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I'm really not in the mood for finding references right now. But I don't read creationist literature. Most scientists absolutely state that they cannot know anything that preceded the big bang. This is because all time and space was collapsed, for some odd reason they cannot address because it is unknowable, into a tiny singularity described as being infinitely dense and of various sizes down to infinity but all smaller than the earth. Within this singulartity there was no time or space and of course nothing surrounded it. This burst forth because (hmm good question) and the "stuff" that happened in the subsequent milliseconds randomly decided all the forces of nature, particles, etc we know today. None of these existed before that big bang.

It is impossible for scientists to look before the big bang. It's similar to the singularity of a black hole. We can only study what emerged.

Stephen Hawkings came close to stepping outside this view, In one of his books, he talked about time taking place throughout the universe as if observed from outside the universe. But none of this can be called science as opposed to religion. It is all an attempt to stretch one's mind around concepts that are unknowable, at least to us now.

You must think I'm for creationism and against science. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But I won't allow religion or science to pretend they have figured everything out, when they quite clearly have not.

If you want, get me some cites to scientific discussion of the universe preceding the big bang, and preceding the primordial egg, and explaining how where when and why the primordial egg existed. And when you do find a scientist or two taking a stab at those questions, make sure they provide empirical proof. By definition they can't and most won't try because just prior to the big bang there was no measurable time or space and they cannot devise any method of "looking" to a "time" before that.

This is standard scientific theory I have spent a lifetime reading scientific literature, not creationist literature.

There are big questions in cosmology and particle physics about the big bang and black holes. For very good reasons, these issues are at the frontiers of the field of physics. However, you seem to be saying that simply because we do not know everything about such things, we therefore must know nothing.

There is A LOT that we DO know about the universe. We know that at one time all the matter in the universe must have been concentrated in the same place. The physics of what exactly happened at that moment are not fully known, but that's half the fun of it.

I have a good buddy working at RHIC on Long Island where they are trying (with some success, depending on who you ask) to recreate a state of matter that the entire universe likely was composed of at some point immediately after the "beginnning". They do NOT know EVERYTHING that happened at that moment, but every day they learn something new. Every day they try to push the boundaries back a little farther. It is true that we don't know what happened before the big bang. But trying to claim that the whole idea is bunk because of that puts you on thin ice.

Scientists DON'T know everything, but we can talk with a great deal of certainty about many things. The strength of the scientific method lies not just in finding evidence for what we do know, but defining limits on what we don't know. The problems you describe are just the sort of thing that we love to sink our teeth into, not examples that question the validity of all previous work done in that field of research.