Isn't the real question all advocates of Big Bang theory should answer is what caused the Big Bang?

Not at all.

Although this is the question that all non-astronomers feel is the most compelling, astronomers have a more incremental outlook. We are interested in developing explanations for observations that encompass as many of the directly observable features of the universe as our observations can provide us. Big Bang cosmology, despite its portrayal by the news media, is alive and well, because it has proved itself over and over again to logically knit together many diverse observations of the universe into a single grand evolutionary model. Speculations about what caused the Big Bang are not part of the testable, and falsifiable aspects of this theory. Physicists realize that the original Big Bang theory could never give us a logically consistent answer about this event because the essential phenomenology at such high energies is not understood. There is no present theory that unites quantum mechanics and general relativity.

The bottom line is that we can still use Big Bang theory as a starting point, because if a better theory comes along, which it surely will, it will have to explain everything that Big Bang theory now does. Newton's mechanics was superseded by special and general relativity, but we still can use Newtonian mechanics to predict the motions of planets and satellites provided we understand that relativity theory has to be used for rapid motions and strong gravitational fields. We use Big Bang theory the same way, but realize that it cannot be stretched to cover EVERY aspect of cosmology. That's why it is undergoing refinement. But the purpose of this is not to explain where the Big Bang came from. The purpose is to better explain direct observations we are now making and which can be corroborated independently.

Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald