Quote:
Originally Posted by damnage
A stephen hawkings an authority on such matters because........
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I don't know about his authority on anything other than physics, but if I remember correctly it may be because he and Penrose wrote a book where they basically said that there was a singularity in the sense that there was a "beginning".
Later, he changed his position saying that GR breaks down and something about scalar fields, and that we don't know what happened just before the big bang, more specifically whether there even was a "beginning".
His original position is still used to provide support for cosmological arguments such as the Kalam cosmological argument:
(1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Thus, the universe has a cause.
It is premise 2 which is at issue.
Maybe he's just firing back.