This question is as old as philosophy Itself. I believe in science and that one day science will be able to fully explain the origin of the universe/life.

What do you believe?

Scientific View:
The universe was created in a big bang about 14 billion years ago. All living organisms share a common ancester and have evolved over millions of years.

Deism:
God created the universe and abandoned it. Allowing life to evolve on its own.

Theistic Evolution:
God created the universe and used evolution as a tool to create humans.

Creationism:
God created the universe around 10,000 years ago and all the animals they way the are today.

The latter 2 are just silly, I'd have to go with Scientific and maybe an outside chance of Deism.

i think deisim/scientific can coexist... in a strange "horton-hears-a-who" kind of totally unprovable kind of way. because that mass had to exist before time in our current sense started.... the supermass, as it were, that needed to 'splode us into existence.

so who's to say that all that is and ever was for us was just some bloke in another universe starting us up through a cacophony of superstring information observation (like that? see, that was me throwing together a few pseudoscientific principles with no foundation whatsoever into a vaguely coherent hypothesis of the start of our universe and the existence of others... groovy, neh?).

i don't adopt any explanation......all are wrong, but all have there points.....

science fails for the simple reason that most modern sciences (especially physical sciences) refuse to accept any theories pertaining to the metaphysical......i find it hypocritical and ignorant for them to do so.....speaking in terms of evidence, there's enough to suggest the metaphysical exists in some form or manner......hell, even their "Big-Bang" theory contains some metaphysical reasoning behind it.....not that the "Big-Bang" didn't happen, but the truth of the matter is, philosophically speaking (even science goes by this), "something" can't come from "nothing".......philosophically speaking, it is impossible and logically invalid to conceive of nothing/non-existence.......what's more, i personally believe that science is nothing more than religion

religious views (such as Deism, or any other) also fail because most don't adhere to one key concept......that perhaps said "creator" was not in any shape or form sentient.........believers of any religion don't really like the idea that their "creator" was/is incapable of any thought (specifically concerning itself)

which is why i go more with the philosophical view that perhaps said creator is indeed metaphysical (like religions says it is) and that perhaps it is infinite (science) and not sentient in any form (philosophy)........perhaps EXISTENCE has always been, but the physical reality (as we know it) was simply result of motion (time, for instance.....the "big-bang")

I think belief is a strong word for something none of us have a clue about.

so...other. I don't know just as much as you don't have clue.

Sorry...continue your discussions...

i have a thought (just random no need to listen), what if "god" was a man who lived around the "beginning" and there actually was life before but that someone created a bomb capeible of destroying almost everything. therefore following that the explosion is what caused the big bang. just a random thought... havent been on in a while so i thought while i was here 'd say somthing... as per the original conversation deism seems to be the right one for now, but i like the one i just thought of more... seems to make sence considering the fact the man just LOVES insane explosions... and i'm sorry if this seems off-topic thought though that it might fit...

the problem with a begining is that it would have to suddenly spring into existence from nothing. As Six pointed out this can not be, even if we were to try and define a begining to the universe we know you couldnt do it because its building blocks always must have been, stretching back into infinity. Of course this could mean that the universe does not exist and it is just a construct of our mind of course where then did the mind come from? A conundrum with no answer. Unless you elimnate the concept of begining and ending and accept that the universe simply is.
Perhaps life is the begining of the universe in that until life existed there is no change, the universe prior to life is limited to whatever natural state the elements are allowed given their combination and amount of energy. When you add life you add the possiblity of variation to the universe the birth of something completely new, conceptualy this gives a purpose to the universe. without a purpose existence is meaningless so to some extent the orgin of the universe begins when life begins

Look at nature, everything is in a cycle, things are born, live, and die... however they never disappear. Their molecules are broken down and used for other things which in turn power the cycle. Although the human mind is used to thinking of things in terms of a beginning and an end (probably due to our own mortality) the universe itself works above these terms. I don't believe that there actually was a beginning, nor will there be an end.

personally i have been raised christian, and it hasnt been until recently that i have started to question and form my own explainations.
i am theistic, but i do not believe in a one true god, i do believe in a higher lifeform/lifeforms that created life as we know it. i believe that life was created and has slowly adapted for billions of years. i do not believe in evolution, well at least darwinism. i think darwinism is highly over rated. in the last 20 years scientists have disprooved many facets of darwinsm (tree of life, four winged friutfly, hecel's embryos, natural selection, finches in the galapagos islands)
i find that todays conlfict with the origin of life is not between creationism and evolution, it's between two different versions of evolution.

I'd be interested to see what your information on darwinism is, there's a lot of misinterpretation of what evolution is about. I mean, there's debate w/in the scientific community. Some facets of it, like that life evolvs towards perfection, were disproven a couple hundred years ago and other parts of the theory have most likely been adapted to fit new information.

Let me know if your up for a discussion on that sometime. Darwin had some great ideas, as did Mendal, and Newton, all of whom made theories that led to great advances in the way we understand our world.

They did however have limited rescources compared to now and parts of their ideas needed to be modified (e.g. F=MA doesnt work one matter gets turned into energy it's no longer concerted thus einsteins e=mc^2 and mendal didnt know about masking gene expression, and darwin didn't have access to the info we have today). So yeah, i tend to be a scientifically oriented person in that i like to try to figure things out

On the fact that we exist, any scientist that claims they know how the universe started is climbing an M.C. etscher staircase. the big bang is supported by evidence like the red shift, quasars etc, but that's only to help explain how our particular universe came to exist like it does, not where all the matter that was compressed to smaller than a pinhead came from. no one knows.

i hate myself.

aside from that, how can one actually prove that nothing can spring from nothing, if (a) nothingness cannot exist (ie i can't prove that fairies don't like peanut butter) and (b) we would be incapable of understanding void if it even existed (ie if god exists we can't prove he's omniscient because we don't know what omnipotence is). seems like it's all too easy to say that nothing can just come into existence, a little harder to actually prove it.

my take on it is this. in the beginning, there was nothing. there is always nothing. the universal average of existence is zero. nilch. our existence is counterbalanced by an anti-existence which is a mirror image of our own. so net reality is conserved by existence/non existence. let non existence be whatever place you like (i say non existence but i really mean anti-existence, perhaps metaphysical existence). kinda like a person walking on a raft, or a bomb exploding, or a book resting on a table despite gravity. momentum, force and energy are conserved. why not reality?
so i guess that makes me... other, leaning towards scientific. i'll put scientific since most of my analogies are based on science.

oops well force isn't really conservable but you get the idea, the net force on an object at rest is zero... lol i'm such a nerd

What? That made no sense what so ever. How is the metaphysical, "anti-existence?"

Although, I understand what you're getting at, but really BAD choice of words. Throw away the "anti-existence" and just leave it as metaphysical. For, in many ways, that is what science and philosophy has been theorizing these days. Physical matter is finite (it can be "anti-existent")...the metaphysical, on the other hand, well, perhaps it's infinite (existent).

good point, 666, it's really arbitrary which of metaphysical and physical you take as existence or ...antiexistence... for lack of a better term. the idea is they're opposed and average out to nothing.

I don't if they're really opposed. I mean, it's two different aspects of existence. One's physical, one's not. A pop-can isn't the opposite of not a pop-can, remember?

well, not in our existence, because a pop-can belonging to existence cannot have an opposite (additive) in existence but it must exist in the anti-existence, which does not exist in the way in which i normally intend the word. like i'm not saying you can add apples and oranges and divide and get the average of "appanges" but you can add up deposits and withdrawals and get the balance. does anybody know the real etymology of the word existence? like what is "existence" really supposed to mean? i suspect that the idea i'm toying with might not even be impossible to imagine, just a little unusual and completely ridiculous, but knowing me you guys should be pretty used to that by now.

I take the sceintific view. Though I believe in god.

I can't say that i agree with the scientific view of how the world started. The chance that the world started with a big bang is a really small chance, then the chance that we evolved from microorganisms in the sea is even a smaller chance. You combine the two of those, and it is totally unlikely that they happened together.
But with the Deism view, it explains how the world came to be, but it was also explains why the world is so screwed up. If there was a god, he certainly wouldn't have let us do what we have done.
I prefer to think that earth existed, without the big bang starting it. the earth started with dinosaurs, and those animals, and the some of the monkeys morphed into cavemen, and then into humans.