How did the universe begin?

God created it with a beginning — the heavens and earth split from one joined entity (Qur'an 21:30), the heaven still expanding (Qur'an 51:47), as the Qur'an describes. Adam was created directly by God's hand.

With the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago, as far as the evidence reaches. Whether anything preceded it is an open scientific question, and atheist thinkers hold that 'we do not know yet' is a more honest answer than filling the gap with a god.

Agnostics accept Big Bang cosmology as the best-evidenced account of how the observable universe developed. What, if anything, preceded or caused it is left where the evidence leaves it: unknown.

God created it from nothing: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth' (Genesis 1:1). Most traditions accept the Big Bang and the universe's age as the science of how — a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, first proposed the Big Bang — while a minority reads Genesis as a literal six days.

By God's creative word, as Genesis tells it in ordered days. Maimonides defended creation against Aristotle's eternal universe yet wrote that he could reinterpret the verses if reason ever demonstrated otherwise; many modern Jews accordingly read Genesis as theology rather than chronology, alongside big-bang cosmology.

There is no creation story: Buddhist cosmology describes universes expanding and contracting through immense cycles, with no first moment that can be found. One discourse describes a world re-forming after a long contraction — partly as satire of the claim that a creator god started it.

Not once, but endlessly: most texts describe cycles in which the universe is breathed out of Brahman, endures for cosmic ages, dissolves, and is emitted again — the Puranas count a single "day of Brahma" at 4.32 billion years. Older Vedic hymns offer other pictures (a cosmic sacrifice; a golden embryo), and the Nasadiya hymn openly wonders.

The scripture says that for countless ages there was only darkness and the formless One, until by a single command He created the universe — no date, no stages, no detailed cosmology. Most Sikhs accordingly see no quarrel with scientific accounts of cosmic origins.

It has no doctrine of its own. In practice, secular states teach the scientific account — cosmology, evolution — in public schools as science, while protecting every family's right to hold and teach its own religious account at home and in worship; the US Supreme Court struck down a ban on teaching evolution on exactly these grounds.

It defers entirely to cosmology: the observable universe expanded from a hot, dense state about 13.8 billion years ago. Humanism adds no creation account of its own, and treats open questions as science’s to answer.

It defers to science: whatever account of the universe the evidence best supports. Liberalism's own contribution is the free universities and open inquiry in which such science can be done and corrected.

No position: feminists defer to the sciences or to their own faith on cosmology. The movement's subject is society, not the cosmos.

It has no teaching on the universe's beginning; its followers take their answers from science or from their religions. Its own story begins much later — with peoples, languages, and states.