Well I know which horse I’m backing.
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Throughout our history we have explained the things we don’t understand with the supernatural; thunder, lightning, earthquakes, plagues were all believed to be the work of god(s) until we understood them through science. I fully expect this process to continue.
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I don’t know. I’m hardly clever enough to have a deep understanding of theoretical physics at that level. But there are lots of scientist who are really clever working on these theories.
Here is a good video setting put everything we do know, which takes us back to seconds after the Big Bang.
As to what caused the Big Bang, who knows? There are scientists who speculate that the universe may have arisen from a bubble in the quantum foam which underpins reality, and the universe is only one of countless others spontaneously emerging and collapsing again. Others think that the universe may have resulted from a collapsed black hole in a prior universe. And there are other theories that suggest the universe is cyclical, expanding and contracting over and over again.
On the subject of God, I think it’s interesting that over the last few hundred years, it has been a process of removing the God hypothesis from various scientific questions. We used to think God was the reason for the weather, diseases, successful agriculture, the formation of the earth, the solar system, the diversity of life and so on.
When those things were cutting edge science, there will have been loud prominent voice arguing for God’s role in them. Those voices were proved wrong, and we no longer need to God in those theories.
So the God idea has basically been in retreat now for centuries, and at no point, in no area where God was once considered a possible resolution to a problem, has the God idea actually survived.
At this point in time there are really only two questions that the God hypothesis can be plausibly entertained - that’s what created the Big Bang, and what started life. I think we’ll have plausible scientific theory for the second of those in my lifetime as we’re quite close to this, but the first may remain elusive.
My issue is then this. Every time God has been put forward as an answer to a scientific question, it’s failed. What is it about this one that will be different?
I can’t remember who to attribute the line to, but I like this: Religion was our first attempt to understand our world. And because it was our first, it was also our worst.
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Hitch.
As for the origins of the universe:
And pretty much most of these:
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Thank you, found those videos and your words really interesting. The one part I still find unsatisfactory is ‘perhaps the first universe was always there and our human understanding is unequipped to accept that fact’. That doesn’t feel a huge jump from ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ (equally unsatisfactory). Though I guess you’ll say many scientists are unsatisfied with that theory either and will remain so until it’s solved.
The Einstein quote saying it’s the same as asking what’s north of the North Pole seems a bit silly
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If it’s any consolation, we can’t get our heads round the universe’s size / shape either. Our current understanding is that matter is currently expanding into a seemingly endless void.
That’s no consolation, except to an agnostic 
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Hawkings view was that there is no God. His view is that before the Big Bang there was no “time” (time = 0 started at the moment of the Big Bang) and therefore no time for any God to create any Universe.
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@Klopptimist thank you for the Radio 4 Infinite Monkey Cage links. I wasn’t familiar with the programme. Around the 23 min mark in the pre Big Bang discussion, Brian Cox shared a sense of wonder he has about the fact that we are here talking about these matters; and that what started as a hot, dense, random state ended up in this dignified sense of order we have today.
I connected with that part, but ultimately the programme didn’t satisfy. The one thing I was waiting for was an answer to what came before the Big Bang, how all of this had its first cause, but there was no real explanation.
At present the current answer is we don’t know.
We don’t know where the matter first came from.
We don’t know where the first chemicals came from.
We don’t know how chemistry organized into the first closed cell structure.
We don’t know how it came alive.
And we don’t know how it became conscious.
I am thankful for science but there are some very significant ‘how’ questions that are unanswered to date.
Still, I do like the idea of infinite universes, because it means that in one of them we are having this same discussion, only Klopptimist and Mascot have faith in God, while some other fella called Red over the Water is trying to tell you it’s all a load of bollocks!
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@Mascot thank you for the links too.
Heres Brian Cox’s view on god and the big bang
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We do know some of that stuff. We know where matter and elements came from. it came from the cooling of the early universe, micro differences in density, gravity and then ultimately the birth and death of stars.
I’ll look up on whether we know the next steps towards the development of life. I’m personally not sure on that one but we surprisingly know quite a bit right up to some miniscule moment after the big bang. Worth also noting the big bang wasn’t an explosion of sorts. It was a rapid, very rapid expansion of something the size of a grapefruit.
This happened 13.8 billion years ago and there’s not been a peep of what started that process since. Everything since that moment is explainable via known physics and nature to my knowledge. Very little room for divinity sorry.
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Absolutely.
But the grapefruit? Where did it come from? That’s what I’m after. It gave rise to matter, elements, etc.
Did it magically appear from nothing? Is that what you believe? Serious question, help me out.
I know theories that talk about infinite universes, or other theories about a continual cycle of Big Bang-expansion-contraction-black hole-big bang-expansion-contraction…etc. Some of those things are dealt with above in the various links.
It doesn’t satisfy because there is a significant assumption that the raw material was just there, ready to give rise to all that we observe.
I find that to be a massive leap of faith, sorry.
I am less au fait with quantum physics, but talk of quantum foam again gives me the same sort of reaction.
Where did that come from?
I am mindful of the notion of a first cause. I think it may have been Aristotle, but others can feel free to correct if I have my wires crossed. Basically, you can’t just have an infinite chain of events going all the way back with no beginning. Or if people want to argue that you can, and the universe has no beginning, and we don’t know how the materials got here to give rise to all this, but instead it was always just there… then sorry, that’s a massive leap of faith to believe that.
Why cant you?
Just because the human brain struggles to comprehend the idea that something is eternal does not make the idea incorrect.
Consider it in relation to “God”
God has either (a) always been there - an eternal form or (b) God is something created by another God.
If (b) is the case then who / what created the God that created God? And then on we go into an infinite past.
Why is it so hard to comprehend and accept the eternity of say matter, when you can readily accept the eternity of a “God”
I am not even suggesting this eternal theory is correct - I don’t know and I’m pretty sure nobody else does, but your statement is a self defeating argument.
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And that’s problematic for the religious? 
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If what you are ultimately getting at is God did it, then you also have to apply the same logic. What caused god? Where did he come from? Who created him?
This is why it’s a satisfactory answer.
I’ll just pick this put, because I completely disagree, and I think this is a misunderstanding of what science is.
No scientist is saying ‘I know this happened/exists. I feel it in my heart. It’s been privately revealed to me. I just know it’s true’.
That’s the essence of faith. It’s not how science works.
No scientist is basing their theory of the Big Bang on what the feel is true. The questions you’ve raised are good ones, but either we know the answers through evidence and testing, or we don’t know but that means we try to find out.
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Straight from the Stone Age to a written language…
Impressive.
You’ve lost me there
?
I think he just means that you’ve missed out the Bronze Age and the Iron Age that fell between the Stone Age (that ended c.5,000 BCE) and 500 BCE.
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Ah I see
OK I will rephrase
And that small but important change obviously solves the God v Science debate.
Now that’s sorted, shall we move on to a simpler discussion, say the evolution of consciousness?