Ownership has gotten out of hand.

The Indians asked "how can you own the land, will the water and sky be next ? "

Destroy the rich, "eat the rich" .....

If we shared it ALL, we'd all be truely rich and nearly free .... working for more better bigger FUN ....

I thought this post was gonna be about televangelists.

All 3 are man made

Who said it popped out of nowhere?

The question "Which came first?" assumes a single, uni-directional dimension of time. The arrow of time in our universe is, to my limited understanding tied to the Laws of Thermodynamics and entropy. But there is no guarantee that those laws are valid outside of our space/time. Also, there are theories that allow for more than one dimension of time.. So, while obviously speculative, an entity existing "outside" our space/time and embedded in a bi-directional time dimension would have no beginning or end. I'm not sure how all that relates to our universe. Maybe not at all.

No it didn't 'pop' out of anything.

Why can't something be eternal? 

If I remember correctly, quantum fluctations of the vacuum result in a particle and anti-particle moving in opposite directions in time. So at least on a quantum level, the arrow of time is not absolute. And cosmologies that allow for multiple dimensions of time are logical extensions of observable physics. While it is all on the edges of understanding, it is not just woo-woo.

It's wrong. The universe will continue to expand indefiently. 

All right then, what did the universe 'pop out of'? 

Than you are running into the same problem the OP is proposing. 

The Big Bang is by no means 'simple.'

I wouldn't propose that anyone should mix up the idea that if it is difficult to understand then it is by definition complex.

However, I think that the workings of a single cell in your little pinky is HUGELY more complex than the Big Bang actually was in reality.

Ok, let's say this as an analogy.

An intelligent alien lifeform captures a human.  As the alien is studying the human the human scratches himself.  Now why the human scratched itself is simple for another human to understand.

He scratched himself because he had an itch.  No human would find this a difficult or complex idea for his actions.

However it may completely baffle the alien that has no concept of what it is to itch or how scratching would make it feel better.

Just because something is difficult for you or I to understand does not mean it is complex.

We know for a fact that a cell is very complex.

Find me a scientist that says the Big Bang was itself a complex thing.  Sure some may say it is somewhat complex to understand.  That's not the same thing.

Intelligence is the issue here, not complexity.

As you were.

The biological implications about what caused the itch isn't the point of the analogy.  *slaps hand to face*

How did I know you would sidestep the point by bringing that up?

It wasn't "what caused the itch" it was, "why did that earth creature decide (<- did you notice that word?  DECIDE) to rub it's keratin composed residual claws that are on it's smallest appendages on it's upper limbs over its skin in that particular location in that particular manner?"

Ok, here I will make a stand.

One cell in the human body is MUCH MORE COMPLEX than the Big Bang.

Quantum Mechanics is behind it all if you want to go with it in that direction.  QM is behind it all: the big bang, animal/plant cell, rock, etc.  Big whoop and beside the point.

Added complexity.  More complexity.  Evolved complexity.

Okay, if we don't know much about the Big Bang, then how do you know it's simplier than a cell? 

The 'singularity', which is one idea of the starting state of the Universe, is the ultimately simple thing - by definition it has no structure.

Of course the theory we have built up to provide a framework to reflect the way matter and energy behave at the scale of fundamental particles, namely Quantum Theory, is complex. It provides a framework for hypotheses of how the raw energy of the primeval universe spawned an ever-growing sea of particles and flows of energy eventually leading to the distribution of galaxies we now observe.

The increase of information involved here matches the increasing entropy. 

Current evidence is that the rate of expansion is increasing.

One speculation that appealed to me is, as far as I can remember at the moment, that collections of matter will ultimately continue to fragment, and that at some point something will trigger new 'Big Bang' expansion within each fragment. This has the side 'benefit' that the new Big Bang starts off with a tiny fraction of the entropy of the original Universe, thereby avoiding one set of objections to the BB based on the second Law of Thermodynamics.

Qute apart from exactly what the true state was at time zero, the well established ideas of the 'evolution' of the Universe involves many examples of more complex arrangements of matter/energy 'condensing' out of more formless states.

The raw sea of energy condensed into sub-atomic particles as it expanded and cooled.

As the energy density dropped further, hydrogen atoms could form out of the sea of particles.

Further down the track, clouds of hydrogen gas began to form clumps under the influence of gravity, which condensed into the first stars, which started fusion reactions to form heavier elements, releasing energy which eventually caused them to explode and scatter the new elements into the interstellar gas clouds.

At a later stage, longer-lived stars formed and began to coalesce into galaxies. Stars continued to form within gas-clouds in tho galaxies, and in some cases at least, the left over matter around a newly formed star condensed into more solid cold objects such as asteroids, planets, comets, etc.

On at least one planet, as it cooled, some analogue of this pattern continued, to form some more complex collections of atoms and molecules, leading ultimately to life as we know it....

 Not pretending my account here exactly describes just what happened or the best current research, but I make the point how desperately mistaken and naive are the ideas of even the more 'sophisticated' believers about natural processes,  'cause and effect', entropy, 'information', and the 'natural' explanations for how what we perceive as 'complexity' arises from less complex states of matter, in both living and non-living matter.

You mean minimum entropy, hence no information. Otherwise you can't go any further, since entropy can only increase.

Information was generated by the random quantum processes taking place as it expanded and cooled. I actually read this in an article in NewScientist magazine. It requires more information to define the state of a mass of particles than a tiny 'glob' of raw energy.

I repeat, a singularity has no structure, it has the absolute minimum possible 'information' content. The maximum information content of a volume of space is theorised to be proportional to the surface area enclosing it.

Original thermodynamic definition of entropy is related to the total quantity of thermal energy in a system divided by the absolute temperature. Since the primeval fireball universe would have been at some astronomical temperature, that corresponds to a very small entropy, increasing as the temperature falls, matching the increase in entropy. Complexity increased from virtually zero.

The further a system is from equilibrium, the greater is the increase in entropy associated with its energy flows, and the more those flows of energy can support spontaneously self-organising local systems, up to and including life. See the works of Ilya Prigogine.