I can see myself still, 17 or 18, walking on to the school
playground from 'the field' - the boys' football pitch alongside the girls' hockey pitch with a square between the two for cricket in the summer - reading Fred Hoyle's The Nature of the Universe; feel still my naive surprise at all the galaxies and millions of stars there were, knowing
nothing of cosmology let alone of the Big Bang versus Steady State dispute that Hoyle had instigated. I even seem to remember thinking his Steady State Universe was the more likely, everything kept going by 'spontaneous creation' - after all, why not?
When I say all these years later if God did not create the Universe, then the Universe created itself, I mean to mock the idea of either creating itself. Which leaves an eternal Universe no less possible, probable or certain than a Creator God.
To me, what the Universe 'comes from' then is whatever it was and is. I don't believe human beings can make sense of anything other than 'the Universe' is just that - all there is and always was, existing as whatever it is and may change from, to. We have been made part of it, not the other way round.
All these years later, I do not see how what I mean can ever be clarified beyond these words I have now.