My first thought is "counterproductive to what?"
I'm not trying to be a smart@ss here, I simply am curious to know how on the one hand THERE IS NO CREATOR but, on the other hand the entire mass of the universe SIMPLY IS. And the only answer is; "Hypotheses abound, but some things are unknowable, and many questions are unanswerable".
Am I missing something here? I'm serious. >100 billion years ago there was NOTHING, and then later on there was EVERYTHING. And all the scientists on this thread act like this is an absurd point. What physical law could possibly be twisted to give you everything from nothing?
You seem to lack the curiosity or intellectual capacity to as the same obvious question about the creator. Perhaps there are things we don't know, but who'd figure?
There was Nothing 100 billion years ago, because not only did the universe not exist, neither did time.
Time came into existence during the big bang, before that, there was nothing, there was no time. Therefore, there has never been a 100 billion years ago.
Physics makes my head hurt, ask someone else if you want it explained further.
Rational discourse. You're asking a question that you know has no answer. You're asking it in a pointed manner that implies that the people you're addressing aren't intelligent enough to realize that. What do you expect as a response?
>100 billion years ago there was NOTHING, and then later on there was EVERYTHING.
This is an assertion on your part, not a fact.
What physical law could possibly be twisted to give you everything from nothing?
Zero can be broken out into plus and minus values. Matter and AntiMatter. Something from nothing.
The entire mass plus energy of the universe simply is zero. (As has been explained many time on this very forum.)
When snowflakes condense from water vapor, before it happens you have a disordered, invisible gas, and afterwards you have beautiful, ordered crystals. What happened between was a phase transition, that lowered the symmetry of the system. It may seem odd, by a gas has very high symmtery, because no matter how you move it or rotate it, it looks the same. Symmetry-lowering phase transitions are common in physics.
As I understand it, and I'm not a cosmologist, the big bang has been posed as a symmetry-lowering transition: from the perfect symmetry of the void, to the lower symmetry of a single point, and then to the still lower symmetry of space as we know it. Similarly, the particles and interactions we see are all lowerings of the symmetry from some fundamental set of particles. The ideas here are not new to physics; they're commonplace.
The observational evidence is as follows: there is strong evidence the universe is expanding, and therefore it was much smaller than it is now. Furthermore, something must have initiated the expansion - Newton's fist law, and all that. Plus we have the microwave background - the 2 Kelvin hiss that permeates all of space. It needs to be explained.