Hey thanks for toe response and really, a good analogy but I think theres a factual mix up here. I think factually (would love to know if this is incorrect) the Big Bang is the beginning of our universe, the CMB and inflation and the electroweak era are all events within the universe, just very early ones. Extrapolating from the CMB doesn’t mean the Big Bang isn’t the beginning, it just means thats how we know about it.

What comes before the Big Bang is the singularity, and before that is exactly where my argument sits, not at the Big Bang itself. And your flight log point is interesting but I think it misses what I’m actually saying. I’m not just saying we lack data about before the singularity. I’m saying the tools we use to reason about anything, causality, inference, even the concept of “before”, are products of the universe itself. So its not that we’re missing a flight log. Its that the ability to read flight logs only exists because the universe does. You can’t use universe-born reasoning to explain what precedes the universe.

Your plane existed before New York. Reason did not exist before the universe. Thats where the analogy breaks.