God vs Science vs Father Time

"If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size"

That's just one of the many amazing lines in Stephen Hawking's mind-blowing A Brief History of Time, a book that explains the history of scientific thought on the big bad universe we inhabit. I'm not very good at science so I worried that a lot of it might go over my head, but Hawking must be the greatest teacher in the world, as the most gigantic yet infinitesimally esoteric concepts managed to sink into my brain. What's weird for me is that the more Hawking proves the reasons for our existence and the existence of Earth itself with baffling scientific theory, the more I contrarily believe that there must have been some God behind it all. Take the quote above for instance: if when the universe initially expanded it had gone 1/100000000000000000 (I think) slower then it would have collapsed back in on itself ages ago and we would never exist. And that's just one tiny qualifier in our existence. When you add together all of the different ways in which life on Earth could have been scuppered, the odds of us being here are so small that it's impossible to comprehend that we actually exist by chance, and the idea that there was a nice God to put us here instead (and then make up loads of complicated science to bamboozle us) becomes a lot more palatable.

When I was reading A Brief History of Time on my way to work I found myself staring out of the window at the land and just thinking "wow". Everything that exists, everything that got us to this point in humanity is amazing. And the book is stuffed full of so many great ideas, I can't believe Hawking managed to pack them all into two-hundred pages. The ones on time are the most inspiring. I've always had a problem with time: it seems so queer to me that when something is done it's done and you can never go back and do things differently or better. We're supposed to learn from our mistakes, but everytime we mess something up and get the chance to learn, we never get to live through the exact same thing again and defeat our previous mistake like an end-level boss in a computer game that killed us the first time round. Or when an era of our life is complete it's gone forever: why can't we go back and dip in and out of different times of our lives instead of always being stuck in the present? It would be so much more interesting to flit between the past and future too, and also make us appreciate the here and now instead of just drifting through it. Hawking raises a lot of points about the arrow of time and the possibility of it being fiddled around so that we could live a more Slaughterhouse-5 style existence, and it's given me lots of good ideas for short stories. I'd like to write one where you got to the half-way point of a story and Time's Arrow was reversed, and then you'd follow the character back where he'd come from. Or a story where a character met all of the different versions of himself when time splintered off after major decisions and events in his life. So I think I will. Thanks for the inspiration, Hawking!