What causes the earth to continue rotating on its axis?

Ahhhhhh.....thx for that. But I don't see the answer to "why" it spins in the first place. What started it? Does all rotating matter rotate in the same direction? Why? What is the "force" that got it all going? Thx again.

Now that you've clarified, that's a very interesting question. The very hot gas that was the early universe had, as gases do, not only density fluctuations, which were amplified into galaxies, galactic clusters, stars, etc. but also velocity fluctuations and, accordingly, angular momentum or vorticity fluctuations. When an object becomes caught in a bound orbit, it will curve one way or the other depending on which way it was going. Chances of it not having an overall tendency one way or the other are small, and over time interactions--collisions between dust, etc.--will cause the tendency to become more homogenous. Once one body has this sort of rotation, it also has a velocity gradient--particles toward the outside are moving faster than particles toward the center. So once the galaxy is spinning, the accreting solar system will pick up its own spin, because the particles that started off toward the outside of the galaxy will be swirlind in their direction faster than those that started off farther toward the inside swirl in theirs. And from that, the earth will pick up its own spin, etc. So an early thermal fluctuation on the scale of a nascent galaxy can be propagated all the way down to the level of the earth!

And when is the earth going to stop rotating.. its not going to happen. It may change its speed.. For that some serious disturbance has to happen in the neighbourhood of our solar system resulting in a serious disruption in the mass balance. And rest assured it is not happening during the lifetime of yours or mine.

For that I think the big bang has to be clearly understood, which it still isnt. The big bang starts off saying that there was this infinitely small, infinitely dense ball of infinitely great energy... now thats a little hard to imagine. And where did that ball come from.. no one's explained it properly till date.

Thanks for the post(s). I hear you about the laws of physics and all...and I (almost) understand it. But I still can't quite grasp where the original energy came from to get it all going. As you note, ALL matter is in motion, in macro and micro scale. I just don't know how it started in the first place, y'know? Thanks again for the informative response.