Energy (or, orthodoxly, "matter"+energy) is always
conserved.
Everything is, theoretically, made of matter/energy.
So what do we mean when we say that something has been created or
has ceased to exist? Its constituent matter/energy has merely
transformed, ergo this thing has transformed "into"
something else. What does that mean exactly?
Surely the original object doesn't subsequently exist INSIDE OF
that "into"
which it has been transformed. (Or does it?)
If all that exists is matter/energy, then our 'things' that are
annihilated and created amount to perceptual categories. Sure,
these things exist inamuch as they are made up of matter/energy,
but since this matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed (big
bang and QP particle/antiparticle pairs not withstanding), these
things do not exist independently of our perceptual categories -inasmuch-
as they CAN be created or can cease to exist.
So, nothing "really" is ever created or ceases to exist.
This is not to say that Eastern Airlines or the library at Alexandria still exists, but that, exactly inasmuch as they HAVE ceased to exist, they amount to an abstraction/concept in mere reference to a particular part/aspect of what is/was.
Let's take, for example, a (wooden) chair. Over a very long
period of time, this chair will slowly rot into oblivion. Or it
might burn up in a fire.
During this process, there is no definitive point in time at
which the chair, as such, ceases to exist. At the end of this
process, you may unequivocally state that the chair no longer
exists, but choosing the exact point at which its constituent
matter/energy is no longer a "chair" is a complete
judgment call! It is arbitrary, hazy, and what it shows that we
do not have actual objects that are created and cease to exist,
but rather, actual matter/energy whose state is continually
shifting into and out of our relatively arbitrary categories like
"chair", or even "wood", vs. "dirt",
or even "light" and "heat."
(Even the transformation of energy in a chemical bond into
light/heat form, and the material separation of the atoms, is a
process/event, taking some amount of time, so there is a
continuum of state that ranges from fitting into one label to
fitting into the other label. The same applies even to the
nuclear tranformation of "matter" "into"
"energy.")
So what we have is eternal actuality vs. transient perceptual
categories.
This is an interesting realization in itself, but if you are expecting a more significant point, here it is. Page Two
And also, a less radical and more solid implication of the
above:
Nothing in our human experience truly has every been created or
destroyed.
So to extrapolate that, because everything we know of has been
created and will cease to exist, the universe itself must have
been created and must cease to exist (as opposed to being eternal,
something we have trouble comprehending, but is implied by
conservation of matter/energy), is a blatent error of the
intuition -- the universe itself contains ALL transient states of
matter/energy which we categorize as this thing or the other
thing which we think has been destroyed when its matter/energy
has transformed into another thing. That energy itself that can
take the form of anything we know of, has never been known to be
created or destroyed (*), and any state of that energy or matter
could be said to constitute 'the universe'.
*except for the big bang. which would seem to beg the question, but i'm only pointing out the error of the intuitive extrapolation, not the big bang theory per se. Also, it can be argued that the big bang was not a creation, because creation happens as the difference between a time at which something is absent, and the time at which it is present -- and there was arguably no time before the big bang. (And if there was, there must have been some kind of (eternal?) existence to give that time (which a measure of change) a context.)