The question is, "How did the universe get here?"

Your answer is, "God made it."

But that does not answer the question, it just postpones it.
I reply, "How did God get here?" You see, you haven't answered anything, you've just replaced one unanswerable question with another one just like it. You have made no progress at all.

The proper way to speculate on these sort of philosophical matters is the way we did here a little while ago when we talked about the role of consciousness in the cosmos, and about whether the universe looked like a computer simulation, or a hologram. Its perfectly legitimate to speculate and ask questions, even questions that may have no answers, to try and find a theory that fits some of what we observe. But your tone of voice is not one of honest questioning, you're trying to sell an agenda.

And spare us the pseudoscience and techy-sounding words. You know nothing about science. Now, being ignorant about science is neither a crime nor a disgrace. But pretending you're not in order to justify your uninformed ideas is.

Religious people have a ready-made cheat for this contradiction. They say things like "God has always been here." How the hell do they know that? It's certainly not obvious to me. Hell, if "God has always been here", why can't the universe have always been here? After all, the universe is a lot simpler than God, so its origin should be easier to cavalierly explain away than God's.

Besides, the problem with the religious POV is not that they say there is a God. After all, they might be right. The stupidity, the arrogance, the pure conceit and self-importance of this attitude is that they have the audacity to make statements about what this hypothetical God's properties and characteristics are, as if their faith gave them some sort of special insight we heathens lack. I've spent my whole life studying the universe, trying to make sense of it, trying to come up with at least some working hypotheses about what is going on, with no answers. And the God people come strolling in pontificating that they know all the answers, and how that entitles them to live forever in paradise (providing they kiss God's ass first). That really takes an inflated sense of exaggerated self- importance. I find it insulting and intolerable.

I'm sorry if you find my comments harsh and unforgiving, Johannes. But this is not just a disagreement on investigative methodology and interpretation. This is a forum dedicated to scientific inquiry, not the justification of and apology for tribal and medieval myths. The belief in a deity is not necessarily a bad thing, it may not even be a wrong thing, but the idea that there is a God which must be worshipped with certain prescribed and agreed-upon rituals and doctrinal agreement among the worshippers is the most evil and destructive pathology that has ever infected the human mind. It has caused more pain and suffering and misery and death than almost anything else man has ever come up with as a collective philosophy. It will not find a welcoming reception here.