Can everything that exists have no beginning or end?

Question

Can everything that exists have no beginning?

I'm not asking about religious notions (as all the other questions I saw on here seemed to be about), if there must be a God to create a universe that has a beginning. But, whether everything that exists can have no beginning or end?

Surely, I'm thinking, the Greeks asked that question, and had an argument.

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I'm not asking if it's possible that everything has no beginning and no end, in the sense that could be shown to be true with any thing which has a beginning or end. But if "everything", as in that object that would fall under the universal set, could have no beginning and no end. I'm sorry, but I don't know how to express that any clearer

Answer 1

Plotinus argues this question in his Six Enneads, specifically the Third Ennead, Second Tractate. In it he says:

Of course the belief that after a certain lapse of time a Kosmos previously non-existent came into being would imply a foreseeing and a reasoned plan in the part of God providing for the production of the Universe and securing all possible perfection in it- a guidance and partial providence, therefore, such as is indicated. But since we hold the eternal existence of the Universe, the utter absence of a beginning to it, we are forced, in sound and sequent reasoning, to explain the providence ruling in the Universe as a universal consonance with the divine Intelligence to which the Kosmos is subsequent not in time but in the fact of derivation, in the fact that the Divine Intelligence, preceding it is Kind, is its cause as being the Archtype and Model which it merely images, the primal by which, from all eternity, it has its existence and subsistence.

Buddhist and Hindu scriptures are in agreement on this also. The universe had no beginning and has no end; it is infinite and eternal. What we think of as the 'beginning' of the universe is simply the start of a new cycle. The Universe is like a wave or a pulsation which rises and falls.

Answer 2

The universe (everything that exists) had a beginning and may have an end. Every single thing or collection of things that exists or once existed had its beginning: the moment, in the vastness of time, at which it was brought into being or created. Nothing exists without an act of creation or cause. The destruction or modification of any thing ends that existence as it was through an act of creation of the new reality.

Answer 3

Greeks did ask the question, and did give answers. To ancient atomists "everything that exists" were atoms in motion, and they had no beginning or end. Lucretius phrases it as follows in De Rerum Natura:

"No visible object ever suffers total destruction, since nature renews one thing from another, and does not sanction the birth of anything, unless she receives the compensation of another's death. [...] Each thing springs from the source that has the matter that it needs, the primary particles, and comes into the boundaries of light, and that's the reason every thing cannot give rise to every other thing, because there is a separate power in distinct things".

On this issue Parmenides concurred, nihil fit ex nihilo (nothing comes from nothing) is attributed to him. The idea of cyclic time, and more specifically of eternal recurrence, was also widespread, Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Stoics, possibly even Aristotle subscribed to it, although the last is disputed. But his revolving Cosmos eternally powered by the unmoved mover certainly suggests it. In fact the idea of linear time, where the beginning and end of things becomes thinkable, does not even get articulated until the rise of Christianity, particularly in Augustine, who was an adamant anti-cyclist.

However, there are ambiguities in the question on "everything" and "exists". Above I interpreted them narrowly in the "fundamental" sense. But if "everything" includes transient atomic composites or each recurrence cycle separately, etc., and their dissolutions count as terminations of their existence, then obviously one can always find some "formations" that do have beginning and end. Whether they count as "objects that would fall under the universal set" depends on one's notion of the "universal set". E.g. whether it includes its own subsets and other combinations of its elements as elements.

Answer 4

In McTaggartian philosophy of time,

• An A-series ordering is an ordering in terms of the following predicates: is past, is present, and is future.
• A B-series ordering is an ordering in terms of the following predicates: comes before and comes after.
• A C-series ordering simply is the very simple concept of any ordering of things.

Only the A-series has direction, but the A-series (according to McTaggart) has no order without the C-series. The conjunction of A-series and C-series produces the B-series. "Beginning" is a B-series concept because it refers to that which comes before all else in time. Yet, B-series depends on A-series and C-series. According to McTaggart, A-series ordering is essential to the reality of time such that, likewise, A-series is essential to the reality of beginnings. Therein, the reality of beginnings depends on the reality of time. I will not take a position either way, but I implore you [impersonal pronoun] to read McTaggart's "The Unreality of Time" and make a judgment on the matter for yourself.

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Much more generally, if beginnings exist then, categorically, time exists, and if time begins then something that begins exists, but whether or not anything other than time has a beginning is a separate matter. Additionally, whether or not something that exists is real is another matter entirely (and one that is quite relevant for a realist).

In keeping with Kantian thought, the position expressed herein is that existence/being is not a predicate—“Sein ist offenbar kein reales Prädikat” (Kant 1781). Rather, it merely is copular. It indicates something’s inclusion/exclusion in/from a particular domain of discourse (or universe of objects)—“Es ist bloß die Position eines Dinges oder gewisser Bestimmungen an sich selbst” (Kant 1781). Russell’s (1903) Lotzean distinction between being and existence is rejected on the grounds that it amounts to contradictions (e.g. “nonexistent things must exist as something and every thing is something”) and ill-formed propositions (e.g. “it is”). Moreover, conjugations of "to be" are more versatile than conjugations of "to exist" such that the former can substitute for the latter in virtually every case whereas the latter cannot substitute for the former in many cases.

Thinkers like Parmenides denied the reality of time (and space) such that nothing real begins or ends because beginnings and endings are references to time. Beginnings and endings are illusory; they exist as illusions (i.e. unreal things). Mactaggart argued against the reality of time on the basis of the unreality of referents of time-orderings in terms of past, present, and future (i.e. A-series time-ordering).

Answer 5

Scientists have never explained convincingly how everything started nor indeed how it will end.

If there were this big bang firstly where was whatever went bang and what was it? If the universe is continually expanding from that bang then what is it expanding into? Was there a nothingness?

Our perception of a beginning and an end does not make sense. So perhaps the simple answer is there was no beginning nor will there be an end. There's just an always. Then everything makes more sense. We are energy and use vessels to experience the world and move on to another when the vessel wears out. Maybe?

Answer 6

Some people argue that the universe must have had a beginning because of the impossibility of infinite regress. They say that if you start in the infinite past and try to get to the present you will never arrive. But this is not so. If you draw a line with the present set as 0 and each past year as a negative number on into infinity, you can pick a number such at -10 and in 10 years you will be at the present. On this time line every part of the line has identical characteristics. So no matter how large its number, if you take any point in the line its distance to 0 will be finite and can be traversed.