re: #149 freetoken

You are right in saying some scientists and laypeople conflate the Big Bang with Creation, because there is still a lingering belief in a Creator Thing/God which started everything going. Probably something leftover from both Judaism and the ancient Greeks. As for the science of the BB, it is currently the most widely accepted theory explaining what we know about the universe now and in the distant past. It cannot discuss or even propose what existed before the BB, because we have no data or evidence of a pre-BB universe. Even the question of an open or closed universe is not yet answered. The last I had studied astrophysics, the consensus was the expansion of the universe was slowing down, suggesting a cyclical pattern of Big Bangs and Big Crunches. But that seems not to be the consensus now, as data suggest the universe will keep on expanding (and cooling) until all the stars run out of fuel.

Bummer.

Judging from my more recent perusals of the literature, scientists are still finding supporting evidence for the BB. The steady state universe theory is now considered invalid (Fred Hoyle, IIRC, was a big steady state proponent). But as Stephen Hawking once said, asking what happened before the BB is like asking what’s north of the north pole. Physics offers no clues as to even why it happened. So, our simian brains try to find explanations outside science. Even scientists can fall into that trap.