Where did the universe come from?

This is the most important question because without the universe we would not exist. Most cosmologists believe that the universe started with the Big Bang. How did this theory come about? The answer is that it goes back to Einstein's relativity theories. Einstein knew that the universe had expanded but he came up with the idea that gravity had countered the expansion effect and the universe had settled into a steady state. He called this ratio of gravity versus expansion the cosmological constant. This idea was abandoned when Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was still expanding and that galaxies were moving away from one another. Einstein had the means to predict that the universe began with the Big Bang, but he was too enamored with a static universe to accept this idea. Even geniuses make mistakes.

It was Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, who coined the name 'Big Bang' to make fun of Edwin Hubble's idea that the universe is expanding and thus had an explosive beginning if you extrapolate the expansion of the universe back in time. Fred Hoyle insisted that the universe was static and not changing. This has since been proven to be wrong.

The most credible evidence for the Big Bang is the discovery in 1964 of Cosmic Background Radiation, the faint microwave signal that seems to come from every direction. This is hard evidence for what was previously only a theory. The microwave radiation is like a left over clue of a cosmic event some 14 billion years ago. This discovery changed everything.

So, if we accept that our universe started with a bang from an infinitely small primordial object, then the next question to ask is: where did the primordial object come from? This is where it gets dicey. There are lots of theories but no proof.

Religious leaders jumped on this Big Bang idea and said that it proves the existence of God, that God created the universe in this manner. They propose that nothing existed until God created time, space and all the energy required to create the universe that we live in. This concept is interesting in that it reveals many things about God. One is that God exists outside of time and space and that God decided to make a universe for a reason. That would suggest that God got bored and decided that He needed to create creatures less than Him (which are the only kind that he could create) so that they could recognize how great He is, or that He was lonely and decided that He wanted to create other beings because it gave Him something to love.

When I use the term less, I mean that we are flawed beings compared to God. God is perfect and immutable. But if that's the case, why did He need to create us if that was in fact His primary reason for creating a universe? That question leads us to another question of why do we exist? God certainly doesn't need us, and we're flawed. What's even worse is that in many cases we humans don't even care that God created us. Despite the fact that many people believe in a God, many more don't.

One thing that we don't understand is how God actually created the universe's primordial object. Did He take something of Himself to do it, or did He have access to stuff that He could form into the object. These are questions that religion cannot answer, and it appears that science is unable to come up with a provable theory to explain it.

Most cosmologists don't consider God to be the primary reason the universe exists. They don't like the idea that nothing existed and that a primordial object just popped into existence. Some quantum physicists do accept the idea that quantum particles can pop in and out of existence because of the Quantum Uncertainty Principle. That's a provable concept, but to suggest that the Uncertainty Principle is the reason for the primordial object that led to the Big Bang is a stretch. Most cosmologists accept the fact that the Big Bang just happened without a creator's intervention.

So, how could the Big Bang just happen? That's a big question in cosmology. The reason for this is that many believe that the primordial object was a singularity, which is an idea that no one understands. A singularity is what happens when one compresses matter to the point that it violates Einstein's relativity theories. It's could be what's inside a black hole. However, no one has been able to describe a singularity or even prove that it exists.
There are, however, several theories to explain what happened to cause the Big Bang.

The most prominent theory is the Brane Theory. Branes, or membranes, are part of string theory. Branes can be thought of as two-dimensional sheets in which strings (think of subatomic particles like quarks here) are attached. There are infinite numbers of these branes and they occasionally make contact, resulting in Big Bangs, which means that there are lots of universes. All of this is based on mathematics. There is no physical evidence for strings or branes.

The Lattice model assumes that there is an infinite lattice of fermions (elementary particles like electrons, protons and neutrons and the particles that make them up) that are distributed over the fundamental domain (a region of space) and that they were in the lowest entropy state possible before the Big Bang. This still doesn't explain why the lattice was there in the first place.

The Big Bang is the result of a Big Crunch that occurs occasionally from an infinite number of bubble universes when gravity pulls matter back down to a singularity. This assumes that bubble universes formed at some point during the expansion period directly after the Big Bang, but why they would do this is unknown, or at least unproven.

The Hartle-Hawking state is a theoretical idea that the singularity that exploded into the Big Bang always existed without a space and time boundary. The time and space boundary only came into existence after the Big Bang. This still doesn't explain why that singularity was there.
None of these theories can be proven other than mathematically.

So where does that leave us? We know that the Big Bang occurred, but there is no real proof about how it happened. It just did.

I believe that something as complicated at the universe could not have been an accident. It had to have been planned. Things exist for a reason, at least that's what seems logical to me. A supreme being was responsible, but there is no proof of this. It's just something that one must believe in without proof. That's called faith.

Thanks for reading.