Where did the universe come from? If the answer is God, where did God come from? Did he create himself with his omniscience? Was he always there? The fact that God exists is sometimes justified by saying that if he didn’t exist, then there would be no plausible reason for the world to have appeared out of nothing. Nothing comes out of nothing, and the only thing that could subvert that rule would be a magnificent omniscient being, right?
One problem to note with all these questions, which is very rarely posed, is the following: Why is it assumed that the universe did not exist before? I think that this may have something to do with the fact that ever since the beginning of language and civilisation, humans have assumed that things were created. This creation myth, once doubted by secularism, may influence the thought pattern of the doubters, making them ask themselves “Well, if there was no God, what caused the world to start existing?”, not realising that they are making the assumption that the world did “start” existing at some point, instead of having existed forever in some form of another.
It makes more sense to believe that something existed all along, whether that be God or matter in some form, and if matter already existed, it does not need to be created by a god, it just needs to follow its unknown natural course and evolve into different natures, one of which we see today.
There is something called the Laws of Thermodynamics that state that matter cannot be created. This would support the assumption that everything has always existed, and that it has only transformed into its current state. Maybe the laws were wrong at some point in time and as soon as matter appeared, the Matter Creation feature was automatically turned off for the time being. But now that’s a theory worth taking to a crazy-people permanent-hotel.
Ok, so at this point in my writing, I realised that someone smarter than me has probably written about this topic before. And voilà, I found an article written by Mr. Hawking himself. It’s called “The Origin of the Universe” and mentions literally everything I already mentioned and much more. Here’s a link to the text
Do you think the universe started or that it has always been there in some form or another, eternally mutating?