It gets wierder. There is a possibility that time doesn't work the way we percieve it to be working. About the only difference between past and future as far as physics is concerned is that entropy is less in the past and greater in the future. Entropy was pretty much at zero at the big bang (all energy in one place), and at the other end, entropy is infinite (sometimes referred to as the heat death of the universe, when energy becomes so evenly distributed that the entire universe is nothing but a featureless cold sea of individual particles indistinguishable from the ones that appear and disappear all the time (but always summing to zero, can't break the first law of thermodynamics) due to random quantum fluctuations (that's another unintuitive thing about the universe but the evidence is very strong that it actually happens)).
Anyway, it's possible that we percieve time in a before, after kind of way because that's the only way our brains can make sense of it. If true, there is no past or future. It's as if the universe is like a film. Everything the actors ever do in a film is already on the tape, but you view it one frame at a time and in a specific order. Everything that will happen or has happened in the universe is already "on the tape", but since we can't comprehend the entire thing at once, we experience it as a sort of playthrough.
But, hard to know for sure. I figure that even if that's true, I might as well treat time in day-to-day life as I always have, since that's how we're equipped to deal with it. Doesn't make much of a difference unless we figure out how to rewrite parts of the tape. I don't expect that to happen, but who knows. Kinda interesting to think about the possibility that parts of the tape (us) are rewriting other parts and that the tape could be recursively rewriting itself.
The closest analogy I have to the nature of the universe as I understand it is that it is similar to a recorded sound, specifically the sound of an explosion or earthquake or the pluck of a guitar string, any sound that has a sudden beginning and a long drawn out fade to nothing, and the universe itself is that sound. While the universe seems a lot more complex than a sound, remember that a sequence of binary digits contains all the data needed to describe your dwarf fortress worlds and the means to create them. Sound is just as capable of carrying information as binary code. I'm not saying that's what the universe is, but it's a halfway decent analogy. Sudden beginning, long, drawn-out fade, with most of the interesting stuff happening in the early middle.
Amusingly enough, this is not far from some creation myths. I've found that sometimes if you dig far enough into any given subject in science, you realize that the theory somewhat echoes the mystical ideas that first attempted to describe it. Some ancient cultures believed that the magma erupted from volcanoes was a result of fire, hot air, and water merging below the earth. Turns out that one of the major causes of mantle or crustal material melting to form magma is the addition of high-pressure water and dissolved gases to hot rock.
These are some of the reasons I find the discoveries of science to be more wondrous than the creation myths. The data and equations reveal things that almost no one would normally imagine on their own.
I suspect my intentions in writing some of the above will be misread. I am not saying that science shows the myths are true or that God exists. I'm saying science can be just as poetic, often more so, and many of the myths contain a shadow of the truth. I don't expect humans to be capable of finding all the answers as they are now, but I don't think that means the unknown can only be explained by having a God be responsible for it. The history of science is saturated with instances of both the poorest and greatest minds giving up and attributing some mystery to God, only to have someone else come along later with a solution they hadn't thought of. I expect that every time we find ourselves stumped, there will always be a rational answer, even if some of those answers can never be verified by experiment. I expect there is either a final answer for everything, or a continuous chain of ever-more-slightly accurate approximations.
Even with all that, It's still possible that there could indeed be a God at work, but I am certain it would not be the God or Gods described by the religious texts and artworks that we have come up with. I therefore believe that there is no point in tying oneself to the Christian God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, or any of the other thousands of Gods that we have invented.
Some say that by not choosing and worshipping a God, I am making a reservation in Hell. My reply is this: If one of those Gods truly does exist and wants us to worship it, and only it, on penalty of damnation, then that God is not deserving of worship. The reason that God is not worthy of worship is that it gives no clear way to distinguish it from the others as the true God and indeed, went to great effort to make the world appear not to be created by any God at all.
Take fossils for example. They say fossils were created to confuse us. That means God intentionally is trying to deceive us into eternal damnation, which makes him the most evil bastard in history. Or, they say the fossils were created by the Devil. So God is so powerless that he can't keep the Devil from creating the fossils or making them disappear? The guy created the universe, according to you. What's the Devil, or a bunch of fossils, to him? If any of these arguments were true, God would have to be either an asshole, powerless, or a retard. None of those options suggests that anyone should worship him.
Besides, why is belief and worship in God so important to him? Shouldn't he care more that I'm a law-abiding citizen who tries to do good work and not introduce misery into the lives of others if I can help it? Don't the good things I've done count? I'm no saint, certainly, but I've done things for others when I didn't have to and there wasn't anything in it for me. If God wants my belief so bad, all he's gotta do is let me know in some form other than books or the words of other people. Actually, you know what? Even books or the words of other people would work. They just have to not be obviously full of shit of the kind similar to what I described in the above paragraph.
If it did turn out that God irrefutably existed, you know what I'd do? I'd believe in Him/Her/It/They/x. So would any scientist worth the name. Ours is the study of what is verifiable, and if God were verifiable, then God would be part of science. However, the Gods you believers follow simply aren't verifiable. No matter how strongly you believe, it doesn't count as evidence. And as long as you bring flawed, unverifiable arguments or evidence to support your case, they will not be found acceptable as hypotheses or proof. The burden is on you. I gaurantee the person who proves God exists will get the Nobel Prize, as it would be the greatest discovery in history. So, prove us wrong. You'd be doing us a huge favor, because nothing moves science forward like our best ideas getting proven wrong.
That turned out... longer than I thought it would. Thanks for your patience if you've gotten this far. It kind of meandered.