The universe is eternal. Why do people say it needs a creator?

Is the claim of theists: The universe NEEDS a creator?

Or is the claim: The universe HAS a creator?

It is my belief that nothing at all had to happen. That you, me, everybody didn't need to be here. Thus, it did not NEED a creator. God, in his benevolence, just was.

Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.

You are using words without knowledge, so how can you possibly understand the right answer? You don't even know what "eternity" means. You think something with a beginning and end can be eternal. That is absurd. No one but you has that definition of eternity. An absurdity does not need to be disproved.

Eternity is even different than infinite. Infinite is continuing forever in a linear fashion, while eternity is beyond time, no beginning and no end. Anything with a beginning has a cause. No material thing spontaneously appears. In the beginning, God created time, space, matter, and energy, the universe came into being. Life cannot come from non-living matter, which necessitates an eternal living God to create life in it's linear existence. God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. God holds time itself like a string. If you can understand these words, than you will have wisdom.

Eternity is a logical absurdity. You admit time began - you're only off by about 10 billion years or so. The universe is finite since it had a beginning. It would take an infinite amount of time to expand the universe to infinite size. What you're advocating is the Steady State Theory, which is no longer considered correct and in fact, the expansion of space disproves it. As for needing a creator, if the creator doesn't need a creator, neither does the universe and thus a creator is superfluous.

Science is completely empirical by definition, that's why it constantly redefines itself...that's a large part of its flexibility, usefulness and beauty...

There is no evidence, empirical or otherwise, that the universe is eternal, or that time only extends for some arbitrary length of time; the first is an opinion, the second is a misconception of some current thoughts in physics...

All that being said, the universe doesn't "need" a creator, but there either is one or there isn't. Facts remain facts, whether or not we understand them or can prove them...We'll never know if there was a creator, nor will we ever know how "long" time is...

Because the universe isn't eternal. It had a beginning, and from the looks of things according to cosmologists, it will have an ending through entropy.

"@SCE2AUX2: Having a beginning does not imply something is not eternal."

But having an ending does.

And having a beginning does require that it have a creator.

The universe has a finite amount of energy. If you put $15 worth of gas in a car, it doesn't run for eternity. It is going to run out of gas at some point.

Stars do not have infinite energy. If the universe were eternal, the stars would have run out of gas in eternity past.

-That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.-

-The age of the universe is defined in physical cosmology as the time elapsed since the Big Bang. The best measurement of the age of the universe, as of 22 March 2013, is 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years[1][2][3] (4.354 ± 0.012 × 1017 seconds) within the Lambda-CDM concordance model.[4] The uncertainty of 37 million years has been obtained by the agreement of a number of scientific research projects, such as microwave background radiation measurements by the Planck satellite, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other probes. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang,[4] and measurements of the expansion rate of the universe can be used to calculate its approximate age by extrapolating backwards in time.-

-If the Universe needs a creator, why doesn't god?

If god doesn't need a creator, why does the Universe ?-

Basic physics.

Anything that exist has to have a starting point; some point of origin. Something, or someone has to have started all that is in to motion. Existence requires a creator.

The universe apparently has a beginning, so i wouldnt say it is eternal

as for the creator issue, id say some event had to take place, but to call this event intellegent, and to go further and say it is watching us is just absurd