My point is that (again, to my understanding) the Big Bang theory relies on an "it appeared" start and does not at all address from whence the matter of that nascent universe was derived.
Is it necessarily so that something has to come from somewhere/something else or that there has to be a beginning to everything? Why is it not possible that the "stuff" comprising the universe has just always been there? Maybe our way of thinking is a reflection of the limit of our cognitive abilities.
This seems to fly in the face of the very reason that man uses science to investigate his world.
If you read that article by Stephen Hawking on The Beginning of Time, you'll see he isn't as quick as the NASA guys to throw up his hands in defeat when considering the moment before the big bang and invoke an outside agency for all that came before. You have to read it all the way to the end to get to the Big Idea he's proposing.
Haven't gotten to it yet, only because the link resolved to the "home page" for his lectures, and I'd already logged out of GH and didn't have the proper title to navigate my way to it. I'll check it out, as well as the other one you linked, too.
Imaginary time, to my ear, sounds like a better hypothesis than the "God must've done it" hypothesis. Even if imaginary time turns out to be a wrong solution, it keeps people on the track of considering that we probably haven't thought through all of the possible materialistic explanations for how the universe began and that it is probably much too early in the game to throw up our hands and invoke "theories" that begin and end with The Creator did it.
My approach is that, when at the hypothesis stage, "must" is not a word in the conversation. One person can toss out a half-dozen interesting theories based on physics, none of which may currently be tested for validity. A second person may toss out a half-dozen theology-based theories, each equally incapable of having its validity tested. To the objective observer, at that moment, not one of the dozen theories is any more right or wrong than the others.
Ultimately, I've never been one to force a religious view upon anyone. I've raised the positions counter to science more to show that, in rare cases, adherents of science appear to discount non-scientific theories more out of pro-science prejudice than because science has proven its own theory on the particular matter. The question of where the matter came from that formed the universe is one such instance; the issue almost wholly lacks evidence for any theory, yet the religious accept a religious theory and dismiss scientific guesses out of hand, while the scientific accept or promote scientific theories and dismiss non-scientific guessing. Many times, listening to people argue about unanswerable issues reveals more about the arguers than the issue.
