Where did the universe come from? Atheistic origin science has no answer.

[JuliaL]

The bible's brand of creation is far from ex nihilo. According to the bible there was always God standing by with the potential to pull a universe out of his hat. The cosmological brat goes too far but he strikes me as someone enjoying a joke when he says it. Regardless he is either wrong or misleading, and if the latter it is probably for a good cause like increased book sales.

'Zactly.

Absolutely nothing means absolutely nothing. It does not include a universe creating potential in an omnipotent being.

I'm not a fan of the quantum fluctuation supposedly responsible for the origin of the universe "coming from nothing." This is inferred from models which are extrapolated beyond a point at which they lose predictive powers. Before that (causally, but not temporally as it was from this event that time itself emerged) the laws we've discovered by observation of existing consistencies may not hold. So conditions predicted by such laws also lose legitimacy. I find it quite plausible that the event which caused the universe involved a dimension into which we cannot look. If a two dimensional puddle receives a raindrop falling from a 3d sky, the impact just happens from the viewpoint of the flatlanders on the surface of the puddle. They can't look up. My view is that something we don't and possibly can't observe, as it occurs in a direction we can't see, happened to cause the universe and that is where we will probably have to leave the matter. "I don't know what happened" most emphatically does not include an old guy with a long beard who looks pretty much like us.