ABSTRACT
Hell, some wit in antiquity once suggested, was made by God for those who asked what he was doing before he made Heaven and Earth. The quip is retailed by Augustine of Hippo (Confessions 11.12.14), in an uncharacteristically light moment in a serious disquisition about time. The point of the joke, he tells us, is that before the Creation, time did not exist, so there is no point in asking about any ‘before’. Modern cosmologists face a similar problem when dealing with questions about what happened before the ‘Big Bang’, which currently holds sway as the best theory for the beginning of the universe. Before this event there could be no time, nor space, so the question, ‘What happened before?’, is just as meaningless now as it was in Augustine’s day.1
