And this is how human spoken language falls short of the weirdness of reality.
We humans have developed our language for communication within a space-time continuum on a macroscopic level dealing with sub-light speeds and medium gravitational forces.
This is why ever sentence contains a verbe. Because everything we know and experience, exists and happens within a context that has temporal condition and where stuff "happens".
The very foundation of our language and communication, is temporal by nature.
This is also true for the way we think about things.
It's perfectly normal and to be expected that humans aren't capable of wrapping their minds around things like atemporality, quantum mechanics, side effects of approaching or even achieving lighspeed,... even just the concept of the relativity of time sounds completely absurd to our human brain. It is all very counter intuitive.
But one has to remember that the only reason it is counter intuitive, is because our intuition has been trained and evolved to only deal with medium gravity and medium speed under temporal conditions.
Had you been a mosquito, then your brain wouldn't have been trained and evolved to deal with gravity in the same way that we humans have to deal with it. Instead, your intuition would be geared more towards dealing with things like surface tension.
As a sidenote, what I find quite amusing with this whole "time is an inherent property of space-time itself", is that it is perfectly accurate to say "The universe has always existed".
Since "always" means "for all of time". And if you take any moment in history (in "time"), then the universe existed. When there is time, there is a universe. So the universe always existed. Perfectly accurate statement. Lol.
Speaking of language...this is sort of where I wanted to head with this thread. When we get to the quantum perhaps we leave behind time and space and see beyond what we, as observers of our environment, are mainly capable of seeing. Perhaps we should draw a dotted line around space-time and think about the formation of atoms and beyond as the story of our Universe and see the seams of the fabric of space-time (its topology, its fields) as having quantum seams which indicate something more fundamental and extra-Universal.
In any layer of physical activity there are primary units (atoms, people). The behaviour of those units may support a higher level of behaviour in certain environments (molecules, societies). It also expresses a layer of behaviour of a lower level (sub-atomic particles, multi-cellular life forms).
I find that stochastic laws prevail at points in a system where one layer transitions to another like atoms/molecules in a gas. If quantum events are often stochastic then does not our experience suggest that there is an orderly layer which is generative of this randomness? And if a signal (the Universe) forms an order out of this noisy background then we should consider that noise as indicative of a "lower layer" of activity. If we cant observe that then that is merely an outcome of ourselves as the limitation of the instrument we use to measure with.
We can analogize then to the many layers of the universe we do have access to and consider that there is another layer. Maybe we can see the classical Universe as "our" layer.
This should be considered alongside the nothing assumption since by analogy we might be able to recognize a distinction thereby between a perfectly, self-explained and presentable universe out of nothing vs a created universe with odd "blemishes" in its presentation that suggest that there is more to its story.
With respect to our need to understand our universe as being created by a "spiritual source" then there is an interesting possibility that science might add where the properties of the quantum become the stand in for the imaginings of the nature of God. The various miraculous qualities of the quantum (non-locality, particle-wave duality, tunneling, etc) would stand in as vestiges of those miracles that throughout time were imagined of the gods.
