Quite, while I may not agree with your views on many, many things at least you never present them as if you've just randomly plucked words from a book on the subject.

WF those details only apply if you ignor such factors as the existance of dark matter...
'The first indications that there is a significant fraction of missing matter in the Universe was from studies of the rotation of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. The orbital period of the Sun around the Galaxy gives us a mean mass for the amount of material inside the Sun's orbit. But, a detailed plot of the orbital speed of the Galaxy as a function of radius reveals the distribution of mass within the Galaxy. The simplest type of rotation is wheel rotation shown below. Rotation following Kepler's 3rd law is shown above as planet-like or differential rotation. Notice that the orbital speeds falls off as you go to greater radii within the Galaxy. This is called a Keplerian rotation curve.

To determine the rotation curve of the Galaxy, stars are not used due to interstellar extinction. Instead, 21-cm maps of neutral hydrogen are used. When this is done, one finds that the rotation curve of the Galaxy stays flat out to large distances, instead of falling off as in the figure above. This means that the mass of the Galaxy increases with increasing distance from the center.
The surprising thing is there is very little visible matter beyond the Sun's orbital distance from the center of the Galaxy. So, the rotation curve of the Galaxy indicates a great deal of mass, but there is no light out there. In other words, the halo of our Galaxy is filled with a mysterious dark matter of unknown composition and type.'

As I was making dinner it suddenly dawned on me what point Sumplug was trying to get across here.

It's a religious / pseudo-science arguement to "prove" the existance of god, which is normally called the first cause argument.

It generally runs along the lines of ... every effect must have a cause, but something must have triggered that cause, because it is itself an effect and so it must go back right the way to the big bang. Because this was the first event it had no cause, therefore the cause must have been god.

It's an old argument which falls in to trouble the minute you ask, "Well what caused god, then?" which generally gets either a stupid answer ("god has always existed") or a change of subject ("you'll burn in hell for asking such wicked questions").

Ah. I understand now, so my last post isn't entirely relevant. It's still bull though.

Of course it's bull... the human mind is very good at bull, especially when it stops thinking and thinks it has reached the end of understanding.

Here's a theory based around the multiverse superstring theory that the big bang was/is actually the rse-end of a black hole in another universe.

Basically, matter and space-time is absorbed and as far as we know destroyed, in the form of a complete breakdown of our laws of physics when it enters a blackhole, in our universe. Everything - matter, space, time is crushed beyond existence at the theoretical singluarity at the centre. But the singularity can never actually be reached by anything. It would be too small for a single atom to exist in the same place for instance, let alone all the matter blackholes consume.

But if the laws of our universe cease to exist, then technically it's not our universe... and it could be the connection to another. Blackholes could be the doors that connect mulitverses, except the multiverse-brane they connect to either have laws where nothing of our universe can exist and that all blackholes lead to the same multiverse brane (which would be a universe of nothingness as far as we could understand it), or that they connect to one of a infinite number of parallel universes. But what is to say that the big bang (or big inflate as it really is) was the result of energy from another multiverse and is being spewed out the back-end of a blackhole equivalent creating our 'bubble' of existence? Suddenly the energy is subject to a completely new set of laws and bursts into the existence we know it as space-time and matter, from what seems like total nothingness...

It would mean there is no 'creator' and that there are possibly an infinite number of universes like our own.

edit: @ Julian, ok but I don't see why dark matter cannot be part of the same closed-system? It's still all part of the same universe, the only implication is that there is a lot of it and we can't detect it, yet. There's a whole load of dark energy theories about this anyway.