With these devices our intrepid time-traveller would seemingly be able to do the impossible. Hold fire in her hands, travel great distances at high speed, communicate over vast distances with ease, and mortally wound others without so much as touching them (apparently). With just a few demonstrations of her bag of 20th century toys our hero would certainly be revered as a great magician, but could also conceivably portray herself as a god, and would surely be worshipped as such, and stories told of her great powers long after she departed.

Now, let us head the other direction. Imagine it is 2000 years into the future, and the year 4009 is just beginning. Scientists have finally dotted every ‘i’, and crossed every ‘t’ on the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. They now now how the universe came into being, but more than that, they know how to do it themselves. They take a few precautions and create a new Big Bang and spawn off a new universe parallel to their own. The new universe matures and develops much as ours did, and is basically left to its own devices for a few billion years. In a few places life develops, and a some of that life develops intelligence – and thus begins to question the origins of the universe.

The point I’m trying to make is how would we be able to tell the difference between a being who was vastly more advanced than us, and a ‘God’? Clearly an advanced being probably wouldn’t be a god,but they would certainly appear god-like to us. Arthur C Clarkes famous quote:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

can easily be re-written as:

Any sufficiently advanced being is indistinguishable from god.

So, if we did physically find God, how would he/she/it be able to prove they were god, and not just a highly advanced lifeform? Would it make a difference if we could or couldn’t?

Two of my favourite authors have dealt with similar topics to the second part of my story. The first was by Isaac Asimov in The Last Question, which deals with a vast universe encompassing computer which is asked if entropy be reversed. The second is by Terry Pratchett and is called The Science of Discworld, and centres around some wizards who live on the Discworld who manage to create a ‘Universe in a Bottle’ that just happens to contain a world that looks startlingly like our own. This book by the way is an excellent foundation for many of the fundamentals of modern science form the Big Bang to Evolution.

*Just to clarify, by ‘we’ I mean any intelligent and advanced lifeform (and possibly artificial life too).

an atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything

Wrong Ray, very very wrong.

How many times do you need to be told that an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a god or gods. End of story. That particular belief doesn’t define what an atheist believes about other things, however, what it does do is to free our minds and open them up to the possibilities that begin to present themselves.

Trying to figure out what happened immediately prior to ‘The Big Bang’ isn’t easy. Our current physics models don’t work in the first few seconds after that event, so trying to extrapolate back from there opens up a can of worms. It is hoped that if we ever figure out the so called ‘Grand Unified Theory’ that it will answer a lot of these questions. However, there are still many theories that are quite interesting, here are two of which I find interesting.

The first postulates that space and time oscillate around these singularities. These oscillations stretch back infinitely in time, with no beginning, and no end. This is an explanation that should be particularly attractive to theists, as they should be quite comfortable with the concept of something that has no beginning.

The second idea actually supports Mr Comforts original quote. Quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle actually suggests that tiny amounts of energy (and thus matter) can in fact spontaneously be created for very short periods of time. The effects of this have actually been observed. Whether this could in some way allow for the creation of a much larger amount of energy – and thus our universe – is unknown, but it’s certainly intriguing. If you want to learn more about this and other aspects of Quantum Theory, I can highly recommend Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You by Marcus Chown (his other books are very good too).

At the end of the day however, the fact that we currently are unable to give a definitive answer to ‘where did the universe come from’ as a very long way from proving that Goddidit.