In the beginning of what? Is this semantics? How can tautology be a proof?

"The beginning" may not be there so your italics do not entail your all caps. The contrapositive is still a conditional, if there was a beginning then nothing was there. And circular arguments with random premises do not need to be refuted, their premises can just be dismissed.

Maybe see philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/8173/…

How can something come from nothing? Sth like a sine wave demonstrates that – at one instant of time (the zero crossing point) there is nothing, but there was and there will be something. It all depends on the reference frame. Shift that and it all changes, such as with geocentric to heliocentric models. Everything is relative: nothing is absolute.

"irrefutable"? There is no beginning...

Let’s say that the beginning of causal history is at time t = 0. This would mark the beginning, but there would obviously be something. It doesn’t have to come out of nothing. There would just be nothing before it.

@Syed yes, but some think the beginnning was about 6000 years ago, and others think it was about 14 billion years ago. Both are just a point in time of one's belief. Neither is relevant to the other person's frame of reference, so neither view can disprove anything earlier.

@WeatherVane > How can something come from nothing? It's like a sine wave – at one instant of time (the zero crossing point) there is nothing, but there was and there will be something. == I think that may be the center of the explanation. Seriously. One man's zero is another man's 90 degrees. == Something's rotating. I think they're called Penrose cycles. == But when you start talking like that, you're talking science fiction.

@WeatherVane No no, as usual i'm explaining myself wrong. I wasn't accusing you of science fiction, I was saying you've got the right answer to the question, seeing it as a sine wave. But I made the further observation that this whole area is something I don't feel comfortable talking about because it's so tenuous and mysterious and make-believe. It's not hard science. == I think your Comment was very insightful.

Upvoting for moxie. VTCing for clarity.

@JD dammit! I cant delete it. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can't.

@MissUnderstands are you still expecting "hard science" to come up with a fixed well-defined universe? Because nobody can, or ever will, agree on that. There is a certain common sense to it, but beyond that we all live in very different worlds.

@WeatherVane No, i'm just trying to get out of a situation I'm in again, where I ask a simple, genuine question and it gets beat up and voted to close for no apparent reason, and I get banned for asking bad questions. I think people just want me out. I'm really sick of this. But it happens again and again, I can't stop it. When will I learn to shut the HELL up in public? == But then something interesting occurrs to me, and I get excited and I ask, and it starts all over again.

Thank you for the provoking question.

@WeatherVane You didn't say thought provoking, so I have no way of knowing whether that's sarcastic or not Because I'm autistic. I guess I don't want to know. I thought the question is interesting. I'm sorry you think it's provoking, assuming that's a bad thing.

I meant thought-provoking, without sarcasm. Btw I am on the spectrum.

@MissUnderstands I suspect many of here are neurodivergent. 🖖 LLAP.

@MissUnderstands: Questions usually can't be deleted once someone has answered them, on the theory that if they put in the effort to answer it would be rude to discard that work. Yes, that can be frustrating.

Generally, relying on a linguistic trick is going to fail since language is so darned slippery. It's too easy for folks to answer that what you think they must have meant is not what they meant. There are many beginnings. Beginning of this universe may not have been the beginning of the multiverse, to take one obvious counter example.

Also, remember the people have been arguing this for centuries, so any argument that simple has probably been voiced many times before and folks who disagree with it will have standard answers ready to go. We are coming in very late in the conversation.

You know, the really nice thing about the statement “if anything existed, then the beginning was earlier” is that it’s compatible with both a beginning of time that occurred a finite time ago and a beginning of time that occurred an infinite time ago (e.g. no beginning of time). “Earlier” does not imply “a finite time earlier”.