Well ol' Papa Bear has done it again, said something so immensely contrite and stupid. And of course when called on the carpet for it he said he knew that the gravitational pull of the moon causes the phenomena of the changing tides. And I have no reason not to believe that. In fact I think Bill O'Reilly is a smart guy, he has to be to manipulate the masses with such obvious falsehoods espoused on the O'Reilly Factor. What Bill eventually asked was "Where did the moon come from?" this is a little more complicated question, but about five minutes on Wikipedia could have resolved this for him. Eventually every time someone with knowledge answers him, he will ask "Well then you explained A is caused by B then where did B come from?" So eventually in our hypothetical back and forth with Billy Boy we come to the singularity of compressed matter, space, and time, the thing that would eventually rapidly expand and begin the formation of the universe, and he of course comes to the question "What started the Big Bang?". The penultimate question in the theists god of the gaps argument.
The fact is as far as I know, science doesn't have a perfect answer for that. And guess what? That is ok. One of the things I had to come to terms with when I became an atheist was the humility to accept "I Don't Know" as an answer. Because when one says I don't know, they can then begin to maybe get a little curious, maybe actually find evidence that supports a hypothesis of what was there "before". And when one says "God dun it", well one is just making a baseless assertion and is perhaps cutting off any further inquiry into an unexplainable phenomenon, and perhaps in a more philosophical sense cutting off the one "purpose" that I can see for the whole of human existence. The purpose to divine the secrets of the world and the universe around us. To be the mind of the universe, to allow the universe to understand itself (props to Carl Sagan for inspiring that idea in me).
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