Well, I don’t believe it was “created” at all - rather, it has always existed. And if someone calling themselves God told me otherwise, I’m afraid I wouldn’t believe him.
But explaining the universe and everything in it, including human philosophy? If I didn’t seek such an explanation, I would merely be living the life of an animal in clothes.
But that has nothing to do with Jesus Dying for Your Sins.
A few random thoughts:
I can conceive of reasons why the answer to this question might matter, but that’s not why it interests me. It interests me because it’s an interesting question. Goodness knows it doesn’t “matter” who wins the World Series (to me, none at all), but people talk about it, a lot.
In my observation, a lot of people find the notion of an uncaused universe to be irrational, impossible and/or disconcerting. I’m not one of those people, but understand the problem. Nothingness and void are scary. Is no one here afraid of heights?
As the child of a fundamentalist Young Earther (happily, she went off the deep end long after I left home), I’ve given a lot of thought to the question of why creationists cling so strongly to that view. IMHO, it’s mostly about inerrancy. Either the Bible is the literal divinely inspired of God or it’s just a book. Since it’s important that the book be the divinely inspired word of God - makes it self-validating and therefore indisputable true - they develop apologetics (e.g., here) to ward off the assault by science. And, in a sense, Rigamole is right. That they’re wrong doesn’t impact their daily lives, so the belief system is sustainable. We (most of us) may think they’re nuts. They don’t care what we think. They care about God.
In closing, my pet peeve. It has become common in this debate for people to say the Big Bang was the beginning of time. The Catholic Church has grown to love the theory for this reason, cuz, of course that not only permits but almost requires there to be God before the beginning. Thing is, that’s not what the theory says. All it says is that, whatever there might have been before the Big Bang (and nothing is one of the choices), we have no way of getting at that scientifically because the Bang was a singularity across which no data can have been transmitted to us.
Clarification. When I say “this debate,” I mean the cosmology debate in general, not this thread. And a typo, should have been “indisputably true.”
Err, one of the primary reasons for caring about how the universe was created is (for me) to determine whether it was created by a God. If that God simply came to earth and explained the process to us… well, where the universe came from won’t seem to matter as much anymore because it’ll be dwarfed by the sheer existence of that God. I’m with Whack-a-Mole and mamboman here. If we can somehow verify the authenticity of that God, eh, nothing else will really matter.
In that one being lies not just the “where” and the “when” but the “why” and the “how”. Why are we here, where are we going, and how are we getting there? If he’s willing to answer those questions, we either become gods ourselves from our omniscience or, at the very least, we’d know our purpose. In an instant, our species’s entire path would be laid out and we’d see the rest of our lives. Whether that’d make our lives more meaningful or completely meaningless, I do not know. Forget the forces of nature or new technologies or scientific discoveries. I mean… if you can see from the very beginning through to the very end, you’d have lived not just your life but the life of the entire universe in a single moment. Once you’ve seen that, you can’t make any choices anymore and you’d just be a slave to time, doomed to repeat everything you already saw in slow-motion. What’d be the point?
Of course, if God is limited to knowing only the beginning and not the end… well, that’d be very exciting indeed. Omniscience coupled with true freedom of action? Imagine what we could do! Knowing us, we’d probably end all of existence in the first few seconds 
And if he doesn’t answer ALL our questions but just the question of how we got to be here… well, he just won’t get as many people who believe he’s actually god. And depending on how detailed his answers are, they may or may not advance science and change our lives. Just ask yourself what you’d do if an alien UFO suddenly appeared and explained the first few moments of the big bang – we probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and God anyway, not unless we become truly omniscient.
I’d sue God for malpractice.
Hey Reply. As you will recall, I suggested in your prior thread that the cosmological proof is a side issue. If you want to know why, see here. Bear in mind, also, a comment I made later in that thread. Paraphrasing Homer, even assuming God made the universe, there’s no reason to infer that such a God pays the slightest attention to human affairs, much less sacrificed a part of himself to another part of himself then accepted that as vicarious atonement for mankind’s sins. God as creator-only is called Deism, and arguably not really a religion.
As for the OP, your last paragraph suggests to me a thought experiment. Suppose some UFO dropped by, heard about our interest in the question and said, “Hey, we can help you there, figured it out a few years ago.” Suppose further that the aliens confirm my understanding that the Big Bang is a singularity past which it is impossible for anyone, including them, to see. So, we would have the answer to the science question (insofar as it can be answered), which would make me very happy, but not the religious one. Now what?
George Carlin, from You Are All Diseased (1999). Only a small excerpt from a much longer rant.
I gotta tell you. The longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize that something is fucked up. Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. Just between you and me, in any decently run universe, this guy would have been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And, by the way, I say “this guy,” because I firmly believe, lookin’ at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this.
Yup, I agree with that. The God we find may not be the God we expect or want. I was just saying it’d be interesting if he cared enough to answer all our questions.
Like others have already pointed out, I think you’re missing something.
For one thing, we could save a lot of effort and money by exposing all the false Gods.
New WMAP results today: New Three Year Results on the Oldest Light in the Universe
The Bad Astronomer explains: New WMAP results: quantum fluctuations, galaxies, and the first stars
Only 96% of the universe is made of stuff we don’t know what it is.
Isn’t this thread a little late? We already know how the universe was created, at least down to the first 10^(some two digit negative number) second.
Also, “sick of hearing about it?” Really? It’s not like it’s blaring out of radios like a Britney Spears song. I’ve gone weeks without hearing anything about the origin of the universe.
And thanks for the links, squink. very cool.
You don’t really believe that settles the question of ultimate causation, do you?
/me hums the theme from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.
I don’t think much would change. The various theologians have a lot tied up in their present positions, and they’d find some way to make it seem like they were right. The scientists, at least the open minded ones, would make tremendous gains, but the church wranglers would remain ridgid. “God is what I say He is.”
And biological life is what exactly?
If I understand your point, you are suggesting that biological life is elusive of definition. Granting that, what has that to do with Asknott’s point?
As to the OP, if God Almighty himself came down to explain things, do you not think that the whole world would be affected? For one thing, people would stop worshipping all the false Gods. War would end. Peace and harmony would prevail. Poverty would cease to exist. We would be knee deep in scales that have fallen from eyes. No more pollution, hunger, strife…
Plus we would know how the universe had been made. Win win.
Maybe not with your scenario. However, suppose humans develop the means to actually figure it out and collect evidence in support of their having done so. Those means of analysis and the means of collecting the evidence to support of the analysis would doubtless effect a vast change in our lives.
To answer the OP: it is part of self-knowledge. To understand how the universe in its entirety got to be here casts a lot of light on what it means for me to be here. It defines me differently if I am:
• a byproduct of a long chain of happenstance events that are in turn byproducts of a finite amount of energy gradually winding down to embers
• a very small local subpart of a massive vaccuum fluctuation, the entirety of which occurred for no reason other than that it could
• a culmination of a weeks’ worth of deliberate creation on the part of an overarching conscious authority who put everything, including us, here
• the 213 octillionth form in which one of the myriad life-spirits that have been around since the dawn of time has been made manifest, to learn, make amends, suffer, and die anew
• one of the rebellious ungrateful denizens of creation who are living out the consequences of our distant ancestors having chosen chaos and destruction over purity and divinity, riding along as the entirety of creation continues on its way to crumble and decay into sewage and hate and death
• ______ (etc)