DamianaRaven wrote: Serious questions, though, if I may. Do the two of you doubt or deny the existence of God? Also, how do you figure creation came about?
Obviously I can't speak for Eric, but I don't believe in God because there's no evidence one exists. I try to make my beliefs as scientific as possible, so I assume the null hypothesis until other evidence comes along. In this sense my lack of belief in God is really quite mundane: it's the same as anyone's lack of belief in bigfoot or unicorns or any of the gods other people believe in that they don't. There's no evidence they exist, so why believe? Certainly if one intuits from the evidence that God likely exists he's free to prefer that hypothesis. One is really only wrong on this issue if he makes an unsubstantiated and affirmative claim.
As for the creation: we don't know, and anyone who says otherwise is incorrect. It's now well established that the universe began with the big bang, as it's called, but the origin of that singularity is, at the moment, unknown. Some people like to assert it's God. Conceivably it is, but I see no reason why it had to be a God that created the universe. I tend to prefer hypotheses that don't require a creation, but a cycle. I prefer these hypothesis because they only rely on the current and extant laws of physics: no creator or creation event is necessary.
For a while the Big Crunch hypothesis was looking nice. According to this hypothesis, eventually the universe's expansion would stop because it would run out of energy, and everything would start collapsing into the center of the universe because of gravity. Eventually everything would collapse into a singularity and then potentially explode again in another big bang. Unfortunately, the Hubble Telescope discovered a problem with this hypothesis: the universe's rate of expansion is
increasing. We don't know why, but it probably has something to do with dark energy, whatever the hell that is.
One potential explanation that recently arose revolves around the Higgs' Boson. Basically, with our discovery of the Higgs' Boson, we've narrowed down the size of the boson to a specific range. If the boson is a certain size within that range, this means, for reasons I absolutely don't understand, that it can, by chance (though with extremely low probability) spontaneously form another universe expanding faster than the current one that will engulf it. It could be that there have been a series of universes that were each engulfed by faster ones as the bosons within them fell from their metastable state to a stable one.
I like both of those hypothesis (well, now only the latter, because the former has been falsified) because they don't necessitate a creation event or a creator. They work within the current laws of physics. But ultimately, who knows? It'll probably be solved soon enough but until then we don't know.