It is tricky in the sense that it doesn't operate according to our common sense intuitions.
That's another possibility, but the possibility I posited would mean that it might not make sense to talk about the universe having a beginning, and yet it not existing for an eternal past.
I wasn't questioning the etymology, but rather the conclusion you were trying to draw from it, which was fallacious and violates Occam's Razor.
Why should an uncaused universe be stable and not expanding? You are just repeating the claim rather than supporting it. And I'm not denying current scientific thought on the expansion of the early universe, which is explained by the nature of the universe itself rather than by anything outside of it. Both Russell and Hawking supported what I'm saying about the universe just existing without external cause, and both were aware of and accepted the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe.
I now have no idea what you're talking about. #432 wasn't even my post.
I agree that to have a beginning means there could not be an eternal past.
I don't see that as being an option if the universe has a beginning.
My post #569 wasn't about Caroljeen. It was a question to you that you didn't answer. If you would like to answer it, we could then move forward from there.
Why would an uncaused universe expand? Doesn't there have to be some type of thrust/force to cause the universe to move/expand?
The universe's expansion is a distinct issue from it having or lacking a cause for its very existence. The expansion can have a cause without the universe itself having a cause. I don't think cosmologists have a settled answer for cosmic expansion, but dark energy is currently thought to be involved.
Post #569 combined two responses. One was me agreeing with Caroljeen that the universe being non-contingent doesn't explain everything about the universe. The second, and quite distinct part, was where I asked you a question based on your apparent rejection of Occam's Razor. You responded to that question without answering it, instead making a comment that committed the etymological fallacy while also violating Occam's Razor.
Are you saying that the universe existed for an indeterminate amount of time then something caused it to expand?
No. I'm not saying anything contrary to modern cosmology. The universe began, possibly along with time itself, in a manner that may or may not have been caused, it inflated very rapidly in the early period known as inflation before slowing down and is now expanding at a slower but increasing rate due to dark energy. There's a lot here that is far from fully understood even by the experts (of which I am not one), but the postulated causes of all of this are within the universe itself, as aspects of the nature of space, time, matter, and energy. None of this requires the universe itself to have a cause or be ontologically contingent upon some further entity.
Yes, that's probably a good idea.
But the point I'm making is that there never was a time when the universe didn't exist, so to talk of a beginning doesn't make sense.
My point is that You havent proven that time is necessary for cause and effect events. If time is just the relative positions of objects in space then such a concept may not be necessary for causal events.
You dont really know that universe beginnings are radically different from beginnings that we do have experience with. In fact from the characteristics of the universe such as having a beginning from a finite point and its expansion, it is behaving basically identical to other things within the universe that are caused or are effects.
We don't have any experience of causation where causes do not precede their effects, so while some other kind of causation might conceivably be possible, such a suggestion further supports my point that we are dealing with a case radically different from anything we have experience of, or to which we could therefore reasonably extrapolate.
Again, it isn't. That's not what time is.
I believe I have more than adequately supported that point. We have no experience at all of universe beginnings, of beginnings of (vs in) time, of causation from other dimensions of time, or of causation without time. We have no experience of any of this, so we have no basis on which to extrapolate to it from what we have experienced.
Actually we do have evidence of the nonphysical causing the physical. Your non-physical mind caused you to sit down and type this response. And we know that QM could not have caused the universe because QM requires an interval of our dimension of time in order to occur. Because at the Big bang our dimension of time = 0. And we do have observational basis for the universe having a cause, our observations show that it has all the characteristics of being an effect, ie a beginning and/or change.