[jpsb]

"there was a Great Big Dude with a white beard who waved a magic wand over some water and created the earth"

I am pretty sure I never made such a claim, please correct me if I did. Waiting. I'd really like to debate your contention that something can spring into existence from nothing. I have real problems with that. E=MC^2, put a zero anywhere you like and the result is zero. So I am interested in hearing how zero turns into something other than zero.

[FredZarguna]

1) Read Genesis. My synopsis is actually closer to what is written there than what you've written in regards to the Standard Model cosmology. 2) If you want to understand how a non-zero mass (or energy) can come into existence, I gave you a reference to vacuum fluctuation. Read it. 3) E=mc² is an expectation value of the Klein-Gordon Hamiltonian in the stationary reference frame. More properly E² = (pc)² + (m₀c²)². In quantum field theory, these are operators, not numbers, and the time/mass formulation need not hold for a massless field. Furthermore, in that formulation the momentum is never zero, and energy is never exactly equal to rest mass (times c²) alone.

But of course you already knew that.