[Karunamon]

    <post class="devils-advocate"/>

And yet, that information is not forthcoming, and those hypotheses effectively infinite.

"Guilty secret" is an uncharitable reading of the parent post, I'd say more out of the realm of scientific inquiry and more the philosophical. It's like asking "what was there before time existed?" - the scientific answer is null because that's a nonsense question - "before" implies the existence of a "time" to count it.

And yet, if the universe suddenly exists at T+0:00, it'll be impossible for science to understand the conditions at T-0:01 because that information does not exist given consensus understanding of time.

Still, we can comprehend the concept of "before time existed" on some abstract level, but the sciences cannot, absent some external source of information that a scientist must necessarily reject until it appears.

[Nursie]

It rather depends. There are branches of physics (m-branes, multi-universe, some offshoots of string theory) that could possibly have answers to this, should they figure out ways to test and measure such things. They are somewhere in the realm of philosophy or mathematical conjecture until that point though.

And potentially that pushes the question back further - so where did all that come from?

I took issue with the initial post because it sounded conspiratorial, and it also sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore. On the contrary - it's very interesting and it's no shame or revelation to say "we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will"

[alanwatts]

>sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore.

Yes, like that of the post which I was directing my response towards:

>As a lifelong believer in science...

Science is fundamentally hypothetical, not something to be sure of.

Believe: to accept (something) as true; feel sure the truth of.

"Believing in science" or "believing in creationism" are both opposed to your statement (which I agree with), because they do not leave room for doubt:

>we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will