It is a simple concept: reward or punishment, aka. fear, the great motivator. Whether it is death, business, government, religion, groups of humans -- fear controls the vast majority of people.

The near unlimited capasity for comforting self deception among humans never ceases to amaze me.

Stephen Hawking

"Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them. Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang."

My guess is that luck produced the big bang. Of course if luck be a lady, then god is a missus.

What produced the Big Bang, or whether there was more than one big bang, or whether multiple universes slip in and out of existence, and all the other possibilities that cosmologists are looking at, is really nothing to do with religion and atheism. We simply see no evidence for any kind of god, and we don't find a need in our lives to invent one. I am perfectly happy to tell theists that I don't know the secrets of the origins of the universe, just as I don't know much about quantum theory.

I got 2 cents.
It is more likely that a cat made the universe.
Or a gold fish.
I think that when we allow that maybe there is a god, then we are not out of the maze yet.
Primitive man created gods as answers to questions they did not have answers for.
The concept of a god, is just as much man made as any particular god.
A cat or gold fish are more likely than a god, at least we do know that they exist, so not we just have to work out if one of them was a creator. But they are infinitely more likely than a god to have done so.
People argue, we don't know if there is a god or not,
we don't know if there was a creator
Why can't we just say, as yet we don't know how the universe came to be, and perhaps we never will.
In my life time that question will not be answered,
BTW, this is not a critism of you or anyone else who has commented, it is just my bent,
I am yet to be convinced of the big bang too.
All that aside, Welcome Jeff,
hope you enjoy that site,
I do, we all have different opinions on everyting,
which is what makes it what it is.

There is a great difference between suspecting that a creator may have started it all and the dogma of worship. But many folks don't want things to just end upon death, so they look to spiritual resurrection of some kind.

I am content to be honest and say I don't know what the orgins of our universe or time/space continuum. I will not pretend to know what I do not know. As an athiest I simply do not believe there is a god. I have no responability to make up answers or to have answers, I will not be caught up in that theist game.

I was a fundamentalist wacko so I will fill you in on the thinking. All the animals were made from a "perfect" blueprint, Man was the perfect manifestation of this design, women "just" an imperfect copy of the male. Humans are completely different from animals as we are issued souls at birth as we are all something like demi-gods as we are Gods children. Everything else is "just" creatures for us to dominate and they are practically worthless as they don't get issued souls from the warehouse. Some believe in evolution and others don't, but it does not matter as we get to go to heaven or hell. Interestingly animals don't get to go to Heaven or Hell they just cease to exist. Why is God humane to them and not us?

I also allow for the possibility of a creator god (not an Abrahamic one). But the possibility seems remote. It what sense would it explain things? If time and space both originated with a big bang, how could there be a being that pre-existed? And where did that being come from? Still, one never knows...

why are you leaving room then?