The Problem of Beginnings: I. The Question That Starts Too Late

How did the universe begin?

It seems an innocent question.

Perhaps the most innocent question imaginable.

Everything we know begins somewhere. A tree begins as a seed. A building begins with construction. A conversation begins when someone speaks. Even the things that seem permanent have histories.

So it is natural to ask:

When did the universe begin?

And then, almost immediately:

What happened before it began?

There is only one problem.

If time began with the universe, what could before mean?

This is not merely a scientific difficulty. It is a conceptual one.

The word before describes a relation between events within a temporal order. One thing happens before another because both can be located in a sequence.

But if the question concerns the beginning of temporal order itself, then the relation may no longer apply.

To ask what happened before time began is rather like asking what lies north of the North Pole.

The words form a question.

That does not guarantee that the question has somewhere to go.

Yet this is precisely what makes the problem interesting.

For our ordinary understanding of beginnings has a familiar shape:

First there is one condition.

Then something happens.

Afterwards, there is another condition.

A beginning is a transition.

But a transition requires some way of distinguishing before from after.

What, then, are we imagining when we imagine the beginning of everything?

Perhaps we picture an empty universe waiting to be filled.

But where is this emptiness?

Perhaps we imagine an infinite darkness before the first light.

But when does this darkness occur?

Perhaps we imagine some prior cause producing the universe.

But where does this cause operate?

Each attempt to imagine the beginning seems to smuggle in something that has already begun.

Space.

Time.

Causation.

Absence.

We imagine a stage before asking how the stage appeared.

Perhaps this is why the beginning of the universe remains so difficult to think.

Not because it lies unimaginably far in the past.

But because our ordinary concept of a beginning may already assume the world whose beginning we are trying to imagine.

And so the question with which we began—

What happened before the universe began?

—may have started too late.

Before asking what happened at the beginning, perhaps we should ask a more dangerous question:

What must already be possible for anything to begin?