(August 21, 2019 at 9:31 pm)Lek Wrote: I'm more of a philosopher than a scientist, but I'm taking what I understand from science and I'm philosophizing. If energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, that means that they share an intrinsic quality with God. They have always existed with no beginning, and they will continue to exist into infinity. Those are qualities are also given to God. Could this match up in any way with a pantheistic understanding of the universe? If I use science as a basis for my understanding, there couldn't have been an occasion when nothing existed, so energy and matter could not have been created.
His ideas on this topic have not yet reached a point of consensus, but the late Stephen Hawking argued that spontaneous creation of the universe without the need for any god could one day be explained via quantum theory. Hawking relies on the idea of the existence of a multiverse in which matter and energy spontaneously erupt in endless "big bangs".
The state of science on this topic can best be described as in a state of conjecture and exploration. So I do not put this idea out there as "the" explanation for how the universe began. I only mention this to point out that there is an interesting possibility that science will one day be able to explain the spontaneous genesis of our universe, but in our version of genesis, there will be no need for god.
