The problem with prayer.

[robvalue]

I can affirm that I do not know to a certainty either.  I should have posed the question as given the information we have, what is your personal best guess for the beginning of the universe and the concept of time as we perceive it.

You're again assuming that there was a beginning to our reality and/or the time associated with it. We don't know either of those things to be true, before we even move onto speculating as to what they might be. Our reality may well have changed form at some point and/or had the rules associated with it changed. Maybe, maybe not.

Calling it the universe can lead to equivocating, because if you're trying to imply there is something not in the universe yet responsible for it, then whatever that is did not create "everything". This is why I prefer to use the term reality. It allows for any number of other things to possibly also exist, in some other way. Maybe this additional set of things is empty, maybe not.

If I had to guess, these feel like the two likeliest scenarios to me, because they involve the least number of assumptions:

(1) Our reality has always existed, in some sense, in some form

(2) Our reality is a manifestation of a process in another reality; maybe intentional, maybe not