The universe either created itself, was created by something else, or has always existed. All three options are quite unbelievable.
Without any apparent impetus, how does all of ‘this’ just spring into existence? Where was all of this potential matter before it existed?
If (a) “god” created it, who created that god?
And if it has always existed, well, something stretching backwards for infinity, without a beginning, is just hard to wrap one’s head around.
And, yet, here we are…
There is a very real and simple response of course:
“We don’t know…yet.”
The third one is the least unbelievable, just near impossible to wrap the mind around.
The others involve something existing before the universe.
I agree, that it has always existed, is the only one I can wrap my pea brain around. We may or may not have a better understanding of what it is when we die, but not before.
I comfort myself with the thought that when I die, I’ll either have answers to these types of questions or I will cease to exist. Either way, I’ll have no more questions.
Also depends on what you mean by the “universe.” Is this the “only” one which has ever existed or ever will, or are there countless others in different dimensions, across space, and/or time (Many Worlds/Black Hole Genesis/take your pick).
E=mc2.
And according to deGrasse-Tyson, probably never will, as we can’t see past a certain point in space. As for God. . .well, that’s a strictly human construct and therefore suspect from the get-go. Ascribing things to a non-scientific entity just rubs me the wrong way.
Here’s a song to help your pondering
And perhaps we’ll never know, but that’s still okay because we’ll never know everything about everything in the Universe. Accept that the Universe exists, and pick any of the hundreds of creation theories that suits you. It doesn’t really matter, does it?
You’re making the utterly unwarranted assumption that there’s something called “time” which exists outside of the “universe”.
As a couple folks almost said, it’d be helpful to define what you think a / the “universe” consists of. Hint: that is not a simple question to answer.
There is an “outside the universe”?
We’re just clueless. The more powerful the telescopes become, the more clueless we seem to be. The huge “universe thing” (whatever it is) just seems to get bigger and bigger. More galaxies than grains of sand on a large beach. It’s all incomprehensible. We have no idea what we really are. We just know that something self-aware, whether illusory or not, appears to provide a framework for sailing through this enormous whatever. Despite this complete lack of answers, I can’t stop asking questions about what it is, where it came from, and where it’s going. Sigh. The human condition.
Depends on which definition you use and what you believe about everything else. But yes, thete may well bevadtly more out there which is not what we amatuers conventionally think of as “the universe”
Same with time. What does “always” or “before” mean if what we amateurs conventionally think of as time is a local property of the current universe?
We took my son to the planetarium on a recent vacation. After two videos on space, we went in for a third. My SIL said, “I’m gonna bow out. Space freaks me out.”
Fair.
What was the last video? Black Holes.
While John De Lancie narrated a description of being torn apart at the subatomic level by a supermassive black hole, my son was beside himself with delight.
Afterward, I came out of that theater and told her, “If space freaks you out, you picked the right one to skip.”
I think about space a lot. And yeah it’s freaky as shit. There’s no answer that isn’t existential.
Sometimes I feel like God is deliberately messing around with us by leaving enough evidence that there’s something divine that created the universe but purposefully also leaving us little enough evidence that we think it’s not divine either.
Isn’t there a theory out there that says the universe and human consciousness are intertwined? That the universe can’t exist without human consciousness, and vice-versa? Or something like that.
I’ve also heard that the universe as we see it and experience it is not how it really is. Apparently our monkey brains filter, color, and reduce everything we see, and that we simply don’t have the computational power to even begin to see & understand what it really is. And hence much of what we think we know is false. Or something like that.
I kind of doubt that we’re going to.
We can find out all sorts of things about the universe; and have found out a lot of them. But that particular puzzle very likely isn’t one of them. I think there’s something about how the structure of logic works in human beings that doesn’t match up with whatever’s behind this sort of apparent impossibility. Some things about reality just don’t fit inside a human head.
Fun to keep trying, though.
Considering that everything we do think we know leads to the conclusion that for all but an utterly minuscule bit of the existence of the universe there have been no humans in it, that strikes me as massively unlikely. It also strikes me as the sort of thing made up by the sort of human who can’t imagine a universe without themselves in it.
So we may never reach the ultimate destination? It is the “yet” in my previous statement that gives life meaning, that gives us the reason to continue…that gives us the journey that is much more important than the destination.
You can’t always know, but you can usually know more.
I keep wanting to respond as if this were Great Debates.
There is no evidence that “something divine … created the universe.” There is only ignorance (i.e. lack of knowledge) and supposition (because some are uncomfortable with uncertainty).
The people I know who think that there is nothing divine behind the creation of the universe (a phrase that is, essentially, meaningless) do so for logical reasons, not due to “lack of evidence” (see previous paragraph).
And yet that’s the one that has the least evidence supporting it. Or maybe it’s better to say that we have evidence that contradicts the hypothesis of an infinitely old universe, while we don’t have any evidence to contradict the other two hypotheses.
There we get into the definition game. If by God you mean the Abrahamic God followed by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, or one of the others from the multitude of polytheistic religions like Hinduism or the various historical ones, then I agree, we don’t have evidence to support that hypothesis.
On the other hand, if one of the other two hypothesis mentioned above (that the universe created itself or that something else created the universe) is correct, then there is still room for other kinds of deities. It just depends on how you define the word God.
In the universe creating itself ex nihilo hypothesis, one can (but doesn’t have to) make that into some kind of pantheism, with the universe itself being a God. In the universe being created by something else hypothesis, one is also free to speculate (but again one doesn’t have to) that whatever that creative force was is some sort of God, at least in the sense that it isn’t constrained by the rules that we have to play by within this universe.