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Moreover, few things are more pointless than adopting the (manifestly anti-intellectual) position, "the universe cannot be understood by humans" to a physicist..

Bingo. There's your problem. If you could maybe find a tiny bit of crack to open that mind of yours to the possibility that you don't have the answer for everything maybe you could experience a whole new universe out there. In short, your full of yourself. To that, your are correct, it is pointless.

Ultimately, what you're saying is that anything goes, nothing is knowable, nothing can be proven, and words don't mean things.

Once again you miss the point. Your arguments state anything goes. Your arguments state what can't be proven and what is not knowable is "null". Your arguments state words or writings mean nothing, only physical evidence.

To sum this up for lurkers:

Post 1766 by usastandsunited asked Physicist whether he ever "wondered what came before the big bang".

The post by Physicist at post 1797 shows why time is not considered, i.e. space/time does not exist before the Big Bang.

The discussion proceeded away from the discussion of null to a discussion of science v. religion. I hope it'll get back on the subject of null!

To sum it up, time is part of the creation and not something in which the Creator exists.

Because science limits itself to the material, it goes no further than inception (i.e. Big Bang or multi-universe theory.) Religion on the other hand, has no such limitation.

Here's more on Teleology.

There's your problem. If you could maybe find a tiny bit of crack to open that mind of yours to the possibility that you don't have the answer for everything maybe you could experience a whole new universe out there.

First, your position that the universe is not understandable by man does not constitute open-mindedness. It constitutes closed-mindedness.

Second, don't presume to lecture me on what we know and what we don't know, or to tell me that we don't know everything in physics. The border between our knowledge and our ignorance is exactly where I make my living, and it's a territory I know very well. If I thought we knew everything, I'd be out of a job.

Your arguments state anything goes.

My argument is that nature operates according to knowable rules. It is the antithesis of "anything goes".

Your arguments state what can't be proven and what is not knowable is "null".

Not at all. What I'm saying is that, in the context of the Big Bang model, the idea of "before the Big Bang" is known and proven to be null. (Aside: Do you think that the square root of 2 can be expressed as a ratio of integers? Why or why not?)

It appears you may be confusing the map with the territory. The Big Bang is a model. It may or may not be correct, which is to say, it may or may not reflect the true structure of the physical universe. If you ask a question about the behavior of the Big Bang, you are necessarily asking a question about the behavior of the model. So when you ask "what happened before the Big Bang," you are asking a mathematical question, which does admit of a definitive answer; the knowledge and powers of God as you imagine him don't enter into it. It's just like the question about the rationality of the square root of two. It turns out, there's no such thing.

Now, let's say, for the sake of argument, that our model is wrong, and the universe as we see it was created in a hyper-dimensional brane collision. The question, "what happened before the Big Bang," becomes meaningless with respect to the physical universe, as that model doesn't pertain to it.

Your arguments state words or writings mean nothing, only physical evidence.

Now you're leaning towards the truth. Words do mean things, of course, but physical evidence trumps them every time. The universe is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be.