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Originally Posted by Shauk
I have a question, Let it be known that I didn't read all the links posted, I'm easily distracted between monitoring some important things and work and these forums and so on... anyway, question...
A few really.
So lets say that Evolution is a fact, everyone wants to look backwards at where it started, thats where people wonder about creation in the since that "poof" you're in existance cuz I said so -Big G vs. "you used to be a monkey" - Evolution.
so, both theories fail hard in my mind when people are completely OK with not answer the question (when aimed at religion) "Where did god come from, who made god? and if something made him, what made that? and so on, how does SOMETHING form from NOTHING?
likewise, lets say we started ala "Spore" as a sea amoeba or something of the sort. The climates, the dirts, the gasses, the water, all of it that it took to make a coctail of "hey look, I made a fish on accident!" - Natural Causes.
Where did space come from? where did matter come from?
be it water, air, dirt, gasses.
theres no SOURCE to any of this that anyone can determine, nor seemingly ever will be able to determine.
it's pretty easy to realize that Science can't provide all the answers, but then again, Religion can't tell me where their god(s) came from, so neither of them work for me.
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This is getting
heavy into cosmology and doesn't have a whole lot to do with evolution specifically except in the larger 'everything connected to everything else' sense. Still, I'll answer as best I'm able and hope the answer makes sense to you.
Basically, it goes like this. We know that the Universe came into being at some point. There are several different ways we have of intuiting this, and I'm not going to get into them, but basically there was nothing and then there was. This was about 14 billion years ago, give or take a few hundred million. We're actually almost entirely certain of this; the Universe started out as an infinitely small, dense point that contained all of existence, which subsequently exploded. Where we go from there depends on who you talk to. What's interesting, however, is that the concept of time is tied into our Universe; specifically, leading theories hold that it may actually be tied into the Universe's expansion. Modern quantum theory states that the Universe may exist in as many as 10 dimensions, including both the three classical dimensions and time. What that means, then, is that if the Universe is compressed into one super-singularity, there is no time. See, we compress it to the point where the normal rules no longer apply. This is why we say it's infinitely small - it's literally so small that the dimensions of it are impossible to measure.
So what does that mean? Well, simply put, it means that there's no 'before' before the big bang.
I'm going to stop here for a second. I want you to read the above sentence again. Read it carefully. Then read it once more. Then take a second and really think about the implications. Go ahead, take as much time as you need, I'll wait.
....
Dig it? Good, let's move on.
So here's where we get to diverge a little bit. The theological answer to where everything comes from as it connects with the Big Bang theory goes a little like this:
Since time is a facet of our Universe and only exists when our Universe exists, there's no 'before' before the big bang. Given that, God doesn't need something to come before him. Existing outside of time, he can literally will himself into existence. There needs be no predecessor, since as soon as he's there he's always been there and always will be there.
Trippy, I know.
The secular answer? Basically a set of shrugged shoulders. Essentially, we are contained entirely within our Universe (I'm not going to go into why, so hopefully you'll trust me on that). What that means is that we have no way to observe anything outside of our own Universe. Since at the point of the Big Bang our entire Universe was contained within an infinitely small point, we have no way of observing what came before or what may have existed apart from our Universe and for that reason the question is meaningless and irrelevant.
Above I mentioned the little nooks in scientific theory that allow modern science and theology to be friends with each other. You, my friend, have found another one. We don't know what created the Universe. We can't know. Cosmic accident or all-powerful creator, believe whatever makes you happy.