[hvs]

  Calculations show that everything we see today, from atoms to galaxies, 
  exists because just one extra particle of matter survived for every billion 
  matter–antimatter pairs.

Everything about the Universe boggles the mind, but I was unaware of this.

[fluoridation]

Huh... considering such annihilations should have left nothing but energy behind, from our standpoint, how could we distinguish which of these sequences of events actually happened?

* The early universe produced slightly more matter than antimatter, and they annihilated until matter and energy remained.

* The early universe produced overwhelmingly normal matter and energy, and almost no antimatter.

[sigmoid10]

If you put a lot of energy into a small place, you end up producing particles. We know this and in fact we can do it in particle accelerators. We understand how this happens with a very high degree of precision. The big bang was, essentially, just a huge amount of energy in a tiny place. So according to everything we know about particle physics, lots and lots of matter-antimatter pairs should have been produced. We also know there are some tiny violations of matter-antimatter symmetry that might have caused only one kind to remain after things spread out and cooled down. We know this because we have observed the weak nuclear force violate that symmetry in experiments. But these violations are so tiny that it seems a truly ridiculous amount of matter was necessary in the first place. The only assumption here is that what we currently know about particle physics and quantum field theory still holds true somewhat close to the big bang. I understand that this might seem unsatisfactory on many levels (and it still is to many physicists), but assuming that only one kind of matter was created in the big bang would require a completely new mechanism beyond any currently known physics.

[JohnMakin]

As a former non-atheist, with plenty of people I know in the church that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge accepted science - I've long experimented with theologies in my head to fit the concept of God as they understand it into a cosmological model. Stuff like this is fun for me to point to. Maybe a watchmaker (set it in motion and then stepped away) "god" tipped the scales ever so slightly here (to be clear, I don't believe this, but communicating science to religious people can help to frame things in this way). To me this creates a much more powerful deity than some guy who somehow only created the universe 6,000 years ago but also for some insane reason made it look billions of years old.

[chr1]

Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is rather easy.

If we agree that everything we see is described by physics, then everything including us is simply a computation. And in principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a computation.

People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run the simulation to see what everyone does.

From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and making it look billions of years old does not look that insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.

So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to a computation or not.

[mr_mitm]

Why did that almighty watchmaker create anti matter in the first place that anihilates the normal matter? They could have just created the normal matter and zero anti matter. Why carefully fine tune these number?

All of these situations are quite convoluted if you want to fit a designer in there.

[kingkawn]

Overarching intellectual models exist for the sake of the problems they solve, rather than to stake claims of supremacy over all other models. Religious-style thinking has important meaning in certain contexts, especially crises and periods of apparent helplessness. Scientific rationalism is useful for solving certain classes of problems in certain ways. To posit universality to either betrays a medieval relationship to thought, not that the person, whether religious or scientific, may be close to succeeding at their position’s impossible sense of their own centrality.

[ASalazarMX]

The Universe seems vast, unimaginably immense for our meat minds to really grasp, and yet I can't shake the feeling that the Big Bang could have been an insignificant leftover of some even vaster phenomena.