What is it that keeps the universe 'going'?

This is a very hard question to answer ... with only one answer!

If you are a religious person, then the answer is simple: 'God'.

If you are a religious scientist, then the answer is: 'God, plus inertia'.

If you do not believe in God, then it is simply Inertia.

Right now, our universe seems to expanding and using up that great pulse of energy that started the Big Bang. As it grows cooler, small parts of it get 'wound-up' in some very complex structures like planets and DNA.

The mistake that we make is that we refuse to believe even something as simple as Newtonian mechanics, which says that a body will continue to move of itself even without the action of an applied force. Objects move because of their inertia, not because they are constantly being pushed. The universe continues to 'go' today because of its inertia, not because there is a constant force acting on everything. The fact that astronomers recently detected a 'cosmological constant' operating in the vacuum to accelerate the expansion is irrelevant, because this new vacuum 'force' was physically unimportant until the last few billion years.

I think the idea that 'something' has to keep things going all the time, is one of those misunderstandings that non-scientists have about how the world works which causes lots of problems.