It takes the physical to create the physical, right? So what was the first physical entity to come into existence? I don’t expect to get an answer, I just want to hear some theories. I only know of two - the Big Bang and God. I’ve always liked the big bang theory, but something still had to create the universe. If the answer is God, well that’s fine, God is a non-physical (I assume) being that would be capable of creating something physical, but where did God come from? The only logical answer I can think of is that whatever came first just appeared out of (for lack of a better expression) thin air, which is not a very logical answer at all. Any idea’s?
If you believe in God, you believe that he’s been here for all eternity. Infinity. He always has been here and always will be. He wasn’t created, he just is. To understand that, you need to merely determine the last number in an infinite series.
If we’re talking about the Big Bang, I can’t really help you. It all came from the big bang, it all came from a single point in the universe. But when did nothing become something? I have no clue. Maybe the something has always been there as well. For infinity. It was only 13 billion years ago that the something exploded and created what we know as the universe today.
There is a theory that we are but one of many cycles of an expanding and collapsing universe. Eventually, all matter will collect in a big crunch, and then explode in another Big Bang again as an entirely new universe with entirely new laws of physics to govern us.
The explanation I got (that kinda makes sense to me) is that cause & effect themselves are not applicable to God, as He/She/It is not limited to the four dimensions that we are stuck with… cause & effect are a feature of this universe, so here something must have a beginning, while God exists in more than 4 dimensions (and has no need for cause & effect).
This forum, General Questions, is supposed to be used for questions that can be expected to come to a factual answer (though it might take some discussion to get there). I don’t think this one will turn out that way.
Anywho, the answer is–no one knows or can know. The laws of our universe only describe what happens within our universe. So, you can’t use science to figure out what happened before the universe existed. Perhaps someday we’ll work out some new ways to study the world which might pertain to some ‘superuniverse’ of which ours is just a part, but nothing like that exists now.
Science-minded people have had to get used to the fact that there are things that can’t be known.
As far as the religious angle, God also exists outside of science, so the only things you can ‘know’ about Him is whatever you have faith in. Only you can know that. If you want my opinion (rather than your own), post in Great Debates asking for it.
Time is an attribute of this universe, so you can’t have a “before” the universe, because there was no time then. Time starts when the universe exists, and it doesn’t make sense to talk about “before” time.
A bit heavy for a Monday, all this…
But that doesn’t make sense dylan_73. Even if we agree that time only started at the creation of the universe, that doesn’t help to explain how the universe came into being in the first place.
Perhaps the mass of the universe was held together until 13-20 billion years ago when the big bang occurred. Until then, it had always been there as a single point. Stretching backwards towards infinity, it has always been a single point.
But if we accept that, until the big bang, there was no time, there was nothing, then the universe had to come from somewhere! At some point nothing turned into something. Saying it happened at second zero doesn’t help to explain how second zero came into existence.
I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s still true! 
When you had ‘something’, then you had “second zero”. It makes no sense to say “where did that come from” because that implies that there was a time when it wasn’t there.
Or to put it another way, at no time did the universe not exist.
Because there was no time before the universe.
And, no, it couldn’t exist as a single point for any “time” either. I guess you have to abandon “time” as a concept, to understand it all, but my brain is too feeble to do that.
Told you it was heavy, for a Monday…
dylan_73 is exactly correct: time does not, did not, and cannot exist outside of the physical universe. There was no infinity or eternity before the Big Bang, because there was no before. If this makes your head hurt to think about, you’re not alone. Our pitiful and limited human minds cannot visualize something like this–in the same way that we cannot visualize something with four spatial dimensions.
Creating a concept of ‘god’ does not solve this problem. If one can accept that a creator can exist without having been created him/herself, then one should be able to accept that the universe itself does not need a creator.
-b
dylan_73 is exactly correct: time does not, did not, and cannot exist outside of the physical universe. There was no infinity or eternity before the Big Bang, because there was no before. If this makes your head hurt to think about, you’re not alone. Our pitiful and limited human minds cannot visualize something like this–in the same way that we cannot visualize something with four spatial dimensions.
Creating a concept of ‘god’ does not solve this problem. If one can accept that a creator can exist without having been created him/herself, then one should be able to accept that the universe itself does not need a creator.
-b
Man’s mind.
Don’t take this the wrong way, linolium420, but folks are correct in saying that this question is better suited to Great Debates than General Questions. I’m moving it over there now.
Yup. Time, space, mass, gravity are all related. (Einstein’s Relativity). The Big Bang wasn’t like a chemical explosion spiting matter into the universe. The entire universe exploded outward from the Big Bang.
Try visualizing something with 10 or 20 dimensions. There’s a theory now that all the matter in the universe can be modeled as “strings” instead of particles. This “String Theory” is part of an attempt by physicists to resolve the discrepancies between the laws of Quantum Physics (very small objects) and Einstein’s Relativity (larger objects). The problem is that it requires those strings to be modeled with something like 10 or 26 dimensions instead of the usual 4 (LxWxHxTime).
Supposedly, these “strings” can alternately behave as matter, photons, gravity, etc. That’s why they are useful for modeling such “exotic” events as black holes and the beginnings of the universe.
I’m sure someone with a greater knowledge of physics can explain it better than I can. Try this site:
How do we know this?
Yeah, the idea of the universe operating in 10 or 20 dimensions is just a tad mind boggling…
We know this from Einstein. We can see how time changes within a gravitational field or when we go faster for example, and predict those changes fairly accurately.
Therefore, instead of having just space, we have space-time, meaning that time is a property of the Universe itself; not something seperate.
Besides, if nothing happens (ie. you have nothing) how could you measure time? What would it be?
Of course, I’m using “know” in the scientific sense of “this seems to be true for everything we’ve observed so far” not in the sense “this is absolutely and inarguably true” which isn’t science at all.
Oh, and don’t be put off by bryanmcc’s final paragraph; I don’t see it as a problem at all, and I happen to be a theist 
Argh; I forgot to mention the book.
Have a read of “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene for a nice intro into this stuff. Get a preview at http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/greene-universe.html
What was first? It’s not known. Feel free to speculate &/or have faith but don’t claim knowledge.
That said, some interesting possibilities are, IMHO, God, a “Quantum Foam” metauniverse, and “Many Worlds”. Questions?
I’m not claiming personal knowledge, nor do I trust anyone who does (despite my experiential Christianity). However, I thought that cosmologists had reached the point where they were mostly in agreement that the “observer effect” (or something of the sort) pretty much required a Something or Someone on hand at the Beginning?
Well, my vote goes to the egg.
Short answer: no. You’ve drastically misunderstood the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
It is true that there are a few people who beleive that a conscious entity is somehow required to collapse the waveforms into a single state. But I don’t think any of those people are serious physicists or cosmologists. For an interesting fictional speculation on this idea, see Greg Egan’s “Quarantine”.
Asking what came before is very much like asking what is colder than absolute zero. It is a meaningless question. Trying to reach time zero is like trying to reach a temperature of absolute zero - you can get arbitrarily close but you won’t reach the “start” of the scale.
Try thinking of time logarithmically instead of linearly. You will then see that to stretch back to time = 0 is the same as stretching back to minus infinity. Or in other words, think of time slowing down as you go backwards - you can get as close as you like to t=0 but you can never actually reach it.
The universe has already lasted forever. By definition of “universe” and “forever”.
pan