Where did the speck/singularity/thing come from?

No, the other way. All speculations are equally invalid as theories because there is no current way of backing them up.It is quite likely that the way we describe the world (on a fundamental level) will have to be developed quite extensively before we can even say there is a way to explain it. There are quite a few 'new' theories regarding superstrings and branes that *might* give an answer, if they turn out to be valid, but at this time, we just can't give an answer that is based on actual information.Hence, it would be dishonest to claim to have a direct answer when there is no sure one.

Well, it's mostly that you can't really have an opinion on facts to the same extent you can have an opinion on the meaning of life, or politics, or fashion.So it's vital that you sepparate what you hold as opinions, what you hold as speculations/dreams/visions (and everyone, including scientists, does a fair bit of this) and what you hold as a good model.There is a lot to be gained from discussing your opinions with others, but some fields are based upon people, to put it bluntly, shutting the hell up about their opinions because they aren't helping.

Well, I think you are confusing two things.First, there are models which allows us in a simple way to find patterns in what we observe of the universe, and find useful ways to predict those patterns elsewhere. For example, we have models of how electical and magnetical fields work, and from that we can build computers. Since computer demonstrably exist, it is not a matter of opinion wether the model describes reality or not.Your may have opinions on what the model tells you, but unless you can show objectively that it's incorrect, your opinions will not budge it.What IS an opinion is any truths regarding what the whole thing actually is all about when you aren't satisfied by mere models, and want the real deal. For example, what does a quark look like, where can you find god, do we have a real soul, why does music sound so heavenly. Essentially, you will need to form your own way to observe the 'real' world. This is where you should search your own mind.But with science, it has been demonstrated time and time again that everyone, regardless of opinion, can make observations and actually agree to some things, which is to me a quite good argument that the whole of reality isn't just a personal preference.

I hope this doesn't get too off-topic, though.I follow the current speculations/experiments with interest regardless of which explanations they want to further, but I have to say that string theory has a certain degree of elegance that I like. However, I have this feeling that it might be a bit too wierd for most people and not really explain everything. Some people will inevitably ask what created the strings, and not take any other answer than Some Other Theory.Regarding my spirituality; I find the concept of a God extremely strange considering my own lifetime of experience. I'm more of the opinion that the world makes a really good shot at being absolutely amazing on it's own, and this whole God thing is neither needed nor possible to conclude from what I see, hear, feel and think. I've recently taken quite a lot of time to think my life through (school, love, losses) and I've actually (and I'm not ashamed to say this, quite the countrary) asked both straight out and in my head: "God, what's the deal here, really?".So I've sort of settled in nicely with some very strange mix of philosophies ranging from Stephen Hawkins to Dalai Lama to Jesus. I don't consider things perfect, but neither do I demand them to be.

You both have a point. There will always be a certain degree of uncertanity about the past. However, in order to ever get anything done, we have to settle for 'as sure as we can be'.We aren't talking about details here. We are not looking for the name of every single person that has ever lived. We are looking at overall changes that CAN be and ARE detected consistently in our observations.The big bang has a lot of evidence which points very strongly towards it being true. This is not a guarantee that we know everything about everything at the moment, but that's not what we are after.So while the evidence we have for events that happened 5 minutes ago are indeed more abundant than for events that happened 10000 years ago, this is not a reason to discredit either of them.The reason the big bang theory is so useful is that we can test it, and it tells us stuff that we can actually use to make further predictions. It *has* to be at least somewhat right, otherwise we would find that it doesn't make the right predictions.