Matter and energy exist. Minds are emergent systems caused by functioning brains. Numbers are abstract and only exist because minds project them. I don't know what 'spirit' is - everybody seems to have their own definition of 'spirit', but I haven't heard any that I would say have met their burden of being proven true or likely true.
"Before" the universe is nonsense. The universe is space and time. "Before" the universe is 'before time', so there's nothing for anything to exist in. As for what caused the universe, I don't know. And neither does anybody else.
I can't remember the question - but I do remember 3 metaphisics questions.
What is knowledge?
Knowledge is a subset of belief. It is the model of the universe built inside functioning minds. Perceptions gathered by minds and inferences made by those minds.
To leave the universe better than I found it. To try to help people and increase the mean well being for the world.
The same place everybody does - from the society, parents, friends, books, history.
I'm not sure there's an objective anything, let alone morals. However, in universe with minds, the wellbeing of those minds takes on importance. There are things that increase the wellbeing of those minds, just as there are things that increase the health of bodies. Moving away from decreasing wellbeing and toward increasing wellbeing is the closest thing to objective morality I can imagine.
Just because something is wrong in one context doesn't mean it's wrong in all contexts. If I'm in a situation where, through no provocation, somebody is threatening my life, it is my right to stop him with every method I can including ending his life. I'm a vegetarian, but if I'm stuck in a cave with a dog, before I die I'm going to kill and eat that dog - I'm simply more important than he is. Lying is morally wrong, but if I'm living in Germany in 1940 and the SS comes to my door asking if there are any Jews in the house, then I'm going to lie to keep them safe - that lie becomes immensely moral.
Which god? Thor? Zeus? Jesus? Allah? I've heard thousands of people describe their god and what it wants, but I've never heard two religions agree on everything - let alone two denominations of a single religion - let alone two people who agree on a definition...
The more specific your god claims get, the easier they are to refute. The omni/omni/omni god is logically impossible and can be dismissed. And the more general your god claims get, the less powerful and less important that being becomes. The 'god is love' people are talking about a god that is not meaningful.
And why would you call this being god? Even if it was very powerful? It's just another mind. Even if it's orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest human, why call it god? And even if you did call a being god, why worship it? Why worship ANYTHING? No being that desires worship is worthy of it - and I'm not sure I could even imagine a being worthy of it to begin with.
Just because a lot of people are thinking the same thing, doesn't mean they're right. People 2000 years ago KNEW that zeus caused lightning. They KNEW that posideon caused ocean storms. But not everybody agreed, and there was no way to prove one right and the other wrong.
Now take the side of reason. There is no Chinese math, or Hindu chemistry, or African physics. If you wiped out the sum of human knowledge tomorrow and started us off again from scratch, we would figure out chemistry and evolution and mathematics again - But we would not have the same myths or religions. That alone is a very strong reason not to believe in any of it.
Short answer; I don't know.
Longer answer; I don't know, I've thought about it quite a bit. But any deity worth its salt would know what it would take.
It can't be anything that I can imagine... If you showed a hologram to somebody 2000 years ago, YOU are god to them. So just because I can't understand what I'm seeing or that I don't know the cause, doesn't mean that there's a being causing it nor that that being is god.
We do. A rock without a mind to contemplate it isn't a rock - it's a collection of molecules and energy. A chair is only a chair because we say it is - when building a chair at what point does the pieces of wood become a chair? Is that objective? Certainly not. It's subjective. We give meaning to objects, we group them in sets like 'chair'. There is no objective set-maker - there is no objective meaning.
No WAY. Any deity that would create such widely different religions that believe such varied things and cause us to fight constantly about them isn't any deity that is loving. It's a being that's playing a cruel joke on us.
If a deity created all human myths, it was to be as a test to see if we can see past all the crazy things people can make up and see through to reason. To take facts at face value, regardless of our personal biases against or for them.
The bible is a collection of myths made by people. It was written by unknown authors in tons of languages and reinterpreted and rewritten with known errors. The gospels don't even have known authors - mark wasn't written by mark, and they were written decades after the events they portray.
It doesn't factor into my life except as an example of what not to do. The bible is a cruel book. How people find morality in this book is beyond me, because every time I read it, I had to remind myself that people not only believe this crap but that people think it's positive. It is a cruel, inhumane, immoral, evil book.
It is not a factor in my daily life.