There is a problem that philosophers face while contemplating the origins of the universe. Anything that occurs must have an preceding event that caused the occurrence. Plato theorized that there must have been something at the beginning of time that existed without being caused to exist, and that thing could easily be described as God. According to my instructor, Professor Hilton, Plato came to the conclusion that if you could regress infinitely through events and causes, you will never come to a starting point; because a starting point wouldn’t exists. Plato theorized that nothing can exist without a starting point, thus the pattern of causes and effects are not infinitely regressable. Although I am not educated enough to seriously criticize Plato, what I just described seems like false reasoning. I am not yet convinced that there must be an ultimate causeless starting point.
What I suggest is that there is a sort of infinite regression, but rather than regressing back to negative infinitely, we regress back to near zero. Like a calculus equation which gets infinitely closer to zero without quite getting there, we can infinitely trace the causes of the big bang back to near-zero without quite getting to zero. This sort of thinking allows us to have our cake and eat it too. We regress infinitely, but we still have a starting point; an ultimate zero which we know is there but can never quite reach. Of course, convenience isn’t a valid reason to believe something, but for now, this is my theory and I’m sticking to it.
