Am I an atheist?

[Darwinian]

The Big Bang must have made a hell of a noise though. Although there would have been the creation of space it would have been so densely packed with hydrogen and a bit of helium that, until inflation spread it too thinly to have an effect, it must have been resonating like nothing before or since.

[TruthWorthy]

An explosion incurs potential sound, regardless of whether it resonates.

[littlegrimlin1]

I'm sure the sound existed in the bang, but not outside of its matter. Although most people may associate a bang with sound, I think of it as the explosion rather than the sound, just some violent explosion that has sound as a side effect.. but that's my interpretation lol

[Tiberius]

That's the point though; it wasn't an explosion. An explosion has to explode outwards into something (space). The Big Bang was the expansion of space. There was no space before the Big Bang! Everything was contained within a singularity (infinitely small, infinitely dense) which expanded into everything we see today.

The Big Bang itself didn't have any sound, since there wasn't any space for the sound to travel in. The aftermath of the Big Bang (when the space had expanded and continued to expand) would have been exceptionally noisy, but not before, nor at the point at which the "Big Bang" occurred.

I wish people would stop this nonsense about it being an explosion. As I said before...just a name.

From Wiki:

The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points.

[TruthWorthy]

implosion-explosion: matter is ejected on completion of the "bang".
And it occurs in a void, not in a spaceless realm of nothingness.

[Tiberius]

According to Big Bang theory, your so-called "void" does not exist, nor has it ever existed. There wasn't an infinitely small dense particle suspended in a void, but absolute nothingness (in non-scientific terms). No space, no time, just a singularity that somehow began to expand, creating space and time as it expanded.

Matter wasn't ejected from anything. It was contained within the singularity, and spread apart as the singularity grew, since the space was created as the singularity grew, and the time that was created enabled the matter inside the growing singularity to move.

It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but you'll get it eventually. Most people try to think of a singularity and fail (since it's infinitely small and we aren't capable of comprehending infinity properly), so they do the next best thing, imagine something really small. However the problem with this is that the only way they can imagine something like that is to imagine it in the context of space, such that it was suspended in space. This isn't the case. At that point in time (i.e. the beginning), there was no space, only the singularity. When this expanded, it didn't expand into space (since there wasn't any), but it expanded as space.

[TruthWorthy]

I'm sort of familiar with Stephan Hawking's work. He writes that the universe is finite in its own boundaries, but other universes might be undergoing this breathing process "nearby" (relatively). Just as the "explosion" might be seen as rapid, or gradual, depending on the frame of reference. Also the expansion and contraction process (suggests Hawking's) eventually dies out as the expansion process weakens and eventually the ends on infinity are reached in quicker succession until there might end up being something static or the energy is entirely burned up through loss of motion, friction, light waves, etc.
If everything's a form of energy, including space itself (being malleable, etc) then you could consider the expansion of the universe, and the space that comprises it, an explosive/implosive process. I don't consider the ends of the infinite density being "slower" as being literally free from impact, at some point there has to come to a complete standstill, in order to 'reverse'.

[Tiberius]

The universe is finite in size because it was originally taking up no space, and 13.7 billion years later it takes up all the space and continues to expand (as space expands). If it is expanding at a measurable rate, it isn't expanding infinitely, and therefore cannot be infinitely sized (and is therefore finite).

the expansion of the universe, and the space that comprises it

The space doesn't comprise the expansion of the universe...the expansion of the universe is the expansion of space.

As far as I am aware, current multiverse theory does not suggest some plane of space in which all universes sit, expanding and contracting. It suggests that there are multiple "spaces" that expand and contract, and that these are contained within some kind of dimension (or even multiple dimensions). If you are thinking about the multiverse in terms of a room full of balloons, constantly expanding and contracting, then you are thinking about it wrong. There isn't any space between the universes in multiverse theory, but they are separated rather by dimensions. As I've stated before, all space is constrained within a universe. There isn't any space outside of the universe. This is simple physics...

[TruthWorthy]

M-theory is very deep as Hawkings goes in brain wave and neural impulses. In the gist of it: As a universe expands outward further and further from its central point, the expansion begins to slow until a sort of maximum expansion is reached and expansion ceases entirely before a contraction process occurs. He was difficult to grasp on the expansion process itself (at the atomic level) but also says that he sees no reason why two universes cannot converge at their edges and even "adopt" one another, or battle as two stars seem to whereby one would be consumed by the other.
while time is confined to any one universe so another would be unable to make any reference to another while separate - it doesn't go to say that what is between the two universes doesn't constitute space either. For then in all practicality it has to be space (maybe with different properties than our own universes internal vacuum atmosphere).
Then there is black hole theoretical construct that says all space is within a black hole of some sort, some are contained and stable, others aren't. And there is alot to support this idea as time is considered to operate normally within a black hole, and being inescapable due to gravitational forces, would more than account for such ideas as you mentioned, only there would exist space outside the black hole, we just wouldn't be able to reach it.

[Eilonnwy]

I don't believe in god

That's all you need to be an atheist.