By way of bypassing the Big Bang, from Anu Padmanabhan at Nautilus:
The key new ingredient we have introduced, which helps to bypass this technical difficulty, is the concept of cosmic information. The idea that information should play a key role in the description of physics has gained considerable support in recent times. This notion arises in several contexts when one attempts to combine the principles of quantum theory and gravity like, for example, in the study of quantum black holes. There is also the intriguing notion of holography in some of these models, which suggests that the information content in a bulk region can be related to the information content on its boundary. But, unfortunately, the mathematical description of the information turns out to be different in different contexts, and we still have not found a unifying principle applicable in all cases. Therefore, in order to apply the notion of information to the whole universe, we have to first come up with a definition for it that is physically appropriate.
The definition of cosmic information that we used can be best illustrated with an analogy. When a piece of ice melts to form water, a transition from solid to liquid phase takes place. The actual dynamics of the phase transition can be very complex but the total number of atoms in the ice will be the same as the total number of atoms in water. This number represents the number of degrees of freedom in the system, which does not change during the phase transition. Similarly, the phase transition that led to the birth of the universe can be described by a number that links the degrees of freedom in the pre-geometric phase with those of the classical spacetime. Using this number, which we call “CosmIn,” we can connect the two phases of the universe, bypassing the complications of a complete quantum gravity model. More.
Does it matter that we haven’t found any dark matter, let alone dark energy? Maybe it is now “anti-science” to wonder. Here is anther anti-science thought: Why does so much anti-Big Bang material sound like this?
See also: Top lines of evidence supporting intelligent design: #1 The Big Bang. The fact that the Big Bang supports design is the principle reason it is unpopular. That explains both the pettifogging arguments against it and the weird cosmologies, destructive to science, now promoted in order to avoid it. But the biggest question today is whether evidence still matters the way it used to.