Because the minuscule portion of the Universe we have the power to observe seems to be inflating from within at an accelerating pace, a lot of talented brain power is being directed toward probing what conventional science believes was a 14 billion year old event called the Big Bang.

An observed red shift phenomenon - commonly interpreted to be Doppler related - suggests the more distant the galaxy the faster it appears to be moving. At the very 'fringes of the Universe', the red shift indicates galaxies are moving away from us at a pace faster than the speed of light. This is VERY inconvenient to contemporary cosmologists. They have tried to explain it by proposing that the seemingly extra-logical phenomenon is an illusion caused by cosmological expansion - the creation or expansion of space itself between the material clusters in space - and they have produced sophisticated equations to pare down that velocity to acceptable ratios in order to reconcile the observations with accepted principles of modern cosmology.

Tons of time and computer power have been spent calculating the state of the Universe at the "beginning of time" and pondering whether or not the Universe will some day collapse back in upon itself and while I don't really question the accuracy of the measurements which give rise to Big Bang theory I find the interpretation of that data leaves much to be desired. The sound of galloping hooves does NOT mean the unicorns are stampeding. If you drop a white billiard ball into a container of cranberry juice, the deeper the container, the redder the billiard ball appears. If there exists some property of space or the nature of light, itself, that incrementally shifts the wavelengths of elemental absorption markers to the red end of the spectrum over vast distances, it would explain why the red shift seems to be intensifying at greater distance instead of being constant.

Space exists. Although it is not material in nature, it is some 'thing' every bit as much as those elements in the cosmos that have the property of mass. When dissimilar elements come into contact, they tend to compensate for their differences by evolving to a common state or condition. If a warm body encounters a cold body, the warm body cools and the cold body warms until they both reach equilibrium. Matter seems to be dense. Space seems to be sparse (actually almost no perceptible density). Of course mass is just a condition, and according to Einstein, it is a condition that can be exchanged for energy. Based on his famous equation and the nature of 'The Bomb', I would venture a guess that when matter is converted (becomes ethereal), it occupies a lot more volume then when it was in a material condition. There is only about one atom of Hydrogen in a cubic meter of space, but what if space contracts in the presence of that Hydrogen mass, and the mass expands in volume when in contact with space. I would expect the shrinkage of space to be much greater than the expansion of the material. Not only would this be a possible explanation for gravity, but over vast expanses of distance, it might also explain the apparent Doppler shift - as light passes through a contracting, slightly denser medium with no compensating calculations.

Even if celestial bodies are moving away from each other, it would not necessarily imply an expanding universe. Given a finite number of moving objects randomly vectored at random velocities within a finite volume, all collisions which could occur WILL occur within a finite period of time. Many of those collisions may occur outside of the original volume, but they will still take place within a finite distance, and eventually all of the objects will be moving away from each other.

If the Universe (all of existence, not just the known Universe) began with the Big Bang, then unless it expanded for an infinite amount of time or at an infinite rate of speed, it would necessarily be finite in nature. If the universe were finite then for any given instance in time from any point 'A' there must have existed a finite path to some point 'B' at which motion in any direction would not have increased the distance between the two. To claim the expansion outruns any space ship on four legs adds no credence. Either the cosmos was defined (finite) at every instance in time or it was not. And if the Universe is not finite, then it did not 'begin' at singularity or at any point in time.