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When it comes down to it, I don't think that question's answerable in any meaningful sense. I mean we can talk about cause and effect, but cause and effect is dependent on time (causes have to precede their effects). When it comes to questions like "what causes time to exist" we have no vocabulary nor understanding to even begin to understand exactly what we're asking, never mind what the answer is.Doug_E_Fresh said:So then by your understanding, space, time, matter and energy are properties within the universe, not of the universe itself? That makes sense as to why you probably believe there is no need for God to be involved in its creation. I wonder though, how does one wrestle with the fact that these things just "are"? If universe/multiverse have no cause, no "change agent", how does one answer the question as to why there is something at all, rather than nothing at all? It seems to me that everything has a cause. Even space, time, matter, and energy would then be "caused" by the universe/multiverse in some way.
But if you think about it, that's always going to be the case. If we did have some kind of explanation for what "caused" the universe to exist (and the M-Brane model comes the closest) then that would by definition be talking about the conditions outside the universe. And then all you've done is move the question back a step - instead of asking what caused the universe to exist you're asking what caused the conditions outside the universe to exist. The question hasn't gone away in the slightest.
And to my mind, positing a god of some kind as the "creator" of the universe doesn't answer the question either. Again it just moves it back a step so instead of asking what cause the universe to exist your asking what caused that god (whether you're talking about the Christian God or some other definition of a god) to exist. And that's not to mention the fact that if time is a measure within the universe, how is it possible for something to have "created" it since the act of creation is dependent on time? In fact it's made the question worse because you're asking about things that happened "before" time existed, which involves inventing some kind of higher dimensional "meta-time" to even make sense.
Usually, when this comes up in apologetics (where someone's trying to use the Cosmological Argument for God) this is where things break down into special pleading. The person insisting that a god must have created the universe ends up arguing that the particular god they're talking about doesn't need a cause because they're "eternal" or "timeless" or "outside time" or some such vague term, but when pressed they are unable to explain what that these terms actually mean - or able to explain why (if time is a measure of events within the universe rather than a property of the universe) such descriptors can't equally apply to the universe itself.
Basically... CAN you say that a "timeless" or "eternal" god created the universe? Sure, of course you can. Do you NEED to say that a "timeless" or "eternal" god created the universe? No, because those attributes either describe the universe itself (in which case there is no need for it to have a creator) or they're undefined terms just used to hand-wave away the argument about what created that creator. Eventually you end up just having to state that something just IS, without the need to have been created. And saying "The universe just IS" is no less valid than saying "The universe needs a creator, but that creator just IS".
So to sum up, why the universe exists is an interesting but fundamentally unanswerable philosophical question, and positing a creator god of some kind doesn't help. The question still remains in full force. Therefore there's no need to posit a creator god. If you believe in such a god for other reasons, then that's fine. But if you don't already believe in one then the cosmological argument isn't going to convince you that there must be one.