I checked 1 and 3 also, despite them seeming contradictory.
First, they’re only contradictory if you take “eternal” as meaning “has always existed” rather than “will exist forever”, OR if you take “eternal” to mean something other than “for all time” with the caveat that time may be part of the universe that makes no sense to talk about without the universe.
Second, the current best hypothesis seems to be a multiverse, and picking 1 and 3 seems to be the closest way to pick that.
I doubt there are many here on SD who believe in the same kind of universe that Einstein did when he invented the cosmological constant. My guess is that most people who picked #3 meant something quite different than that. I’d be interested to hear.
If anything can exist without being created, then … something can exist without being created. This argument doesn’t add any weight to either the “God” explanation or the “by itself” explanation. IMHO, the “God” explanation is more complicated and less understandable, so I prefer the “by itself” one, but I admit that’s far from any kind of proof, and I could easily be wrong.
The fact that something exists without having been created is the fundamental paradox. It’s proof that reality is absurd, at least from the human frame of thought. It’s inescapable, so get over it, and move on. If we can prove anything else from this fundamental absurdity, I sure don’t know what it is!
I say “paradox”, but it’s not a logical or mathematical paradox. It’s just something that’s hard to wrap one’s head around. Well, infinity is also hard to wrap one’s head around, but if one is careful and follows the (nontrivial) rules, one can do serious math with infinity and get perfectly ordinary, verifiable, meaningful results. So, scientists and mathematicians “got over” the oddness (from human standpoint) of infinity. I believe that most have also come to terms with the fact that something has to have been uncreated.
This is a good point. The introduction of god to explain this inherent paradox does nothing to further our understanding. You might as well claim the early universe was rhubarb-flavoured and that is why it came from nothing, it makes exactly as much sense and has exactly as much explanatory rigour.
Presumably, in the same supernatural form in which he exists today. But I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter, since “before the universe was created” is rather outside the scope u=of human understanding.
I guess it depends on how you define “forever”. If we accept that time began with the creation of the universe, then he would have been around ‘longer than forever’.
The currently accepted scientific theory dates the ‘beginning of the universe’ back to a point 15 or so billion years ago. So our universe as we know it today hasn’t been around forever; it’s been around for 15 billion years. Of course, we can not, by (current) definition, know anything about what happened “before the universe was created”; indeed, it’s not even necessarily the case that the phrase “before the universe existed” has any real meaning. So again, we’re left with “the universe, in some form, was already there, but we have no way of knowing anything about its nature”, or “God created the universe, but we have no way of knowing anything about how or why, or what everything was like before that point”.
Really, I think the two statements are functionally equivalent. Both seek to provide an answer to a question about which it is literally impossible for us to know the answer. So in either case, you have to accept your answer ‘on faith’.
Aliens did it… If aliens could create the universe, I don’t see how you would distinguish them from God. God did it… never bought that one. If God created the universe, who created God? The universe is eternal and infinite… infinite, maybe, but all evidence indicates it had a definite starting point. Big Bang… a theory that will likely turn out to be flawed in major details, but the best we have for now. Do I give a crap? Well, perhaps not about the answer, but I think asking the question is an important sanity test for our species.