I agree that the non-religious theories about origins of the universe are speculative. I could name a few, and perhaps say which ones I prefer, but I wouldn’t expect to convince anyone, probably not even myself on a different day.
(I suspect the correct answer is somewhere along: “everything exists in a timeless Tegmark multiverse, but intelligent observers only happen in situations where causality exists, and causality defines some kind of measure, so despite everything existing, some things seem more likely to the observers than other things”. And specifically for the origin of our universe, I suspect the correct answer would be that if you get too close to the big bang, local arrows of time start pointing in non-parallel directions and/or the past stops being unique. But that’s just a bunch of words masking my lack of deep understanding.)
However, religions also don’t have convincing answers for what happened before god(s) created the world, or how did god(s) happen to exist. So by adding religion you are actually not getting any closer to the answer. You have one more step in the chain, but the end of the new chain looks the same (or worse) as the end of the old one.
Instead of “universe has simply existed since ever” you have “god has simply existed since ever”; instead of “time only exists within universe, so it is meaningless to ask what was before that” you have “god has created time together with universe, so it is meaningless to ask what was before that”; instead of “the universes exist in an infinite loop of big bang and big crunch” you have “god keeps creating and destroying universes in an infinite loop”; et cetera.
I agree that the non-religious theories about origins of the universe are speculative. I could name a few, and perhaps say which ones I prefer, but I wouldn’t expect to convince anyone, probably not even myself on a different day.
(I suspect the correct answer is somewhere along: “everything exists in a timeless Tegmark multiverse, but intelligent observers only happen in situations where causality exists, and causality defines some kind of measure, so despite everything existing, some things seem more likely to the observers than other things”. And specifically for the origin of our universe, I suspect the correct answer would be that if you get too close to the big bang, local arrows of time start pointing in non-parallel directions and/or the past stops being unique. But that’s just a bunch of words masking my lack of deep understanding.)
However, religions also don’t have convincing answers for what happened before god(s) created the world, or how did god(s) happen to exist. So by adding religion you are actually not getting any closer to the answer. You have one more step in the chain, but the end of the new chain looks the same (or worse) as the end of the old one.
Instead of “universe has simply existed since ever” you have “god has simply existed since ever”; instead of “time only exists within universe, so it is meaningless to ask what was before that” you have “god has created time together with universe, so it is meaningless to ask what was before that”; instead of “the universes exist in an infinite loop of big bang and big crunch” you have “god keeps creating and destroying universes in an infinite loop”; et cetera.