Our personal concepts and theories of physics play a stong role in shaping our concept of reality, god and creation.

Many people consider it obvious that time has flowed on forever in both directions. But the theory of relativity shows that time and space can be distorted by matter and energy. Time may not be able to be defined before a certain point of singularity: the big bang. To talk about who or what created the big bang implies that there was a time before that barrier...

When this was understood, for many, their science outran their philosophy.

Then there is Stephen Hawking's theory of imaginary time: Time is divided to two components, imaginary and real. Imaginary time is continuous but the real time vanishes at singularity and becomes a spatial dimension. Time and space shrink together and become indistinguishable. Our universe, in the direction of imaginary time, is closed and uniform. It has no boundary or edge (just like a surface of the earth). The universe will eventually collapse again but the arrow of time will not reverse.....

According to Russian-born cosmologist Andrei Linde, infinite number of universes are created all the time. Tiny bubbles of energy (just like the bubbles on the surface of the boiling water) are being produced and inflating into universes all the time. Our universe would be one of those tiny bubbles inflating and evolving into the one we live in....

How do we reconcile any or all of these with our personal beliefs? For me it doesn't matter which if any of these theories are fact because that doesn't change my inner feeling that I am both a part of the universe and the whole of the universe.