Just because science has not offered a concluded explanation for the cause of the Big Bang, that does not somehow give strength or reason to religious alternatives.

If then, the question is put to me would I rather confess my ignorance and then employ rational thought and study in an effort to remedy the situation, or instead surrender myself to my ignorance and latch on to whichever explanation is most comfortable and never mind that there is no evidence involved, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the humbling confession.

That was rather my point :p I mean that a negative argument is very weak in this sense.

I don't entirely understand your wording (ironic really), but I'll explain what I meant. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, is this not true? The same is true for energy, no? So, when the Big Band occurred (not that I believe that it did, I'm just saying this for arguments sake) matter and energy must have already existed. But how did that matter and energy come into existence? Did it always exist, just in a different form, or it did it come into being at one point at time? That is what I was referring to.

Why and how are arguably related.

Edit: It probably was unnecessary for me to say 'plausible', but plausible only really matters for the period of time in which you use it. For example, in the olden days, it was generally accepted that the world was flat, and the idea that it was round was ridiculous, it was still a theory, even if (back then) it was considered implausible.

Don't expect any of this to make sense: we evolved in a middle world between the very large and the very small, and cosmology deals with both, and neither behave anything like we expect in middle world.

The Big Bang was simply an expansion of space from a sort of singularity, which is the ultimate compression of matter and energy into a point. It was able to expand because one of its dimensions became one of time. "Before" does not exist in any meaningful sense because that was the beginning of time. You can't rewind a tape past the start, can you? There's no tape to rewind to.

It has been hypothesised that that singularity may have been the collapsed remnants of a "previous" universe, or budded off of a black hole in another universe, but it is tricky to imagine this because it implies something occurring before our universe, but since our observation of multiple universes from an external perspective is a vantage point without time, you cannot use the words "before" or "after" with any meaning. You must stop thinking in terms of linear time, indeed in terms of time at all, because time was created in the Big Bang, just as spacial dimension were. So you can say that the energy and metter were never actually created.

We can also throw various string theories into the mix, but I'm not even going to attempt to explain them, unless you think you can wrap your head around 26 spacial dimensions, branes, compactification, force-matter duality and particles collapsed from vibrating one-dimensional superstrings. I know I can't.

As if that were not enough:

physics and cosmology is too weird to be able to discuss meaningfully without already understanding the science behind it, and to be able to do the math. And the math involved is horrendous, but it works. But in my experience, the only reason people do not accept science like this is because they do not comprehend it. So we get the duality of scientists studying and understanding the universe, and lay people coming up with their own ideas.

Ah, religion and spirituality, good times.

I have the somewhat unpopular stance of being a big fan of religion. I'm not religious myself, but I find it immeasurably fascinating how every facet of our society has some loose moral base that relates to the Western religions. Go, imperialism!

But honestly, aside from being all imperial and corrupt and all that, I do think religion is an incredibly important institution. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't trust in most people to determine their own moral values, and with nothing but empty words in the form of laws to tell people how to behave, there's no motivation to be a good person but to avoid punishment. Religion gives reason to be a good person.

Also, I find it somewhat unfair that a lot of the time Christianity gets all the blame for the acts of the retards who subscribe to that faith. Silly preists, butts are for pooping!

Yeah, Christians. I don't feel like I know enough about the other major religions to attack or defend the belief system and yadda-yadda, so I won't. And like I said, I'm not religious myself, but I get just as pissed every time I see a bunch of angry teen kids decrying religion as when I watch the people with the "Ask me why God hates you!" banners. Er, maybe not, but it's a close second.

Of course, given the fact that both of those people are real, their mutual existence becomes more understandable.

Oh and an edit: I also think it's silly that people think science can persuade a religious person out of his faith. Logic and Faith are equally immobile thought processes.

Christians have made it a form of art... :|

There was a lot in that post I didn't agree with, but right now I'm gunning at this sentence, not least the description of faith as a thought process. But have you noticed that immobile logic praised as much as immobile faith is vilified? The latter is already a "solution", whereas the former is just a method used to reach them.