What was before the big bang?

John 1 KJV
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John means nothing to someone who practices Shinto.

There’s nothing I could say more accurate or relevant to your post than what was already stated.

Only one way to God.

Passing the hat in church, it never stops goin’round.

- Tom Waits

Sure there are. It doesn't matter who you are or how foolish you have been. The Answers are the Answers, and The Truth is The Truth. That's like a universal constant, like the speed of light or the Laplace Limit.

I meant relevant to the thread that you've now posted in several times. Insulting me is not relevant. You should try to post something relevant to the OP's inquiry. Is that something you feel capable of?

I did that as well but I’m guessing, like so many other things, you missed it.

The blow bang was a few days before.

Written two generations after Jesus of Nazareth’s death (90-110 CE) in a language Jesus never preached in (Greek), in a place he had never been (Anatolia) and by persons who never knew him.

What the Gospel of John does give a glimpse into is the evolution of early Christianity from an apocalyptic Judaism (that the arrival of God’s Chosen People’s Messiah was imminent) which Jesus was likely preaching, to a syncretism of Judaism with Greco-Roman paganism. This was because the belief among Jesus’ contemporary followers that he was going to deliver the Kingdom of God right there in Judea “before that generation passes” (Matthew 24:34). But then it didn’t happen: generations were passing and Romans had not been vanquished and there was no new Kingdom of God with the Messiah ruling God’s chosen people as their liberator. So by the time John was written, the Kingdom of God had transitioned from being a physical place on Earth where their new King David would rule to being a different plane of existence with God above. This is one of many key differences between John and the synoptic gospels. But that’s what you get when you have three gospels based on a similar source and then a fourth written many decades later and partially based on those earlier three gospels but critically influenced by two generations of displacement and rapidly evolving theology.

We don't know that.

The usual analogy is that asking what was before the Big Bang is the same as asking what’s north of the North Pole: take one more step in any direction and you’re going south. So any further peering back beyond the Big Bang is only looking forward in time again.

There are some cyclical theories that the Universe goes from a Big Bang expansion to a Big Crunch contraction and then the cycle repeats. Roger Penrose proposed a theory whereby eventually all matter decays into photons, thus recreating the conditions of the Big Bang and then restarting the cycle.

We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of the same essence as the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and was made human.
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried.
The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again with glory
to judge the living and the dead.
His kingdom will never end.
And we believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life.
He proceeds from the Father and the Son,
and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.
He spoke through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.
We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look forward to the resurrection of the dead,
and to life in the world to come. Amen.

Adopted in 325 CE after some debate in what is today Iznik, Turkey.

https://www.pcaac.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/WCFScripureProofs2022.pdf

In the beginning rojo created letsrun.com on a windows 97 PC.
And the website was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the URL.
And rojo said, Let there be mattlondon: and there was mattlondon.
And rojo saw mattlondon, that it was good: and rojo divided mattlondon from the darkness.
And rojo created fastboy77, and rojo saw that it was good.
And rojo blessed mattlondon and fastboy77, rojo said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the forum, and subdue it: and have dominion over the trolls and over every living thing that moveth upon the forum.
And rojo said, Behold, I have given you subforums, a podcast and letsrun.com shirts. you may post links and memes. you have mod power to ban theadultintheroom.
And rojo saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

Even people living nearly 3,000 years ago could understand that something cannot come out of nothing.

Time starts with the bang. Our current understanding of spacetime doesn't posit the existence of anything except heat and energy outside the big bang, or anything at all, depending on the literature you read. It's speculated that physics may have been very different in the first picosecond of space time. It's fun to speculate, but current science can't establish any real theory for a before. In fact, when you talk about any movement of time from the big bang, you're after - see my point about the laws of physics, forces taking a fraction of a second to work in the way they currently do.

A different phrasing of a question is what caused the big bang? The best answer I've gotten from this is it caused itself - that is in our frame of reference it was inevitable. We can't imagine anything outside the space time caused by the big bang. Physics and math can model the universe's first seconds to an extent, but our understanding of the universe can only be extrapolated from the three dimensions we experience and the knowledge humanity has derived from them.

So what was before the big bang? Nothing and from humanity's frame of reference there can't have been anything - your mind can't conceptualize "pre big bang. Any attempt to do so is modelling post big bang because of your limitations. The best you can get to is coming up for words for something that doesn't exist for you. Religion offers some comfort if this scares you, but if you have a scientific mind - at best one religion may be true and no religion can be proven in the same way that "pre big bang" is a phrase without meaning, something that can't be conceptualized.

Foreplay with Harambe?