Ancient Vedic thought on it might be summed thusly:
Know this: the Universe is not created.
(And is, after a convention, eternal, and was always around.)
But they also say that it is cyclical, will die, essentially, and come around (and around, ad infinitum) again... that there is an ultimate limit (4.32 billion years to be precise...) to that which is created, @ which point the universe is completely destroyed and reabsorbed into "God" or Vishnu.
ONE MORE TIME!
[The Big Bounce:
According to some quantum loop gravity theorists, the Big Bang was merely the beginning of a period of expansion that followed a period of contraction. In this oscillatory universe hypothesis (originally attributable to John Wheeler), the universe undergoes an infinite series of oscillations, each beginning with a big bang and ending with a big crunch. After the big bang, the universe expands for a while before the gravitational attraction of matter causes it to collapse back in and undergo a Big Bounce. Although the model was abandoned for a time, the theory has been revived in brane cosmology as the cyclic model.]
A Buddhist will argue, sort of extending that thought, that anything caused is strictly temporary, that the only essential 'thing' is nothing (perhaps better stated as emptiness, Shunyata) 'itself'*. IE: that if it has causality, it is interdependent on the whole ball of wax, meaning tied to everything else with cause, and that a thing with no independent existence is empty of essence. (*: that an eternal self/soul cannot exist, except as uncreated, not-individualized, a sort of all-embracing wholeness.)
Physicists will have a real problem with the idea that a thing can be its own cause. However, it is not seen as what is called a vanishing probability. (note that this implies that nothing is impossible. EG: There have been experiments done at the quantum level that appear to show a thing having caused itself.)
