Guru Deepak Chopra Endorses Big Bang, Says 'There Was No Time Before Creation

Following Deepak Chopra's viewpoints and theoretical constructs can be quite confusing -- especially if you're trying to track with him a long period of time. The Indian medical doctor, public speaker, author, blogger, spiritual analyst and Twitter enthusiast (did I miss anything?) has written more than 50 books, penned a ton of blog posts and news articles, and has sent (as of 10 a.m. ET this morning) 17,068 Tweets. In a sense, he's everywhere and discussing practically everything.

Yesterday, the all-around guru Tweeted the following message to his 555,672 followers:

While Twitter doesn't offer much room to expound beyond 140 characters, this Tweet seems to indicate that he embraces the following:

• The Big Bang is the hub of "instant creation," in which everything came into being at one, particular moment
• Chopra does not embrace the notion that God created the world in "6 days and a day of rest"
• And, the bombshell: "...there was no time before creation."

It is this last point that seems problematic when pitted against some of the guru's former writings and statements. If one assumes that there was no time before the Big Bang occurred, the notion of a "God" seems implausible. This goes back to the "there had to be something before nothing" debate.

Pinning Chopra's thoughts down on the matter of universal creation is extremely difficult. When discussing the "God particle" in a June 2010 Huffington Post piece, he wrote:

Physical forces cannot explain such exquisite order, much less the meaning we derive from it, which is why God came into being. The God particle delivers the tiniest bits of the clock but not the maker. I do not mean that an actual person in the sky made the universe. Keeping strictly with the scientific worldview, the maker must be impersonal, intelligent, universal, invisible, yet manifest in the visible world. The only viable candidate is consciousness...

As science continues to probe the exotic and extreme reaches of physics we can take some comfort that we are actually coming closer to understanding what is most intimate to us, our own consciousness, our self. The tangible springs from the intangible, and that intangible is what we are and what we call God.

Confused? You're not alone. Back in August 2005, Chopra also discussed the universe's origins, slamming both "fundamentalist Christians" and evolutionists for politicizing the debate. In his analysis, he presented a number of challenges to consider and claimed that the universe does, indeed, have "intelligence" in its design:

...progress is being discouraged, I imagine, thanks to fundamentalist Christians. By hijacking the whole notion of intelligent design, they have tarred genuine scientific issues with the stain of religious prejudice.

In a piece posted the next day, Chopra wrote:

Before there is intelligence in action, there is the potential for intelligence. This must precede the Big Bang and still exists at a subtle level of Nature.

This seemingly contradicts the Tweet he sent today. If there was no time before creation, as he contends, then how could intelligence have preceded the Big Bang?

But, this is par for the course. Chopra is an intellectual who is looking for answers, while embracing some potentially odd possibilities (depending on who you're speaking to). Below, watch Chopra discuss the theory that we exist in a "holographic universe" that may be projected by a "2D flatscreen" with Dr. Stuart Hameroff (yes, they are discussing the possibility that we are all part of an elaborate hologram):

Thoughts?