"Eternity"

"Eternity" can be understood as the concept of "endless time." The page on "time" discusses time, which boils down to time = (our perception of) change. That brings eternity to "endless change".

What does it mean to end or to be endless? The page on "creation" discusses how things do not begin nor end from or to nothing. Instead, particles come together in an identifiable pattern (object), such as a log of wood. When the log is burned, we consider it to have reached its end, yet the constituent particles still exist, albeit now forming different patterns. The collection of particles that constituted the "log" disperse, and the compound object ceases to be. The log has ended ad-materia (ended into matter), but it has not ended ad-nihilo (ended into nothingness).

Ending into nothingness (ad-nihilo) and ending into matter (ad-materia) are very different concepts. There is no reason to believe that identifiable patterns end into nothingness, but there are grounds to think that almost everything ends into matter (including the universe), except, perhaps, matter/energy's capacity for change itself.

What the universe was and underwent before the Big Bang remains an ongoing and evolving debate among cosmologists. There may be a state of the universe in which change occurs differently, pauses, or does not occur at all. However if change stops occurring, there may still be an inevitable regaining of time, in which case it may not be considered an end.

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