Question: Do you believe in the big bang theory? If you do how would an explosion just create a world full of people that are capable of creating some of the worlds greatest technology?

Paul Booker answered on 10 Mar 2015:

I do indeed! The big bang put into the universe all the matter (so protons and electrons etc) that exists. From there, the matter came together in clumps that make galaxies, and then clumps that made stars and then clumps that made planets – like Earth. Once you have a stable planet, like Earth, where the temperature is fairly constant and there is liquid water and an atmosphere to shield the surface from space, lots of chemical reactions can take place. Exactly how life emerged initially is something nobody knows, but once you have a few chemical reactions that work together, you have what cells do at a very basic level. From there the principles of evolution by natural selection take you to where we are now. Life gets more complex by competing with other life for resources and survival! Technology is a tool that humans have created to give us a survival advantage (generally).

It’s interesting that I’d think about your question from the other point of view – if we have such great technology, how could you think that there was any other way for the world to have come into being than that discovered by the same process that created the technology (if that makes any sense?). Basically science helps come up with the technology, and tells us that the universe started with the big bang and we evolved, so why pick one being true and not the other?