My own personal theory is that the universe in caught in a never ending cycle of expansion and contraction.
I believe that after the universe has reached it's maximum expansion black holes suck it into contraction until one massive black hole compresses all known matter into a state without distance between the particles of matter. As the super black hole runs out of particles/matter/smaller black holes to consume a big bang occurs and the universe expands only to collapse again over and over into infinity.
How did this cycle begin?
No too sure. What I can tell you is that some flyingspaghettimonster omnipresent being didn't go abracadabra and suddenly everything appeared. I mean, if you believe that, then I say "And where did this omnipresent God come from?"...to which most religious folk say "He/she/it was always there". Which in turn, I find kinda funny because they are asking non believers - who at least have some pretty solid theories behind their beliefs about how the universe appeared - to believe that a God created the universe out of thin air without any apparent evidence, to prove their theory is valid (the Big Bang or variations thereof). Preposterous to say the least...
Whether you believe in flying spaghetti monsters or omnipresent beings, or just random chance... the universe of physical reality does exist and is in motion. It is the motion of the universe which creates a perception of time. Without time, nothing physical does or can exist, including energy and mass. Regardless of anything you believe, something set the universe in motion. It could not be something physical since physical things require time and space to exist physically in reality.
Now you can find all kinds of things funny. I find the Double Slit Experiment funny. If you're not familiar with it, look it up sometime, it's very fascinating. You see, matter behaves in relation to observation. Particles behave as waves unless we observe them, then they behave as particles. It's a really weird thing, but it's true and the Double Slit Experiment proves it.
Atheists often query, "What created God?" Well, we have to understand that "create" only relates to material existence, things are "created" in a physical manifestation within a spacetime continuum of our material universe. Something that is not physical or material in nature, does not require creation. The word has no meaning or significance outside of physical reality.
You said that science has "pretty solid theories behind their beliefs about how the universe appeared" and this is not true. Science has no clue whatsoever. Theories come and go in science, and it has been a popular theory for about 50-60 years that there was this Big Bang event which began the universe. However, there has never been an explanation of what caused this bang. Again, it could not have been something physical since physical did not yet exist.
Huggy continues to cling to a "flat earth" theory of a cycling universe which bangs and contracts or "crunches" and start all over again. The problem is, what we've discovered in the past 20 years contradicts this possibility in every way. For some reason, he believes being sucked into a gigantic black hole is a reasonable substitution for contraction. So the universe bangs, then expands, then gets sucked into a black hole, it doesn't contract. Still, there is no evidence of a massive gigantic black hole sucking the entire universe into it. There are numerous black holes, and they are absorbing the surrounding galaxies with a force that contradicts physics. This is problematic because physics is supposed to explain our universe. In these black holes, matter is travelling faster than the speed of light, which Newtonian and Einsteinian physics says isn't possible.
The new game in town is Quantum Physics. This opens the door to the concept of multiple universes and string theory. We could simply be one of MANY universes. What is even more mind-blowing is, each universe may have it's own "physics" and "reality" which could be totally and completely different than our own. Space and time may function differently, logic may be contradictory to what we understand as logic. Also, there may be as many as 11-26 other dimensions we don't know of. What is a dimension? Well, time is a dimension.
So what we are seeing is, these "flying spaghetti monsters" may be more real than you think. It's a good thing that you think they are funny.
