florida, non-stop stupid. [Politics/Religion]

If you read that article by Stephen Hawking on The Beginning of Time, you'll see he isn't as quick as the NASA guys to throw up his hands in defeat when considering the moment before the big bang and invoke an outside agency for all that came before.  You have to read it all the way to the end to get to the Big Idea he's proposing.

Here's the issue.  The standard Big Bang model says that time had a beginning at the moment of the big bang, but also states that just before the explosion, all matter is bunched up in an infinitely dense point called a singularity, where the laws of nature don't apply.

A situation, any situation, where the laws of physics break down is disturbing.  It means one of two things:  either God did it, or there is something wrong with the theory.   Even believers in a omnipotent supernatural being would have to admit there is a better than good chance a theory deduced by man would more likely than not be shakey.

So why not entertain a theory, or at least a modification of the big bang theory, so that it can allow for both a beginning of time, and fully functional laws of nature prior to the beginning of time?  Hawking thought about this and came up with the imaginary time hypothesis as a solution for the singularity conundrum posed by the big bang theory.

I don't pretend to understand cosmology and barely remember what physics I did learn, even though I did earn 'A' grades for 3 straight semesters of university level physics. 

But what I do possess is an intuitive appreciation for valid attempts at solving a problem of nature.   

Imaginary time, to my ear, sounds like a better hypothesis than the "God must've done it" hypothesis.  Even if imaginary time turns out to be a wrong solution, it keeps people on the track of considering that we probably haven't thought through all of the possible materialistic explanations for how the universe began and that it is probably much too early in the game to throw up our hands and invoke "theories" that begin and end with The Creator did it.

this is a very good point (and one which is almost certainly correct on some levels) and one of the central points in the decomposition of many religious views 

time has a beginning , or time has a direction?

problems that are too complicated to understand-  there are countless things that even most genius human brains, let alone average human brains, can't solve  let alone understand the generalities of.  we can derive very good approximate models to solve analytically or solve these problems numerically with computers, but they still aren't exact and/or analytic solutions.   even then, many problems falling into this area are still not even computationally tractable with the worlds best supercomputers.  doesn't mean we need to invoke a mystical explanation for them- simply that we can't understand/solve them (at least yet).

Donatello = Flying Spaghetti Monster/Mystical Deity of your choosing??

I 'get' the joke

but there is a solution...he drives ratings...because people with Asperger's amuse us in much the same way we stop at the monkey cages every time we go to the zoo, hoping for a little poop fling action.

Aske:  As a scientist you should know by now that the most difficult aspect of discovery lies in posing the right question.

Of course, testing it is a whole other ball of wax.  If it becomes apparent we need new technology to answer the question, we go about inventing that technology.  But the hard part is the question.

The bottom line:  Our only limitation is our imagination. 

blader i misunderstood what you posted earlier- yes this i mostly agree with.
framing the right question the right way often greatly increases our ability to solve a problem.