Tamminen,
I have no difficulty accepting that there is no beginning of time during which matter has existed.
Your astrophysicist friend who has difficulty with the "beginning" ought to consider no beginning.
My uncle, a devout Roman Catholic, has numerous times started a discussion with me and his basic premise was, that "Andrew, the universe had to be created, and if it was created, it was created by someone." I told him equal number of times, that it's a fallacy in my belief (but not in his) to think that matter did not last for ever and it had to be created.
If there was a creator, who created the creator? If he wasn't created then why is it hard to accept that matter wasn't created?
There is a whole bunch of reasonable questions that speak against creation by a god. If god created the universe, and there had been nothing physical before, why did god create the world at that time? The infinite time that preceded the moment of creation was all along in every moment indistinguishable from the moment of creation... why create it THEN, and not some other time?
Also, there are more logical problems with the creation theory. Please ask fooloso4, he is very, very knowledgeable in these matters, and he is willing and happy to share his knowledge with interested parties.
My father used to think exactly like my uncle with regard to creation. Dad had started the seminary in his youth, but opted out.
-- Updated 2017 September 1st, 6:45 am to add the following --
tamminen wrote:I sort of like your pessimism.
I did not start out with pessimism. I started out with a conviction that matter is everlasting, and there is no creator. These are two assumptions I can't force you to accept by using logic. But I wish you could accept them. The lack of purpose in life grew out of it naturally. Pessimism is not me, or mine; it is a necessary hang-about of the outcome of the thinking.
You learn to live with the pain. You learn to roll with the punches.
(I said this once at a meeting of philosophically-minded people, as a refutation to the speaker's point; and the speaker was a rather influential professor of philosophy at the local university. So it was important for me to make a point, and to make it well. My accent, foreign-sounding accent, however, made the last word of my speech sound like a Latin American last name, like Lopez, or Gomez, or Panchez. The entire audience roared up in laughter, and I and my point was totally diminished.)
-- Updated 2017 September 1st, 6:56 am to add the following --
Belindi wrote:
We can and do, as the contributors to this thread bear evidence. Philosophers ask what if anything a question means. You have consistently refused to address the vagueness amounting nonsense of the question. I understand your point that the original poster and you yourself seek meaning. So do I. So does everybody. (*) However our quest for meaning is not aided by imprecise language.
(*) I actually don't. I stopped doing that when I realized there is no meaning.
Belindi: the phrase has taken on a meaning of its own. It is badly worded, fine, but everybody uses it that way. Think of it as a bastardized sentence, with an awkward structure, but accepted by the language and by those who speak it as a lingual phrase, as a completely fine and fully meaningful idiom.
When you or someone else says, "my world has come crumbling down" you don't expect that the world around the person has come crumbling down. Or when someone says, "time will tell if you are right or wrong", you don't expect time to assume a physical shape that can speak and then tell us what it precisely thinks.
Same with the meaning of life. Maybe you are right, it does not make sense semantically; I am not even sure if I can agree with that. But it does not need to, in order to convey meaning, because it is an idiom that everyone understands the same way, never mind its (according to you) awkward composition.
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