If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no.
Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.
This doesn't mean it's the right one, but other explanations are inferior. Especially those provided by religions.
The inferior tier is one where an explanation can be proven false with the limited tools of the 2022 version of humanity. Perhaps some religions' explanations fall into this category, but not all.
Best available is not proof. The sun rotating around the Earth was also the best explanation for a long time in Human history. Traditional physics theory was the best until we started to observe things at the atomic level. Certitudes in Science don't age well, and should teach humility more than absurd dogma.
One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence. Or prove useful to human existence. The Abrahamic God is a father who shot his wad, abandoned the child, but still demands tribute.
Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time.
Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T.
Well, you do the latter of course. So do the events at t0 need to occur for you to observe state T?
Without evidence, that's why it's called faith. There are thousands of unfalsifiable possible starting points, the Judeo-Christian one is laughable.
No one said faith should be based on blind belief. You can most certainly have faith based in evidence. It's not a dichotomy.
The "Abrahamic" faiths have demonstrated themselves, but only one remains uncorrupted: Islam. You can check out provingislam.com for some hard proofs.
1. Politically useful sects which demand followers and everyone else accept certitudes based on pure authority.
2. Politically useless to troublesome sects that don't.
The overton window is set such that the second group can't be acknowledged.
> One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence
Which religions? All of them? Did you study each and every one in detail to be able to make such a claim?
> Or prove useful to human existence
Same question.
> abandoned the child
According to Christianity, but not to Islam or Judaism.
A very common fallacy I see by atheists or secularists when these discussions come up is how they group all belief and faith systems into one thing called "religion", then cast the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, not realizing how easily falsifiable some of their claims are, or how they generalize across that which must not be generalized. You don't have to be an expert about "religions", but don't pretend you're one by the implications you're making.
The major monotheistic religions state that God created and initiated our universe, which does not contradict that a Big Bang happened.
In any case, saying "The Universe always was." or "Time did not exist before the Universe so 'before' is only a term that makes sense inside the Universe, after its creation, and we cannot fathom what is beyond these limits.", is a more satisfying stance for looking at the Universe than first requiring a seemingly infinitely complex being that then created this universe to look like the being is not even required, according to Occam's razor. And it leaves some nice things to be discovered for us too.
I mean, why would I imagine a god building the Himalayas when I have plate tectonics to explain it? Plate tectonics explain it well, and it explains other phenomena, and we can experimentally verify the process. The god hypothesis just leads to infinity more questions, and as such is scientifically unsatisfying.
The god hypothesis generates a huge amount of un-testable hypotheses and suggests that we can simply give up our search for explanations whenever we can use god to explain things. Religion as such demotivates scientific inquiry, and I think it is not far fetched to assume that that was its original intention. Just read some Yuval Noah Harari, we began the scientific revolution when we no longer accepted what the priests told us.
In short, we indeed have no need for the god hypothesis. At least we never have so far, it has never been the simplest explanation for phenomena. God is simply placed into gaps in our knowledge until we fill the gaps (and answer questions), like: "Why lightning?" or "An Eye can never evolve [is irreducibly complex]." or "Why is earth at the center of the universe?". I therefor prefer to extrapolate the solved to the unsolved and believe that questions like "What is consciousness exactly?" and "Can a machine be conscious as we can be?" will also be answerable without invoking any god.
Simple answer: this is a logically contradictory question to ask. It's basically the same as saying: someone baked this piece of bread, then, who baked the baker?
The universe did not always exist, and provably so. The Creator exists outside the realm of His creation, and as such, our laws do not apply to Him.
The very fact that we're having this discussion is proof that God, The Creator, exists.
Secondly, God has sent us many messengers, and provably so. This means that "we have no need for God" assumption is meaningless.
The baker evolved through mutation and natural selection. You envoke an answer outside the provable realm. By doing that you release all bounds. There is no limit to what you can place in that realm.
"The universe did not always exist, and provably so."
Then you are not agreeing with the best of our combined knowledge in knowing for a fact what happened at the very start of the Big Bang? I though we were uncertain up until 10^-38 seconds or so. Did the Big Bang occur in this universe or did it form the Universe? I don't know. Does anyone at this point? Is there any outcome that you would consider an argument against a god? I would not accept the prove of the universe not always existing as proof FOR a god anyway.
"The very fact that we're having this discussion is proof that God, The Creator, exists."
When I look at our DNA, and compare it to every other organism on earth, I see a tree of life, dependencies, common ancestors between species. No proof that a creator exists. I any case, simply stating that anything is proof a creator exist is a bit simplistic right?
"God has sent us many messengers, and provably so."
Could you point me to this proof? Is it a reproducible experiment? Can I do said experiment at home and come to appreciate your point of view?
Could you suggest any experiment that could help me accept that there is a god?
The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma.
You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence behind that theory. It is more arrogant to reject the past 100 years of work on cosmology by thousands of scientists.
Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters.
Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.
He is just how we are able to articulate in our language. We are limited, and He chose to reveal Himself using He, so who are we to question?
> or that it has any involvement after creation
Provably false.
We have hard evidence for our belief and faith. Here's a good starting point: www.provingislam.com
That doesn't disprove what it can prove. We know the universe used to be very hot and dense and expanded and cooled.
What I don't buy is that because we don't understand something -- like what came before the big bang -- that it necessarily implies the existence of some old white bearded cishet white male who cares about our day to day lives.
I'm perfectly happy with having absolute uncertainty about what came before the big bang. There doesn't need to be any explanation, and there certainly doesn't need to be a religious explanation.
And there's the straw man. I don't think anyone is arguing for the existence of such.
It seems you have some misguided (and caricaturic) presumptions, but those should not blur your thinking
The fact that we exist necessarily implies a Creator. Just because you're happy putting your head in the sand does not mean that reality will disappear when you do.
I wonder if the person to whom I was originally responding finds your dogmatism as objectionable as dogmatism of a traditionally religious nature.
Science also refers to the theory of gravity, which I would suspect we can agree exists.
The understanding of gravity had a tectonic shift about a century ago. Imagine if scientists declared that Newton's model of gravity was the final word, and that it was heretical to question it. These things are called theories, not facts, for a reason.
Such things happen all the time in the history of science. As another example, think about the phrase "subatomic particle" and the sequence of mistakes that must have occurred to arrive at such wording.
Paradoxically, instead of the history of science inspiring humility, it seems to encourage arrogance among some. Is the ego a friend or enemy of scientific advancement?