Here's the thing, Scientist and Believer, and I've come to believe you are one in the same...There is nothing at the beginning and there is no beginning. Finding out, via Large Hadron Collider that there really is some theoretical particle that only exists in the world of super colliders will tell you nothing about the nothing that is. In other words, "scientists" want to know what comes "before"--what is first; philosophy, certain branches at least, want to know this too...what is the first-mover; believers in a god are simplest, they don't want to want to know; they want to believe they already know and forget about it.
I would argue that the last is most sane if you simply remove the god part. There is no way of knowing...done. And thinking about it creates madness. Really, try it. Imagine there's a "Big Bang" but don't worry about the why and how of it. The thing you are confronted with first is "that's not a beginning from nothing". Then you're stuck with, how did the elements involved in the Big Bang come to be? No answer--Horton Hears a Who...
For me--the two pieces of literary brilliance below from Hemingway and Stevens are the answers to the two poles we've come to term Belief and Science.
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
From Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-lighted Place."
"The Snowman", Stevens:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
