Smart children understand that references to god or to the big bang are cop-outs. They are ways of saying "We have no idea. Please stop asking." Most kids do as told and settle for the daily business of homework and play. Others grow up to probe religion or science further (or both, as in Dr. Barrett's case).

I am sympathetic to the epistemic-cosmogonic pickle because I am a determinist. I believe that one thing leads to another, and that the one thing was caused by another thing that came before it. I recognize that this view leads to trouble because it tempts us to go and look for a beginning and end. Abraham's religions see the beginning in an act of creation performed by an all-powerful god (still, it took him 6 days. why?), whose own origin must not be explored. Abraham's religions see the end in a swirl of destruction, redemption, judgment, and other cataclysms. Some (many?) physicists have a similar, yet oddly inverted view. They suggest that the beginning was cataclysmic. It was a BIG bang after all. The end, by contrast, shapes up to be anticlimactic. Death by heat and entropy. Boring. The end means that the last effect will not get to be the cause of anything.

Much as I enjoy placing science in front of metaphysical conjecture, I realize that the beginning-end problem is a headache for both of them. Both provide answers that are fundamentally unsatisfying. They demand an end to the questioning, and they invite resignation or blind belief. But why would you want to resign or accept blindness at the point where it gets really really interesting?

One interesting way of dealing with the beginning-end problem is to define it out of existence. Who created god? A god before him. What came before the Big Bang? Another universe that also started with a Big Bang. Likewise for the end not being an end but another beginning. This idea is a version of the old "it's-turtles-all-the-way-down argument."

Little boy: What's holding the earth in place?
Shaman Brahman: The earth rests on a turtle.
Little Boy: What does the turtle stand on?
Shaman Brahman: On another turtle.
Little Boy: And what does that turtle stand on?
Shaman Brahman: It's turtles all the way down.

To the intuitive mind, the reference to more of the same sounds like a cop-out and it runs up against our inability to imagine infinity. To the logical mind, this argument also sounds like a cop-out because it involves infinite regress, which is question-begging.

My way of getting around the cosmogonic headache comes from an argument Nietzsche made in Zarathustra and elsewhere. Perhaps inspired by Pythagorean or Indian texts, Nietzsche proposed that time is not linear but circular. There is a deterministic sequence in which each event is the effect of earlier events and the cause of later events. The sequence is arranged in a closed loop. Time travels around this great loop and ultimately returns to exactly the same spot. Nietzsche calls this vision the law of eternal return. Notice that his conception is not quite Indian because it does not assume that we are in the world to meet a challenge or fulfill a mission, and that if we do, we will return in a better position and ultimately not return at all because we have reached nirvana. To Nietzsche, there is neither progress nor regress, and thus no nirvana; there is only the endless loop.

In the Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote:

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence."

Little Boy: Who or what started the sequence?
JK: Go play.