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Originally Posted by Ian E Coleman
I thought that science pointed to a sequence of events that had a beginning?
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It does as far as I know, I'm not sure where we disagree
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I know that we can only trace the history of the universe to the big bang, but that isn't to say that nothing happened before it... only that all events afterward were the result of it and that there is no trace of history from before it.
All of that is really over my head but let me know if I'm far off.
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Speculating about "before" the big bang is purely philosophical and ascientific, but that's not to say I don't agree with everything you've said so far.
OT: "Big bang" can mean several things. For a cosmologist, it's a theoretical framework which claims that the Universe was hotter and denser in the past. If you push the predictions to the edge, they predict a singularity, or a single point of infinitely dense matter. We don't know anything about this singularity because we know our laws of physics fail before reaching it. Some speculative theories try to go beyond it and predict things like a bounce, the creation of our Universe or some counterintuitive phenomenons.
For a layman, "big bang" is this singularity itself, considered as the creation of the Universe. There was nothing and BANG the Universe was created. But then there are a lot of strange questions that are the crux of cosmology, and as I said before, they are purely philosophical. What was before the Big Bang? Nothing? How can we create something out of nothing? Did time exist before the Big Bang? What does "before" mean then? (The term "big bang" was invented by Fred Hoyle who didn't believe in this theory and wanted to mock it). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sit here and argue about these questions because we don't have any evidence one way or the other. You can change many details and go much deeper depending on how philosophical you are. But what we really know is that there was a period of exponential inflation once, and afterwards the temperature was big enough to explain nucleosynthesis. This is more than a single theory, it's a big paradigm that's very very unlikely to be disproved.
According to some studies I've googled, about 95% of cosmologists agree that the
standard model of big bang cosmology is the most plausible way to describe the origins of our universe.