“In America, we are supposed to be good and do the right thing, not because it will make us rich, get us saved, or reward us in the next life, but because people have value in and of themselves, and because it will make us all better off, individually and collectively.”

And then you say about your religious education:

“There was the intolerance generated by absolute morality, the logical outcome of knowing without doubt that you are right and everyone else is wrong.”

I’m assuming your worries about absolute morality dissipated because you now hold that view (considering you believe that all of us have value.) As you know, some would consider you intolerant, and that’s sad. This is why theism makes more logical sense than atheism. Not only are we here in an expanding universe that must have had a beginning (as you note), but we also are morally conscious and adhere to the same absolute sense of what’s right. This is best explained by the existence of a personal Creator.

I will say first before I say anything else is that I DO believe in a God or Higher Level of intelligience that is beyond our comprehension. And that is the whole point. The beliefs that Mr. Shermer has and the beliefs that I have can’t be substantiated or found to be true until we die. Sorry there is no cheat sheet, no study guide, no one absolute answer. Anyone that claims to have an answer is wrong, how can you know the answer without running the experiment first? While there is no empirical evidence of a supreme being, i.e. God, Allah, some elephant with 8 arms, or some guy in Missouri that gave rise to people that wear suits, ride bicycles, and ask you to read some other book about some deity that says if you follow his lead you will go to heaven, there is also no empirical evidence to prove the contrary.

There is no answer as long as we are living and breathing which leads to how there is contradiction in the world in the first place. Some people believe in god, some don’t, and both sides can make compelling arguments for their beliefs. Who’s to say who is wrong? Maybe both are right.
If you believe in a God, Heaven, Hell, or whatever you believe an afterlife to be then there for that individual there is. If you don’t believe and that when you pass on your consciousness ceases to exist then thats what happens to that person. It’s all about choice; If you believe then you consciousness will act accordingly and when you die that is what you will experience. If you don’t believe then it’s lights out, game over, hopefully enough people like you to show up at your funeral or ash spreading.

It depends on the individual because the choices and beliefs they have are theirs to live and ultimately die with which is when their questions will be answered.
Seeing as how TRUE objectivity is next to impossible with that all too awesome human factor I will be a little biased here with this question. Does anybody think that its funny how the more answers we uncover we come across an even greater amount of questions? It’s like humanity as a whole is chasing a unicorn. Some continue the pursuit some choose to let it find them if there even is one. And even scientists take a leap of faith sometimes. Black holes for instance. A black hole has NEVER been seen because a black hole is impossible to see since no light can escape from it. However scientists KNOW that they are there. Its all about faith. No matter how smart you are or how much evidence you have there comes a point in everyone’s life that a leap of faith is required to make sense even if that faith is no faith at all.

Physicists tell us that the laws of physics themselves break down at extreme densities and temperatures, back before what’s called the Planck time. So, perhaps a more accurate way to describe the very earliest universe is with a question mark. That is…not at all! As densities and temperatures approach infinity, the traditional laws of physics cease to be a good explanation of what’s going on. So, we can’t use such laws to bring us back to time zero or even to conclude that there was a time zero.

String theorist Brian Greene clarifies this point in his wonderful book, Fabric of the Cosmos. He argues that the “bang” in the big bang may have been produced by a short-lived, rapid expansionary event that physicists call inflation. The bottom line, however, as Green argues, is that we still don’t know what banged, why it banged, or even what caused the bang.

An important implication of all this is that physicists aren’t sure if the universe indeed had a beginning. Stephen Hawking has argued that it may not have, and that spacetime may be akin to a finite or infinite, unbounded surface. We just don’t know, since no science known (so far anyway) gives us much insight into the configuration of the universe before the big bang.

Thanks, Michael, for all you do.

I don’t think you understand. We take the null position. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Many atheists spend a lot of time wondering about what is “out there”. We hope one day to find out.