God, Time, Matter, Energy, Causation, and the Universe
Humans have no trouble imagining an indefinitely extended future. In fact, we have a name for it, We call it "eternity." We do have problems imagining an indefinitely extended past. Combined with that apparent limitation of our imagination is our naive assumption that the events we experience have identifiable beginnings. These two facts conspire to lead us to believe that not just life, but the universe itself must have had a beginning.
I claimed that our belief that the events we experience have identifiable beginnings is naive. Let me show why it is naive with a simple example. John, who smoked all of his adult life, dies of lung cancer. That is our final event-state. What was the initial state that started off the sequence of events that resulted in his death? There was no single initial state. There were a multiplicity of them, not all of which are we likely to be able to identify. There is one chain of events having to do with the emergence of the tobacco plant on earth. Another with its being recognized as pleasurable to chew or smoke. Another had to do with the chain of events that led John to take up smoking and another to account for his ability to resist every effort others made to encourage him to quit. Another had to do with the environmental factors that combined with John's smoking to increase the probability that he would get lung cancer. Then there are the genetic factors. Had John had a different mother or father he might not have been as vulnerable to the harmful ingredients in tobacco or the harmful elements of his environment. So we have to build into our model, how John's mother and father managed to come together. There was no initial state that set in motion the chain of events leading to John's death from lung cancer. There were a multiplicity of initial states for these event-chains. In fact each of our event-chains is very likely a set of event-chains.
We are going to have to get rid of our idea that the event-states we experience have beginnings. They have a multiplicity of beginnings and some of these will go very far back in time. You may say that most of these are unimportant in accounting for John's death or any other event but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. We are simply choosing to ignore them. Once one recognizes this fact, one is well on the way to jettisoning the idea that the universe had a beginning. Why must it have had a beginning? Why couldn't it have always been here? That is, in fact, much less difficult to imagine than the idea that some all-powerful God created matter and energy from nothing and set off a chain of events that resulted in the creation of the universe and, giving a nod to those who believe in a personal God, has hung around to meddle in human affairs (as is required in the idea that God answers prayers).
When our daughter was five or six, she asked whether we believed in God. I told her that her mom and I didn't but that it would be up to her to decide whether or not she would. She then asked why people believe in God. I replied with the first cause argument noting that people wondered where the earth and stars came from and believed that God created them. She then asked, "Where did God come from?"
A five or six year old, albeit a smart, unbrainwashed one (we never discussed religion with her), is able to refute the first cause argument (we might call it the "God Argument") for the existence of the universe. It takes an adult to conjure up the silly idea that God created the universe.
The problem here is that we have to imagine a God that exists somehow at some nonmaterial level of existence but who had the power to create matter of many types and energy of many types, mash all of this stuff together into, a very, very, very tiny ball that is so densely compressed that the forces that are trying to escape overwhelm the forces that are trying to keep the ball together and so explodes (Big Bang!) and matter and energy start scattering everywhere. God, having created this material plane of existence from his immaterial plane, then either retreats and watches or hangs around and meddles with things from time to time. You can revise this paragraph to go along with your alternative to the Big Bang theory of the origin of this particular universe. Nothing will change in re God.
Note well, that there has to have been a time when there was only one level of existence, namely a nonmaterial level or we don't really need to posit a God. This was the point of my daughter's implicit counter-argument. In my opinion, it is much easier to imagine that the universe has always existed than to imagine that there was a time when matter and energy didn't exist and some God, living, so to speak, at some nonmaterial level of existence, created matter and energy. I can imagine my daughter asking, "What did he create matter and energy out of?"
Religious sorts might reply that I suffer from the defect of a limited human type imagination and thus cannot understand the mysteries of God's creation of the universe. Only a bona fide nitwit would reply in such a fashion.