Here's the thing folks.... we can build fancier telescopes, bigger Hadron colliders, faster super computers (new one just ordered) and play with all sorts of math & imaginative theories.... and we can thus learn more & more about what we can see and/or measure.

What we cannot do is come to any definitive conclusion about stuff we can't see, measure or find. This means that "dark matter" 'may' remain dark and never be more than a mathematical prediction. It means that multiple universes, "membranes", string theory and the big one... what came before there was anything.. may always be just interesting games.

Even IF someday there is a "theory of everything" that everyone likes and agrees with, universal agreement is not the sort of proof that science accepts. Edmund Husserl made the point that the **Philosophically prior question** is Why is there something, rather than nothing?. That is, it is the question that all philosophy reverts to if pushed far enough. This doesn't mean we know to go about answering it in any way that can't be disputed by anyone saying.."But what about THIS idea?"

We have notions of 'singularities' of 'Supreme Creators', of recurring Universes that expand & contract into ∞³... but our finite minds sometimes trick themselves into believing that once we name a concept, the concept has some sort of independent status... sort of like Plato's "forms".

We (some of us) invoke religious concepts to defend the idea that there must be a "first cause", and that it must be conscious, immortal, all-powerful...etc...all the properties that we can define as valuable, necessary, etc... that WE can name and conceive of. *shrug*... maybe... but 'it' has very little to say about the issue.

It's interesting to play with ideas... and more--or less--- interesting to observe, measure and create 'stuff'. It's also important to keep some perspective about which we are doing, and the limits of each.