[backwoods-engineer]

It would seem to me that an infinite series of contractions and expansions of the universe would be equally amenable to the existence of God as would the Big Bang

Which god do you speak of? Certainly this statement is not true of the Judeo-Christian God, whom I worship. He revealed in Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." None of this oscillation or cycling. Those are Buddhist ideas.

[JimSEA]

I don’t believe God is a trickster either. He wouldn’t make things or processes seem like something they cannot be.