What came before the Big Bang? Not God.

'Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause.'

This has always been the logical way to explain the presence of a god.

What was at the beginning? Something must have happened at the beginning!
It is the reason we still send our kids to faith based schools and attend mass at Christmas, well at least I do. My boys still attend Catholic school, and I have always considered myself a Catholic, even though part of that is because the church always taught that 'You will always be a Catholic', like being Jewish or a Muslim-the choice is not yours and you can never leave, like 'The Mob'.

I always knew the bible was a book of simple stories to explain away millennia and answer some of life's more complex questions, a collection of tales which obviously should not be taken literally.
It was the morality of the 'good book' which enabled me to keep my faith. That 'morality' has been utterly destroyed, by all churches and for that matter all religions over the last decade or so. From thieving TV evangelists, to paedophile priests (and the structure that protected them), to condoms and abortions, to fatwas and jihads, who the fuck are any of them to tell us how to live our lives?
As science, even during our own lifetime has advanced so very far, it is astounding that all religions have fallen back to insisting on Creationism and denial. It is that insistence that will be its downfall.
Darwin, Einstein and even Stephen Hawking were always willing to accept that a higher power may well exist, but for Hawking, no more.
As we look at what religion is doing for mankind right now, this may well be the time for us, that is those of us not driven by dogma and extremist fundamentalism to state that we will fight religion of all kinds ,as it no longer holds us within its grasp. We will no longer allow religion to enter our schools or governments. Religion breeds intolerance and encourages conflict. For once, the French were right by making the state secular, if we had followed them the world would be a different place.
Religion can't be outlawed completely, but it can be restricted to places of worship. All schools, charitable organisations, and religiously affiliated groups should be severely restricted and monitored to ensure that they do not attempt to teach, recruit or in any way advance their archaic views and superstitions.
Above all it is time to end, for once and for all the belief in Genesis and other ridiculous child's tales. There is still room for a god, if people insist, but that place must be a place of worship only.
Any adult who teaches our children that the world was created in 7 days must be exposed as a liar and a charlatan and from here on in, that belief must be the new heresy.
Chris Mercer 2.09.2010

Below are the arguments in today's news announcing Stephen Haw king's 'pronouncement'.


There is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has said.

It was the discovery of other solar systems outside our own, in 1992, that undercut a key idea of Newton's -- that our world was so uniquely designed to be comfortable for human life that some divine creator must have been responsible.
The scientist cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun as evidence to contest the belief that the universe was created by God: "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions - the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass - far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings
Not just other planets like the Earth, other universes may exist," he said

From there he introduces the idea of multiple universes, saying that if there are many universes, one will have laws of physics like ours -- and in such a universe, something not only can, but must, arise from nothing.
Therefore, he concludes, there's no need for God to explain it.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."