Are you sure you're not just trying to "win the argument" on technical points. 282AR? ;-) I am trying to find common ground with you here, not perpetuate a disagreement...

I realize that many of these matters are in fact inexpressible in human language. Nevertheless, there's no harm in trying to express them as best we can. The effort of trying to can produce some great poetry and literature, and that's worthwhile.

It seems to me that the scientific community has proposed the notion of a "first event", namely: the Big Bang. They propose that prior to that event there was no perceivable Universe as we know it, but that the Universe as we know it came into being as a result of the Big Bang. I believe they further propose that time itself did not exist prior to that event...time being the measure of an object's travel across a given distance. When there are no separate objects, and thus no distances in between them, there is in effect no time.

It's interesting to me how closely that resembles some of the symbolic religious stories in Genesis and various other ancient holy books.

I don't think that either science or religion will ever find final explanations for such things, because each explanation simply leads to further questions. It's like trying to find the smallest obervable particle...there tends to always be another smaller one lurking inside it, like the Russian dolls inside Russian dolls. It just depends how closely you are able to look at it.

Despite all the facts we can marshall, life and existence remain mysterious. Religion and philosophy are attempts to unravel the mystery.