"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is the first sentence in the Book of Genesis of the Holy Bible. It goes on to say that God created everything in the Universe in six days followed by a day of rest. Fundamental religions interpret this literally as six days, although some aren't sure how long a day was at the time of the creation. However, the hard core literal fundamentalists hold that a day in the Genesis story was a 24 hour day.
Most members of liberal religions, and many others as well, go with the discoveries of science which collectively conclude that it took billions of years (13.7 billion to be exact) to create the present Universe. Thus, the religious fundamentalists and liberals may agree that a creator (God) created the Universe, but they differ widely on the time line (days vs eons).
But an idea completely different from the view point of either days or eons has emerged based on the findings of particle physics, the branch of physics that searches for the origins and behaviors of the fundamental sub-atomic particles from which all matter is constructed. Basically this new idea holds that the creative process took place within the first fraction of a second following the birth of the universe at the Big Bang. All else happened automatically in accordance to the properties given the newly formed sub-atomic particles during that first fraction of a second.
The lion's share of particle physics research has been going on since the last half of the 20^th^ century at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility in Geneva, home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). What they presently do with the LHC is to send billions of nuclear protons (a hadron) at a time smashing into each other at 99.99991% of the speed of light. This completely annihilates the protons changing them into a primordial soup of energy at a very high temperature. This mimics the conditions of the Universe that existed within the first fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. To be a bit more precise the folks at CERN say that the proton collisions within the LHC allow them to have a look at the super-hot primordial energy universe as it existed a mere five thousand-trillionths (5X10^-15^) of a second after the Big Bang banged.
Instantly (within a fraction of a fraction of a second) following the annihilation of the colliding protons the just born mini universe within the LHC starts to cool and the various elements that make up atoms emerge from the primordial energy soup. As they do they leave tell tail energy traces which are unique for each particle. These traces which number well into the thousands with each set of collisions are recorded then analyzed as to what sub-atomic particle they represent. A massive analysis of this magnitude requires the interactive workings of hundreds of computers. CERN achieved this by setting up a multitude of analytical sites around the world, most within physics departments at universities, and tying them together in a network which ultimately became the World Wide Webb.
The same thing that happens with the colliding protons within the LHC is thought to have happened within the first fraction of a fraction of a second following the birth of the Universe. That is, the building blocks of the universe - the elementary particles that make up atoms - were formed from the initial primordial energy arising from the Big Bang. A mystery that took science a long time to solve was how did particles with mass form from pure energy? In the 1960s the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and his co-investigators postulated the existence of a special energy carrying particle that gave the particles created at the big bang their mass. Energy carrying sub-atomic particles are called bosons, hence the one postulated by the Higgs group was termed the Higgs Boson. Without the Higgs there would have been no sub-atomic particles with mass, hence no atoms and no anything else, including us. For this reason the Higgs Boson is often referred to as the God particle, although Peter Higgs himself detests the term and strongly prefers that it not be used.
If the Higgs Boson emerged with the Big Bang, then it should be among the various particles created by annihilation of protons in the LHC. In fact one of the objectives of building the LHC was to hunt for the Higgs Boson. The LHC, which is a third or fourth generation collider at CERN, became operational in 2008, and the Higgs was discovered in 2012 several decades after Peter Higgs and his team postulated its existence. An amusing aside here is that Steven Hawking who didn't think that there was such a thing as a boson that could change energy into mass bet Peter Higgs that such a boson would never be found. Hawking obviously lost that bet although it is not known what was wagered.
Once these initial sub-atomic particles, consisting of things like quarks, leptons and photons, were formed they contained all the properties necessary to coalesce into atoms, and the atoms in turn inherited all the properties necessary to form molecules and in like manner the molecules into physical entities and so on eventually (over billions of years) forming the entire structure of the Universe, including living beings. By the way, a hadron is a sub-atomic particle made up of quarks of which protons and neutrons are examples each being composed of three quarks.
None of this would have been possible had there not been a Higgs Boson. Accordingly what we will now call the quantum theory of creation did not become tenable until 2012, an extremely new idea compared to the classical notions of days or eons.
Basically, the quantum theory of creation says that once the sub-atomic particles were formed following the Big Bang and given mass by the Higgs Boson, all else followed as determined by the inherent characteristics of the particles themselves independent of any guidance by a creator. The inherent characteristics of the particles given mass by the Higgs, is what David Wilcock in his book "The Source Field Investigations" refers to as the intelligence of the universe.
Thus, by the quantum theory of creation, God's creative process only took a minuscule fraction of a second, not days or eons. An analogy could go something like this. Suppose you had a large rainstorm giving a torrential downpour which forms a giant puddle on top of a hill with lots of dirt suspended in the water. Sometime after the storm subsides and the sun comes out the water in the puddle starts to evaporate freeing the suspended dirt which then falls to the bottom. Let's let the storm represent the Big Bang and the precipitated dirt the primitive energies which will become sub-atomic particles once they obtain mass. Then along comes the mass giver, a guy we will name Higgs. Higgs sits by the puddle, scoops up some wet dirt from the bottom and makes a mud ball. Having nothing better to do at the time, Higgs repeats the process until he has made a whole bunch of mud balls, each ball being a little different. Let's let the mud balls that Higgs has created represent sub-atomic particles with mass.
Higgs collects his gaggle of mud balls and starts them rolling down the hill all at once. As they progress in their downward journey the mud balls bump into each other with different ones sticking together making different spherical shaped structures. Which ones stick together and what they look like after becoming joined was determined by the characteristics of each mud ball after Higgs formed it. By the time the mud balls make it to the bottom of the hill, some 13.7 billion years later (Higgs had a lot of time on his hands.), they had coalesced into a set of unique structures each containing some of Higgs' original mud balls.
As the mud balls were careening downward, Higgs was relaxing in the sun having no further influence on them. His creative process was finished the moment he started the mud balls rolling down the hill.
Our Higgs analogy reflects the popular notion that following the Big Bang the conversion of energy into particles with mass, as well as built in characteristics, had some sort of creative force (God) behind it. But subsequent to this almost instantaneous creation of sub-atomic particles it may be, as Steven Hawking stated in his book "The Grand Design", "not necessary to invoke God to set the universe going" just as it was not necessary for Higgs to do anything further with his mud balls once he started them on their way down the hill.
So, at this point we have three distinct time lines to choose from in believing how long it took a creator (God) to create the universe -- eons, days and a fraction of a second. None of these viewpoints, however, addresses the age old question: Where did this creative force come from? In other words, who or what created God? The answer usually given is what is known as a "first cause argument" which says that an entity such as a creative God needs no creator itself. It's just there. I think that that's a rather lame cop-out argument that doesn't really say anything about creating a creator who created the Big Bang.
A most sticky point about asking what came before the Big Bang is that it leads to an infinite regression of creative forces. That is, who or what created who or what created the creator (God), ect ect? An infinite regression of creative gods. "Turtles all the way down!"
Furthermore, the infinite regression idea is inconsistent with compelling arguments of cosmologists, such as Stephen Hawking, that the moment of the Big Bang was a singularity before which nothing existed, not even time, and most certainly no such thing as a creative force (i.e. God). As Hawking put it, asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is south of the South Pole.
An entirely different explanation for creation that gets around the infinite regression of creators, is that God didn't create the universe; rather the universe created God. By this notion the initial particles that came into being from the plasma rich soup of the big bang, in particular the Higgs boson, gradually became endowed by some sort of intelligence which remains hidden in the laws of nature. This intelligence then guided the formation of atoms and ultimately the entire universe including us. It is a bit analogous to the formation of intelligent life which began as organic molecules without intelligence which then gradually evolved into first single then multi-cellular organisms with the ability to organize and make decisions (i.e., intelligence). Going back to our mud ball analogy, it's not that a creator, Higgs in this case, made the mud balls, but rather that as the rainwater dried away the mud balls formed on their own in accordance to the laws of physics and chemistry. Then some other force associated with the rain storm, such as the wind, started the mud balls on their downhill journey during which they picked up an intelligence enabling them to decide how to bump into each other and with that what kind of new mud balls to form. A creator, such as Higgs, played no role in any of this.
If the universe created God, then, to re-state David Wilcock, God is the collective intelligence of the universe. Furthermore, since all things and all beings are made up of particles and if those particles have a collective intelligence that we call God, then we are all a part of the Divine. The notion that we are all a part of the Divine is a major theme of the Unity Church, a Christian congregation, and is consistent with the theological philosophy of pantheism -- the notion that God exists in all things, including us.
Not only is each individual part of the Divine, but there is also evidence that we are all interconnected by some sort of vast energy web permeating space, not just outer space, but additionally the environmental space surrounding us as well as the space within us. The Unitarian Universalist Church has recognized this interconnectedness and adopted it as one of their principles -- "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part".
The nature of this web and how individuals become interconnected by it are subjects of on-going investigations in relatively new scientific fields such as quantum biology and noetics, the former being the study of the role of atoms in functions of biological cells and the latter investigations into the mechanisms of psychic phenomena, such as telepathy and clairvoyance. In the meantime, there are phenomena previously considered to be the work of a divine god that evidence now indicates are mediated by us mortal beings via the interdependent web which ties us all together. Foremost among these are prayer and hands-on healing, findings which further support the notion that we are all part of the Divine -- the collective intelligence of the universe.
In summary, we now have a menu of selections as to how a creator created the universe and all within it. In terms of historical linage there is the belief championed by hard core fundamentalist that God created the universe in seven 24-hour days. Then there is the idea based on the science of cosmology that it took a creator (God) billions of years to create the universe. Lastly along this line, there is the notion based on the science of particle physics that it took a creator a minuscule fraction of second to create the universe following the Big Bang. Finally, we have the possibility, also based on particle physics, that God didn't create the universe at all, but rather the universe created God. To me, the latter makes the most sense, and it's the one I adhere to. But that's me. Each individual should decide for themselves which, if any, of the creation ideas presented in this essay makes the most sense to them. Good luck in figuring it out.