The Universe Was Never a Singularity

[Anomalocaris]

From the beginning of time by Stephen Hawking.

At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang.

http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

The notion that information can somehow ever be lost through any event, such as passage through event horizon, or big bang itself, was championed by Hawkings. But it seems to have come under serious attack by professionally, if not popularly, equally prominent physicists in the last 20 years. Recently falsifiable predictions of exactly how data about the previous universe would menifest itself as observable phenomenon in our own universe have been published.

---

It leaves the whole question wide open for theists to twart it in such ways to support their own position.

What makes you think they won't do that anyways?

They will do it no matter what, but what they do will add more confusion if it appears to the laymen to slide neatly through loopholes in scientific understanding that the laymen have understood to exist through popular science literature.