Quote:
Originally Posted by Doctordestiny
Questions for atheists. Did the universe come out of nothing? What existed before? Did matter exst? Did it come about be randomness?
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That's one speculation, that it did in fact come out of nothing; the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle requires that nothing can't exist; if you have nothing, a froth of virtual particles will still exist, popping into existence and cancelling each other out. The idea is that such a random fluctuation triggered an expansion of spacetime which we see as the big bang. The net energy of the universe (if looked at a certain way) appears to be zero, so this doesn't violate any physics. There are various ideas as to how this could happen many many times over as well, so that a natural selection type mechanism can account for the apparent fine tuning of some values.
There's also ideas which don't require a beginning at all, in the way that the earth's surface doesn't have a beginning (as unsatisfying as that is, but the universe is under no obligation satisfy our brains which evolved in the trees and plains).
What we do know for sure is that the current successful theories to describe reality (quantum theory at a small scale and general relativity at a large scale) while incredibly successful in accurately describing reality in their own domains, break down when they try to describe phenomenon in the others' domain.
So before we can get answers to your questions, we first have to have the language, the theory, that can even have the questions formed (in the same way that before Einstein you couldn't even ask the right questions about gravity).
So ultimately we have a good set of theories that describe the universe from very young to now, but until we can bring the quantum world and the macro world together with something we can't really begin to ask the question you have, or even determine if the questions are meaningful ("what existed before" might be as meaningless as asking what's north of the north pole, since time is a property of the universe and "before" necessarily is a question about time, so if there's no universe, there's no time, and the question is meaningless).
Some people find this lack of answer a good enough reason to insert god or gods into the unknown places, but this is the same kind of logic that led to the belief in river gods or Zeus to explain the flooding of the river or lightning; putting god in wherever something isn't yet understood (god of the gaps argument) is unconvincing and has the unfortunate effect of weakening god over time; as more and more phenomenon are taken away from being acts of god and are understood as being a natural phenomenon.