Why You Might Have to Choose Between Science and Faith

[spin]

171. The creator is eternal to us. ...

But he may simply be a computer programer in a different universe.

If so Shakespeare was right.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare

We don't believe that the universe has always existed because it is expanding and that would suggest that at sometime in the past it was much smaller, perhaps infinitely small. We don't believe it will eventually collapse and then re expand because the rate of expansion is increasing.

Big Bang

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the early development of the Universe.[1] According to the theory, the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago,[2][3][4][5][6] which is thus considered the age of the universe.[7][8][9][10] At this time, the Universe was in an extremely hot and dense state and began expanding rapidly. After the initial expansion, the Universe cooled sufficiently to allow energy to be converted into various subatomic particles, including protons, neutrons, and electrons. Though simple atomic nuclei formed within the first three minutes after the Big Bang, thousands of years passed before the first electrically neutral atoms formed. The majority of atoms that were produced by the Big Bang are hydrogen, along with helium and traces of lithium. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity to form stars and galaxies, and the heavier elements were synthesized either within stars or during supernovae.

The Big Bang is the scientific theory that is most consistent with observations of the past and present states of the universe, and it is widely accepted within the scientific community. It offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure, and the Hubble diagram.[11] The core ideas of the Big Bang—the expansion, the early hot state, the formation of light elements, and the formation of galaxies—are derived from these and other observations. As the distance between galaxies increases today, in the past galaxies were closer together. The consequence of this is that the characteristics of the universe can be calculated in detail back in time to extreme densities and temperatures,[12][13][14] while large particle accelerators replicate such conditions, resulting in confirmation and refinement of the details of the Big Bang model. On the other hand, these accelerators can only probe so far into high energy regimes, and astronomers are prevented from seeing the absolute earliest moments in the universe by various cosmological horizons. The earliest instant of the Big Bang expansion is still an area of open investigation. The Big Bang theory does not provide any explanation for the initial conditions of the universe; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe going forward from that point on.

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While the scientific community was once divided between supporters of two different expanding universe theories—the Big Bang and the Steady State theory,[16] observational confirmation of the Big Bang scenario came with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, and later when its spectrum (i.e., the amount of radiation measured at each wavelength) was found to match that of thermal radiation from a black body. Since then, astrophysicists have incorporated observational and theoretical additions into the Big Bang model, and its parametrization as the Lambda-CDM model serves as the framework for current investigations of theoretical cosmology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

Accelerating universe

The accelerating universe is the observation that the universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate. In formal terms, this means that the cosmic scale factor has a positive second derivative,[1] so that the velocity at which a distant galaxy is receding from us should be continuously increasing with time.[2] In 1998, observations of type Ia supernovae also suggested that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating[3][4] since around redshift of z~0.5.[5] The 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics were both awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess, who in 1998 as leaders of the Supernova Cosmology Project (Perlmutter) and the High-Z Supernova Search Team (Schmidt and Riess) discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant ("High-Z&quot supernovae.[6][7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe

Of course 50 years from now we probably will have an entirely different theory widely accepted by scientists. By that time we may have proved the existence of parallel universes and believe that our universe was created when two universes collided with each other.