: It's not like the alternative is much better. If
: everything is brought into existence by something
: else, then how can the entire universe have had a
: beginning? Unless it's infinitely old, it must have
: created itself. (I'm talking philosophy here, not
: physics.)
Unless you view time from "outside", as just another dimension in a big multidimensional matrix of spacetime distortions; in which case, something outside the universe, obeying laws not a part of our own universe, must have created it at some point in it's universal time, if its universe has time, or even dimensions as we know them. Could be, say, a purely thought-oriented system, operating entirely in logical and mathematical concepts, and the more complex, sentient programs wrote a program that defines space and time and has it all layed out "on disk" so to speak. I mean, our computer simulations are the same way; we created a device in our physical universe which defined into existance a virtual (from our perspective) universe of logic and math, which we instructed to build a program defining into existance another sub-virtual universe of laws similar to our own.
