• Question: how did life begin after all people say god created the world but who created god?

    Asked by to Sarah, Sam, Roberto, Nate, Nat on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      That’s a tough one! I think it depends on your point of view and whether you are religious or not.

      I don’t believe in God, and I believe the universe started with the big bang, and the universe has evolved ever since.

      My mum is a christian and she believes that while the universe started with the big bang, God made the big bang happen.

      We do know however that the earth and solar system didn’t get made in 6 days though and that the earth is much older than a few thousand years.

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Most scientists don’t believe that god created life. Life evolved in a natural way, in the oceans on the young earth. We’ve been able to re-create many of the steps to life (although not all of them) in the lab, and it seems that it’s simply a natural result of chemistry.

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      There’s a lot of evidence that shows that the universe started with the big bang, about 15 billion years ago, but no one knows how or why it happened. And we know that life started on Earth about 3 and a half billion years ago and there are theories as to how it might have happened, but we don’t know for sure. Some people who believe in god think that it was god that caused the big bang, and caused the universe to be how it is so that we could live in it, and caused life to exist in it, but there is no way of knowing whether that’s true or not. There are others that don’t believe in the big bang and other scientific theories at all, because it doesn’t agree with what they believe religiously, despite the evidence. You can definitely believe in god and believe scientific theories though!

      As for who created god, if he does exist, that’s a bit more tricky and not really science, but religion or philosophy. I think the general consensus of people that do believe in him is that he wasn’t created at all, but has just always existed.

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      This is a really tough one and it’s definitely more philosophy than science!

      Personally, I don’t believe in the idea of God, whether that is a single entity or many. As a scientist, I support the ideas that life has evolved over time and that the universe started with the Big Bang and so on.

      That’s not to say that science and religion can’t coexist, I have many colleagues who are scientists but also believe in God in one form or another. It is all about finding the right balance for yourself and what you believe in.

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Thanks to science we are now able to understand what happened to the universe from a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang until today, 13.7 billion years later.

      If you think about this, that’s amazing!

      But we still cannot say what happened at the very beginning, or what made it happened, or even why there is something in the universe instead of nothing. Those are all questions that science cannot address for now, and perhaps it never will be.

      So religion and God come in as possible answers to those questions – You have to start from somewhere, and whether you call that mysterious moment Big Bang or God, we really don’t know what made it happen.

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