Universe Beginnings

[AnCapandThankful]

Hi all, first time poster here. 

I apologize if this has been brought up before (as I'm sure it has), but curious if anyone has any answer to this. To begin things, I'm a strong atheist that rejects any sort of diety. I've done some layman researching on the topic of the Big Bang, and from what I can understand, Einstein's Theory of Relativity (which holds up great after the Big Bang) breaks down at the moment before the Bang happened. I'm paraphrasing here, but from what I gathered from Hawking, they do not understand how the universe began before the Bang and truly aren't looking into that much (admittedly, could be wrong). 

So my question is, if science cannot describe as of now the beginnings of our universe, is it possible that another species created it? I'm not stating an all knowing, benevolent, no formed being, but a species that has moved on, etc. It actually sounds almost silly writing it out, but I can't logically see how this couldn't be possible given my current (read: limited) knowledge on the state of science.

Thanks for an help in clarifying.

[Metric]

I believe you're correct on both counts: 

A)  General Relativity is a classical theory and breaks down at sufficiently high energy/short distance scales.  A lot of people are looking into next-generation theories, but in this field it is incredibly difficult to get good predictions that can be checked against experiment.  So although a lot of work has been done, not very much can be said to be actually known.

B)  There always exists the logical possibility that some intelligence had something to do with the construction of our universe as we know it.  The "simulation hypothesis" is this sort of idea.  However, merely being a "logical possibility" isn't saying much at all -- there's no real reason (that I know of) to subscribe to this sort of thing other than "wanting to believe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

[AnCapandThankful]

Thanks for the response. I'll look into simulation theory. 

I'm not saying I want to believe that--I don't really have a preference other than objective truth, but I always seemed to get argued down to that possibility, and I simply couldn't deny it.

[LovePrevails]

the universe could have a creator but even if it did that in intself would not prove they were omnipotent, just that they were potent enough to creat a universe XD

[ribuck]

Scientific understanding of the beginnings of the universe consists of taking what we can observe today and "running it backwards" to see what we find.

Beyond a certain point, science cannot (currently) obtain useful information. So, before that time, science can't say much about what might or might not have happened.

Where there's no evidence, pretty much anything is possible. But it's likely to be more productive to speculate about simpler more-straightforward proposals than about wild far-fetched proposals.