You said "According to religion God created the universe." And that statement is a generalization that is wrong because it implies that every religion is theistic and has a creator/deity in its focus. You also wrote God with a capital G, that turns the word from a term like "god" (a category) into a name like the Christian "God".

One can be atheistic - and nevertheless feel religious, or spiritual. Religion is not an exclusive all-theism affair.

What they all seem to have in common is some kind of rituality and a trend for becoming policy- and material power-driven institutions wiht priests and cults and so forth. Thats why I am usually turned away by all of them, including theistic and atheistic alike. I am no friend of this ceremonial stuff, it tends to lure peopel awaya form what realy counts, making the symbol ursurping the relevance of what it only was meant to point at. And the abuse of rituals by hierarchies of priests to serve their own political, material, institutional interests, is obvious. Even in most forms of Buddhism (which knows no god/s and deities originally), this deformation can be seen. Thats why I tend to insist on keeping religions, all of them, on very, ry, very short lines. Lend them just a hand in good faith, and they eat you up alive, all of you.

God was never created. He has always been here, past, present, and future. I know, it's hard to comprehend that a being can have no beginning- even I cannot comprehend it. But that is OK as we are not supposed to comprehend it, we just believe by faith.
Hence why in Revelation 4:8, angels are quoted as singing in praise, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was (past), and is (present), and is to come (future)" and why God says he is the First and Last, the Alpha and the Omega which are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.

Now, moving away from religion here...


There are many, many theories as to how the universe began. Personally, I believe the age-old Big Bang theory is correct. There are other theories, such as when the last universe ended and was crushed into a singularity, it was rebirthed and expanded.

Age old in that many of the ancient texts described the universe as having a beginning. What caused the writers to think that is unknown. It wasn’t exactly an age old accepted scientific theory until 1931 and data which seems support it now.

What if there never have been a beginning of our Universe and there's no end.

To put it the way El Whacko said it

it's hard to comprehend

On the other hand
Even an eternity has a start, which mean even if there never been a beginning it must have start from scratch.

Markus

The question is whether one takes your quoted religous text literally, or metaphorically. :03:

If I take Jesus metaphorically, I have him in one row with Hui Neng, Huang Po, Lin Chi and who else, Ch'An, Vedix texts, old Hinduism, old Taoism. Christian mystics like Origines, Meister Eckehart, Angelus Silesius, Thomas a Kempis, and others express the similioarities clearly although not referring and having known these Asian conceots. If I pick the old testament or the new one beside the glad tidings, or take Jesus literalyl and word for word, I have him on the shelve between the Harry Potter books, and the DVD with Hannibal Lecter.

There cannot be several truths parallel to each other, there can be just one. Where one thinks there are several ones, all but one must be wrong. thats what "truth" is about.

Believing is not knowing. Claiming that believing a virtue is the trick of those who claim something and know they cannot stand the testing of it.


The Golden Rule.


Or this:


“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” - Siddharta Gautama

I think that the idea that humans have any understanding of how the universe was formed or even operates is hubris to a ridiculous extent.



We can form hypotheses from our single point of observation and we can test them across a tiny span of the Universe. That's what we do.... That's all we can do at this time



But that should never be confused with actual understanding of something this big and this old. Even our basic concept of size and time start to fail when applied to the Universe.



Maybe if we can study the universe for a million years or so from different observation points, we might start to garner an understanding.

We would need to be able to step back from it, although we are an integral part of it. Being a part of it we can perceive it as much as an eye can stare at itself. We do not deal with the reality. We deal with our abstract ideas about it, our imgage of it, our fantasy.

I think mind can gain understanding, but for that it is necessary to - well, to step back from the universe, and in the end: to step back from ourselves, from being what we are. We would need to stop being what we are, become unhindered by being anything at all that by its definition of being this and not that already is subject to limits and limitations and therefore cannot embrace "all". Infinity minus even just "1" is not infinity. There may not be many individual minds/spirits. Maybe there can be just one mind/spirit? One all-mind beside which nothing else does "exist".

We cannot do much, we cannot gain anything. What it is about is: let it be, let it go. Doing without intention or desire. Not craving, not resisting. You eat when you are hungry, you drink when you are thirsty, you sleep when you are tired and you piss when your bladder is full. What further comment is needed? What philosophical explanation is needed for doing these things under the given circumstances? What would be additionally gained by that? Our ego is just an illusory construction. Much more we are embedded in contexts and situations of which we are an integral part.

Maybe we are more the events around "us", than we are "ourselves", separate and isolated?!

Billions and billions of germs, bacterias ands virusses in our bodies. "Our" bodies...? Without them said body would not even exist.

What is this observer that thinks and sees and thinks of itself as "me", "my ego", "this is me"?


True understanding, self-realization can only be had at the price of transcendence.

The fact that we had to invent the concept of "the observable universe" as a subset of the universe is all the proof we need that we can never really understand the full scope of the universe. Anything that can happen, will.

Then there’s that theory which says objective reality does not exist until it is observed.

Even objective reality is subjective...

When I observe something and draw a conclusion, you can observe the exact same thing and draw a different conclusion - and both of us could be completely correct or both be stupendously wrong.