... God's equations?
In Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose pictures a cosmos that always has existed, “a succession of aeons, each appearing to be an entire expanding universe history”, a series of Cycles all much alike. He finds it comfortingly similar to the steady-state cosmos fashionable in the early 1950s, where atoms popped into existence at a very slow rate so that the cosmic expansion wouldn’t dilute everything. The arrival of the new atoms could be a fundamental law of nature. Fred Hoyle saw this as far better than what he contemptuously christened “the Big Bang” where an entire universe arrived all at once. Later, the Big Bang became widely accepted. Yet until he invented his Cycles, in 2005, Penrose regretted the death of Hoyle’s “philosophically attractive” universe that “requires no origin in time”.
No origin in time. Would that remove the need for a Creator? Penrose doesn’t actually say so. Still, philosophers from Epicurus to Bertrand Russell have said it. In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo sees no mystery in why a universe exists. Its existence at each moment is explained by its existence at the preceding moment.
Aquinas didn't believe that the universe always existed, but saw no contradiction between that idea and its being created by God. And John Scotus Eriugena conceived of a steady-state universe in the ninth century.
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