The question, "Where did the Universe come from? is usually answered "God made it?" That's not an answer, it's a postponement of an answer.

The next logical question is "Where did God come from?", and you are right back where you started from, having made no progress at all. Only the nomenclature has changed somewhat.

Most people have recognized the pointlessness of this line of reasoning by the time they are 12 years old, and move on to either unquestioning faith or total skepticism. But the point is that even if we concede the absurdity of the question, that is not an answer either, and the question is still there, unknown, unanswered.

The idea that the universe is a quantum fluctuation, a random event that would have to arise eventually if you just waited long enough, may sound more scientific, but it is just as arbitrary and unsupported an assertion as the one about "God making it". It may be true, (as may be all that God nonsense, for that matter) but it is still an empty assertion.

I hesitate to say that we should simply stop asking stupid questions that can't be answered. After all, not asking questions, however stupid they may be, doesn't sound like a very useful strategy for learning new things.

I propose we just shelve the God/existence question for the time being and ask an even more fundamental question, one that is already partially answered. "What am I?" What is the "I", the "it", the Id that asks that question, in other words, what is consciousness? The universe we perceive may not be here at all, it may be just a dream, after all, we do dream about non-existent things every night, do we not? But we can't just brush away the consciousness that easily, can we? Cogito Ergo Sum, and all that. (Or it's irreverent counter, "I think I think therefore I think I am."

Consciousness (or at least, our own consciousness) appears to be the only fact about the universe we know for sure. Or at least, its the one fact we seem to have the best evidence for. Quantum physics tells us the very act of perception alters the nature of the observation, relativity tells us the observation depends on the relationship between observer and observed. Entropy is described by thermodynamics as being an increase in disorder that can be reversed by energy. It appears that our physics is shot through with psychological concepts like perception, observation, order/disorder, work, the universe follows "laws", all actions that seem to implicate consciousness and physical reality in subtle ways. The whole idea of the "external world" is totally dependent on "internal psychological states", whether we like it or not. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it does it make a sound? The question should be "does it matter if it makes a sound or not".

Of course, as some cognitive scientists assert, consciousness itself may not be a real thing at all. Maybe consciousness is an illusion, a function biological organisms have evolved in order to help process information and facilitate interacting with their environment. It may not be real at all, it may be just an epiphenomenon, a word whose meaning is so unclear to me I hesitate to look it up lest I be hopelessly biased by what I learn. (Dictionaries tell you nothing you don't already know, they just get the spelling right.) We have all seen people predictably responding to a situation automatically, as if they were programmed automatons, and they are no doubt convinced they are reasoniong their way through it all. Animals exhibit this behavior in spades. Well, perhaps all thinking beings do this, but are just too dull to realize it. Maybe we are all programmed robots, unaware of the levels of self-reference or iteration we access, so we imagine we are actually thinking. Or maybe our suspicions are correct, and what we do is fundamentally different from what a Turing Machine does. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, "Either way, that's a pretty soberin' thought."

It is pretty clear that consciousness plays some kind of role in the universe. And yet we can't even say for sure whether or not we are conscious, or whether we are just following a program too complex for us to recognize as such. You will recall Turing suggested that if you could communicate with a machine without being able to say with certainty whether or not it was a machine, it was for all intents and purposes, conscious. It had intelligence.

Some clever computer programs already are capable of having fairly long and involved conversations without failing this test, that is, alerting their human correspondents to their true nature. It's not a stretch of the imagination to posit a device that no one could suspect was inanimate, no matter how long they "talked". But even if this were possible, would such a machine be self-aware? Do all human beings report a consciousness? Or are some of us merely highly recursive? After all, we often go through long stretches of activity where we do not watch ourselves thinking, or express ourselves internally with language, as when we play a musical instrument, or ride a horse, or operate a vehicle, or exercise. Would that be conscious thought? Does asking that question even make sense, or are we simply projecting that aspect of ourselves to other people, to animals, or to mechanical devices? And what about recursiveness? Can a subroutine call itself?

If it ever gets answered, this is where the question "How did the Universe get here?" will be settled. Not in the physics lab, or the theoretician's equations, but in a mind thinking to itself. The answer to the ultimate question, indeed, the ultimate question itself, is not open to scientific investigation. But it may be vulnerable to human thought.