Hi Bex

No there’s no gigantic assumption about how it all began in my view of the world, the short answer to that question is that we simply don’t know. We can explain, with theories that can and have been tested how this universe behaved from when it was from less than a billionth of a second old but further back than that we currently can’t go. We don’t assume anything, maybe that’s where god is, all we can say is that there’s no evidence that anything supernatural happened and equally no evidence that it did not. There are a number of hypothesis which attempt to explain earlier times but there’s no way to test them at this stage though the Large Hadron Collider may well be able to push that time window back even closer to the initiation of the event that started it all. Only time will tell on that one.

That’s a foundational idea behind the scientific view, if you don’t know something you say “I don’t know but I’d love to find out” because that’s where the thrill is in science, in the finding out. Religious people start with ‘knowledge’ so called and try to fit the evidence of the world into that. The more extreme the view, YEC for instance, the more difficult this task as the evidence clearly speaks against most such views when you look fully and openly at all of it.

Don’t worry about feeling out of your league here, none of us where born knowing this stuff, we all had to learn t and we are all capable of learning it if we want to. So just ask questions and tell me where I’ve not made myself clear enough and I’ll try to do better.

All the best Bex.

Russell