Are religions manmade and natural or supernaturally based?

I think that Bertrand Russell nailed it:"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument."(Although given progress in scientific knowledge since the 1920's, it would probably now be better to substitute "the universe" for "the world").ICANT, you are using the English language to describe physics that can only be described adequately in mathematics which is so complicated, that only a small number of people on the planet are capable of being at the cutting edge of it. And then you say "this makes no sense". The words which helpful scientists use to try to help people like me who can't do the mathematics, are only ever an approximation - at times, they won't make sense, because they are being used to approximate a scenario which is so far beyond our daily experience as to be incomprehensible, outside of that advanced mathematics.We can play games with the English words all day long. I could say that the universe has always existed. Because the word "always" means for all time - and one of the things that the singularity did was to start time. So because the universe has always existed, it never needed to be created - by anything supernatural or otherwise. That use of language is a fair one, and describes some of the science as I understand it. But it's pretty meaningless, because there's sod all mathematics in it, and therefore incapable of accurate dissection and analysis - we just end up playing linguistic and philosophical games, as the angels dance on the heads of pins.At its most fundamental level, the concept of cause and effect is really just a reflection of our day to day existence. In the weird and wonderful world of highly advanced physics, analysing what went on in the earliest nanoseconds of the universe's existence, why should our unbelievably simplistic concept of cause and effect have any meaning whatsoever ?

But Cat Sci's point is that the first kind of time you describe, is nowhere near as straightforward as you want to imagine it - ie a single straight line of time, which describes the duration of every point in the universe simultaneously and on a linear basis (hence begging your question of what happens if you go further backwards in time than the big bang).Time is way weirder than that. Hence, if you were to take two identical alarm clocks, set them both to go off in a year's time, and then got in a space ship with one of them and bummed around space at a fair whack for 360 days before returning to earth, your alarm clock wouldn't have gone off, but the one on earth would have done. And this isn't the weirdest it gets.It's meaningless to imagine a three dimensional universe, existing during an utterly unrelated timeline. Space-time is a single thing - you fiddle with one, it affects the other.

Really ? Break out the math then - show us your evidence for a supernatural power.

I know - but at the level of the physics we're talking about, the physical evidence is only capable of being adequately expressed mathematically.

Did the Higgs boson exist 5 years ago ?

I may be wrong, but I think ICANT may be referring to his god when he says his best friend ?