer that question.” I extend to you that he is right, and purport to explain why.

Assuming hypothetically an oscillating universe, the logical flaw in your argument is most evident in your graphical depiction of time. In illustrating the circularity of time, you depict many iterations (or instances, in programing terms) of the same universe continuing around a circular timeline. However, while time is circular in an oscillating universe, your depiction is inaccurate. What your diagram doesn’t take into consideration is that right now we would have to be in one of those many iterations, irrespective of the fact that we would also exist in the same form and at the same time within all of them. Once we implement this into your diagram, its flaw becomes apparent:

As you can see, your diagram implies that after 15 further iterations of the universe we will return to this iteration. But because each iteration is the same a last, this effectively makes no logical sense. Further, I understand that your decision to portray 16 total iterations was completely arbitrary. But that you were forced to pick an arbitrary number of iterations should have signaled to you that something was wrong. The following image illustrates the proper way to depict the circularity of time in an oscillating universe:

However, because each iteration of the universe is, in this model, both necessarily preceded and succeeded by another iteration, we can extrapolate from this diagram an illustration that depicts these multiple iterations. Instead of a circle, though, we get a straight line:

This depiction underscores the problem: where did iteration a come from? If you look again at our proper depiction of the circularity of time in an oscillating universe, you’ll see what we are actually being faced with is a chicken-or-the-egg problem: what came first, and where did that come from? However, it could be argued that iteration a should actually be set equal, not to 1, but to i minus infinity. But this effectively answers nothing. If the process is infinite in both direction, where did the process itself come from? Why does this particular process necessarily exist? “It just does” doesn’t cut it: Why not some other process? Why any process? Why does anything exist at all? This is the logical hole (or gap) that your friend was referencing, and, needless to say, it is one with which religious proponents are all to ready to fill with God–the very thing you thought an oscillating universe refuted.

In conclusion, whether the current model of the universe is opened or closed, oscillating or not, should have no bearing on your atheism given that God can (unfortunately) be smuggled into each of them. Instead, your goal need be to illustrate why God is a no more plausible solution to this problem than anything else we might imagine. Indeed, your recent blog on Gaps, Science, and the Anthropic Principle takes a good step in that direction.

<3

[this comment was extracted and modified from my original response]

When I saw an article about this I thought you might be interested because you like controversy. I haven’t read it and I don’t know what to think but I’m interested. Check out http://www.galileowaswrong.com