Wow, you guys had a lot of fun last night.
At the risk of setting off another round of philosophical/religious turmoil, I don't think that what you said here is exactly correct, Denny. Here's what Stephen Hawking has to say on the subject of time and singularity:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html
As I understand it, which I'm perfectly willing to say is not all that well, he's not saying that there wasn't a time before 0, he's just saying that everything got reset at the Big Bang and there's no way of measuring or knowing about anything that happened outside of the time frame of our universe.
I don't know what all of this means as far as the religious debate goes. I would say that the eternal God, if one exists as Mags and I believe, would have to have existed outside of the space-time of our universe. Genesis 1 says that, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It's pretty clear from that statement that he's there at the "beginning" and that for him to do the creating he had to be in existence before the creation. The Bible says that he's eternal and from the standpoint of this universe, that would simply mean that there's no way to test his beginning or end...which is pretty much what the Bible says.
