First causes and how the idea of God messes up science

There is no need for a God hypothesis.  It only serves to clutter science with theology.  That a God  is possible is beyond question, but there being no need for it in a scientific view of how the universe came into being, it should be left out, just as we leave out Santa -- besides, the reason God is put in such discussions is not scientific but  emotional and often based on a desire to convert people to a religion.

Why do I say there is no need for a God hypothesis?  People seem to think the universe could not have come from nothing -- that this is impossible -- but it isn't, and we have to realize that it is only an assumption, with no logical necessity behind it.  We grow up in a world where everything that happens is thought to have a prior causation -- the police find a dead man they ask for an autopsy to see what "caused" the death.   Still, we do know that deaths do happen that go entirely unexplained, or the mortician says something about "probable" causes, meaning of course he is not sure.

I am persuaded that causality is an illusion.  We live in a world where all events are the result of the behavior of gazillion of atoms, and probabilities can be assigned to what each atom will do, and, since there are gazillions of them involved, the most likely probabilities are what almost always happens -- but not necessarily always.  The billiard balls hitting each other create overwhelming probabilities that the result will be as classical mechanics predicts, since there are so many individual atoms involved it would be eons before an exception happened.  This is called cause and effect, but that is a bit magical and the reality is probability.  We perform the same experiment a thousand times and get the same result a thousand times and conclude there is a "causal" relationship, while I would say it remains possible the next time the outcome will be different -- that inference is only a matter of finding what is most probable, not what is written in the stars.

I had to work at it but now I can envision a situation where nothing exists, no time or space.  This would not be eons and eons of nothingness, since there would be no time.  Who is to say what the probability of something happening, such as a quantum variation that sets in motion a chain of events that results in our universe?  Scenarios of this sort of thing have in fact been worked out with a good deal of rigor.