[elfman2]

The Freeper known as "Physicist" likes to post that there is no "before" the Big Bang any more than there is a point North of the North Pole. Time itself starts at the BB.

I think my question wasn't complete. If there was no "before", then what are the leading non-religious based hypotheses as to how it began?

Even if the laws of the universe were different, it's still "something from nothing". There appears to be no way around that. (Kind of like the "God just was" explanation.)

If there are no good explanations, the Big Bang theory's not very satisfying. It only defers the question and pushes what we don't know back to an earlier point.

We could even say that this is a middle ground, some place for creationists and evolutionist to come together, and recognize that they don't have to be at odds from the start.

[VadeRetro]

If there was no "before", then what are the leading non-religious based hypotheses as to how it began?

I see that Physicist has arrived, so if I were smart I'd shut up now.

OK, I'm not that smart. That I can recall from reading the layman's treatments of cosmological stuff, you have the quantum hiccup idea and the multiverse idea. The former says that the universe is a quantum fluctuation with zero total energy. The latter says that some part of a meta-universe sort of collapsed and popped out into our Big Bang to form our universe.

[Dimensio]

"The Freeper known as "Physicist" likes to post that there is no "before" the Big Bang any more than there is a point North of the North Pole. Time itself starts at the BB."

I think my question wasn't complete. If there was no "before", then what are the leading non-religious based hypotheses as to how it began?

AFAIK, there aren't any.

ven if the laws of the universe were different, it's still "something from nothing". There appears to be no way around that. (Kind of like the "God just was" explanation.)

If the laws of the universe were different (the best that can be stated from current knowledge is that known laws break down), then we can't hypothesize without knowing what these different rules are. Perhaps it was "something from nothing", or perhaps it was something else that we cannot observe and thus cannot explain.

If there are no good explanations, the Big Bang theory's not very satisfying. It only defers the question and pushes what we don't know back to an earlier point.

The "Big Bang" is just an explanation for the origins for the universe. It isn't supposed to address a cause, at least not in the current form of the theory. When you can come up with a hypothesis based upon physical evidence and observation and testing thereof, and when that hypothesis is sound and stands up to vigourous testing and peer-review then we might have a more satisfying explanation and you can collect a neat Nobel Prize. Until then the only non-religious answer is "Not enough information". It does not mean that there cannot be a naturalistic explanation, it only means that we don't have enough knowledge to formulate an explanation at the time. You may not think that it is "satisfying", but science is in the business of explaining natural phenomenon in terms of natural causes; it isn't supposed to make things up when it runs out of reasons.