Vatican's space mission

"If the Big Bang was the start of everything, what came before it?"

That is one of the questions being posed by a new website being set up by the Vatican and Italy's scientific community.

After centuries of mistrust between religion and science, the intention is to give the public a greater understanding of both sides.

The website, which will be available in Italian and English, has information on everything from astronomy to theology, from space missions to philosophy and art.

It will have three portals - one for a general audience, one for students and their professors, and one for scholars.

Within each portal, there will be a variety of multimedia platforms, including a cosmology section, and one that will have the latest data collected by satellites and unmanned probes.

The venture is being run jointly by the Vatican and the Italian Space Agency, ASI. ...

He says: "From the Church's point of view, this is about getting religious people to see that scientists are not the enemy and getting scientists to see that religious people are not the enemy.

"The aim is for both sides to come together for the good of humanity." ...

the Vatican's senior astronomer has gone on record as saying intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space, and that alien life does not contradict Church doctrine.

That is why the Vatican is now supporting the new website, with its mixture of hard data and philosophical interpretation.

It is about uniting to overcome the divide between fact and faith - what is explicable and what is not.

The strength of Christian beliefs and the rigour of scientific endeavour make this a unique tool, with the message that when it comes to our origins, proof and trust can exist together.

via BBC News - Vatican's space mission.

Sounds nice, but at the heart of this, you have some people who are wrong trying to get in on some of the "being right" action without giving up being wrong. Let's have 1 + 1 = 3 holding hands and singing songs with 1+1 = 2.  See, we can all get along!

If time did not exist before the big bang(s), then nothing came "before" the big bang(s) because there was no time. Existing outside of time is hard for us to imagine, but that doesn't make it impossible.

This is a great question, but it is completely absurd to leap from "I don't know" to "Must be god, then" ... unless you just accept that "God" is the Christian word for "I don't know."