What came before?

In religious casts in Skypeland, it is common to discuss the origin of the universe. Religious people will ask people of other faiths, or atheists, where they think the universe came from. If someone says the Big Bang was the start of the universe, another will ask where the material for the Big Bang came from, or what happened "before" the Big Bang. Atheists will almost always ask, if God created the universe, who created God. Both of these are similar, because they are attempting to "trap" the opposing side in some sort of logical inconsistency, and therefore possibly "convert" them. Neither ever seems to have much of a resolution. Often someone listening will find the discussion so annoying that they blurt out some sort of non sequitur like "Anyone who does not think that abortion is murder is a mentally ill psychopath!" or "Religion has killed more people in the history of mankind than anything else!" or "The United States was founded as a Christian country!" or "John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli stating the US was not a Christian Country!" or some other off-topic polemical statement.

If the room is calm enough. I can sometimes use this as an opportunity to talk about what science is, since most people do not know what science is (Science is just a method for finding stuff out. Given measurements, a scientific theory is just a temporary explanation for those measurements.) I can sometimes talk about the definition of evolution, which few people understand or can even identify the definition of evolution from a list in study after study (Evolution is just a change in the gene pool over time, and the theory of evolution just describes some mechanisms which might cause this change. No, evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life or the Big Bang).

The Big Bang created time, so there was nothing "before" the Big Bang, really. Also, when people worry about how something can come from nothing, quantum mechanics demonstrates that if you have an empty box containing just a vacuum, matter can and does spontaneously appear in the box. People rarely are able to accept these bits of information from science, and want to rely instead on their "common sense" which is wrong most of the time. After all, common sense says that heavy objects will fall faster than light objects since they are pulled harder by gravity. However, this is incorrect, as Galileo showed, if you discount the effects of air resistance.

But often the room is too full of discord for anyone to actually learn anything. People are too anxious to complain that religious people are blocking stem cell research, and religious people are too anxious to complain that the USA has turned away from God and is allowing wholesale partial birth abortions on demand. This is what happened in the last Skypecast I was in, and I was unable to discuss any of this or help anyone on either side learn anything of substance. I was hoping to do so, and then the room was hacked. People were thrown out of the room over and over, until finally everyone gave up. Oh well...