> No. That is just so called scientists guessing. Everyone knows existence was created 4000 years ago by God. Anyone that tells you otherwise is delusional.[0]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/u85guq/c...
> Last Thursdayism is the idea that the universe was created last Thursday, but with the physical appearance of being billions of years old.[0]
From God's perspective, though, it doesn't matter if the prayer occurs before or after the event, (assuming God exists outside of time and knows everything that has happened and will ever happen).
That might seem to open the possibility that believers could pray for events to be retroactively changed from a known (to them) outcome to a different outcome (rewriting their memories in the process), but presumably the claim is that God's will is revealed through the outcomes themselves, and the believer should update their desires based on that revealed will.
Given that take - there is no distinction between the universe being billions of years old and the universe having been "fast forwarded" to 2000BC. This is being perceived by an entity that sits outside the passage of time. Everything is arguably "fast forwarded" in that the entirety of creation - along with everything before and after creation - is being experienced simultaneously by a timeless being.
Sure, let's assume it's true. Where did God come from?
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The Bible says that God has no beginning (or end), he exists outside the bounds of time. Though it is hard to wrap our heads around that concept, there is no reason to think it is not possible, considering the rhetorical questions above.
On the one end God is just some kind of vague abstract energy that acts akin to some force fate and ends up not being that different to an agnostic or scientific viewpoint of the world.
On the other end you get a highly personified God that thinks in a human-like way with highly specific wants and desires who acts as a moral authority in addition to being a creator (although the rationale behind them being a moral authority never seems to be explained)
I think God as a metaphor for the unknown needs little justification (as you say nobody really has a better explanation). But God as a human-like moral authority doesn't in any way follow from that, and there is lots of reason to think that there is no such God.
Isn't that a consequence of the is-ought problem?[0] Where can "oughts" come from? Perhaps this is the same sort of question as "From where does the state derive its authority to impose laws?".
I don't think answering any of these questions are beyond the bounds of our abilities to inquire rationally, form explanations, improve those explanations through criticism, etc. It's true that there will be no "ultimate answer," because for any current best explanation we have about the origins or workings of the world we can ask the question "why is it that way rather than some other way?" And if we later develop an explanation that answers that question, we can ask the same question of that new explanation. That process will never end, but that doesn't mean any one instance of that question will be beyond our abilities.
Solving just the immediate questions in this life has a nice parsimonious feel to it, actually, like dropping hints for a sequel in the first movie of a (potentially infinite?) series.
We can also assume it's false. Where did God come from? A human social construct to provide comforting answers per geographic or cultural associations.
More importantly though, religion is meant to explain the meaning of life, not that the chain of events that lead to it. It has fundamentally different, though not necessarily incompatible, goals than science. So in short, the answer is that from a religious perspective, it doesn't matter.