What happened before the Big Bang, and who or what initiated it?

That question isn't relevant to my life.

Of course it is, because of the implications that come out of it.

Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters.

Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.

You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions. There's no evidence of a creator, no evidence the creator is a "He" and no evidence that it is remotely human with human concerns and that it cares about what we do one way or the other, or that it has any involvement after creation. You're projecting a creator that looks and thinks like you with absolutely zero evidence, which is alternatively your own lack of imagination or too much imagination depending on how you slice it. And we can go around and around on this argument, which after 50 years on this planet I can reassure you that I've seen it before. Even if I grant you a Creator (which I don't, we can always assume an infinite multiverse instead or just that cosmology allows for a causeless effect) then there's nothing that falls out of that other than the existence of a Creator. You then wind up with something like Spinoza/Einstein's God or the Prime Mover that agnostics like to consider. There's no evidence of any of it though.

Let's say you take the big bang as a historical fact. Something created the big bang. By definition, the "thing" that created it is a creator. We cannot say whether this creator is a sentient being that has vastly more intelligence than any human, but we can say that the possibility seems to make some people very uncomfortable.

The evidence of The Creator is your very existence.

He is just how we are able to articulate in our language. We are limited, and He chose to reveal Himself using He, so who are we to question?

> or that it has any involvement after creation

Provably false.

We have hard evidence for our belief and faith. Here's a good starting point: www.provingislam.com

Yeah you're just getting into word salad now, later.

As a casual philosopher, it seems like the big bang theory as the origin of everything falls apart under a trivial question. To you, such a discrepancy may be "irrelevant" to your life, but you're in the minority. The vast majority of people in this world are religious for a reason. They want to understand the bigger picture, and their curiosity does not stop when their finite logical facilities do.

It doesn't "fall apart", it just doesn't have any answer for what came before it.

That doesn't disprove what it can prove. We know the universe used to be very hot and dense and expanded and cooled.

What I don't buy is that because we don't understand something -- like what came before the big bang -- that it necessarily implies the existence of some old white bearded cishet white male who cares about our day to day lives.

I'm perfectly happy with having absolute uncertainty about what came before the big bang. There doesn't need to be any explanation, and there certainly doesn't need to be a religious explanation.

> some old white bearded cishet white male

And there's the straw man. I don't think anyone is arguing for the existence of such.

It seems you have some misguided (and caricaturic) presumptions, but those should not blur your thinking

The fact that we exist necessarily implies a Creator. Just because you're happy putting your head in the sand does not mean that reality will disappear when you do.

Isn't it called the big bang theory, not the big bang fact? How many reputable scientists can you cite that would publicly declare the big bang as a fact rather than a theory?

I wonder if the person to whom I was originally responding finds your dogmatism as objectionable as dogmatism of a traditionally religious nature.

Ah, that old silly word game - haven't actually seen it in awhile. The definition is available if you'd care to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

Science also refers to the theory of gravity, which I would suspect we can agree exists.

Let's cast aside for a moment that unlike gravity, the big bang, if it occurred, is impossible for a human to witness first hand.

The understanding of gravity had a tectonic shift about a century ago. Imagine if scientists declared that Newton's model of gravity was the final word, and that it was heretical to question it. These things are called theories, not facts, for a reason.

Such things happen all the time in the history of science. As another example, think about the phrase "subatomic particle" and the sequence of mistakes that must have occurred to arrive at such wording.

Paradoxically, instead of the history of science inspiring humility, it seems to encourage arrogance among some. Is the ego a friend or enemy of scientific advancement?