Dear Richard,
Thank you for your kind words. Also, thanks for your beautiful, philosophical essay. I enjoyed reading it very much. To me it seems that you are seeking what physicists call the perhaps quixotic "Theory of Everything." I don't mean to disparage this search, for I hope that you are correct -- that it is attainable and not beyond the human intellect. Plus, we most certainly do need the cooperation of philosophers and scientists, of theorists and experimentalists, if ever we are to reach such a thing.
As you can tell from my essay, I belong to the bottom-up school. To some extent this has a degree of pessimism built in. If you read my reply to Jack just above, the quotation by Danny Hillis sums it up succinctly: Our brains did not evolve to understand/decipher nonlinear logic very well. If the Universe is highly interconnected, as now seems to be the case, fathoming Nature may well be similar to magnifying a fractal such as the Mandelbrot set -- an infinite self-similar (actually self-affine) sequence. Nevertheless, that certainly should not stop us from trying! (Interestingly enough, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the early people to assert that we must consider Nature as a whole rather than just reduce it into parts, so the idea has been around for a long time.)
Your question about the Big Bang Theory: I tend to shy away from commenting on the Big Bang, for I am not all that well-versed in its details. However, I have listened to many lectures and studied many papers by cosmologists with implications for cosmology about the Standard Model, such as cosmologically limiting the number of quarks to six, i.e., the number of generations to three. It seems to me that some cosmologists are extrapolating dangerously from a modicum of hard data, much as some psychologists are prone to reach "profound" conclusions from poorly-controlled experiments (my apologies to most psychologists!). And I do know that the Big Bang Theory keeps getting layer upon layer of corrections and reinterpretations -- Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid. In nuclear science when we are performing, say, a shell-model calculation, and we find that it takes an inordinate amount of time to converge -- well, quite often we have chosen an unsuitable, inconvenient basis set to start with. Maybe we should choose a better basis. As far as "a singularity not being a beginning," I think that falls in the category of things we have not evolved to understand too well -- again, we should take the Cantor approach and try.
I have probably said too much, for I am not a philosopher. But thank you for a lovely, beautifully-written essay.
Best wishes,
Bill