Taken at face value, the philosophical implications of a cosmological singularity are staggering. At the very least, a universe that begins in a spacetime singularity poses an acute challenge to any materialistic theory of the origin of the universe. Indeed, a singularity implies that not only space and time but also matter and energy first arose at the beginning of the universe, before which no such entities would have existed that could have caused the universe (of matter and energy) to originate.
