[expat_panama]

I find it easier to believe that everything began with the universe already 4 feet across.

That's humerous enough, but why 4ft? Why not 40, 400, or 4,000?

Absolutely.  The idea is to start with the observed acceleration of the stars showing space's expansion, fudge in the measured mass/energy, and figure back a start point:

Hawkings came up with a beach ball size beginning, someone else said a golf ball, and I found another guy said more like a soft ball.  Anyway you cut it they got a lot of balls doing their measurements from outside of spacetime --they're using God's tape measure without even asking to borrow it.  If they'd have been honest and measured while inside the universe when everything was traveling light speed, then all distances would have shrunk to zero.

[BlueDragon]

Dark energy...if that's not a special pleading, what is? By which I mean the very models themselves (everything coming from a singularity), though perhaps interesting and worthy of investigation, are really not all that much better than brane theory musings, in some regards, for this abundant dark energy itself is little understood, although it needs to be present for the models to work.

As one link (concerning "electrical universe') provided earlier pointed towards...the very observations themselves which are used in the calculations, could well be themselves fundamentally skewed.