Hawking, Penrose and Ellis have shown that at the creation of the universe, time and space were created along with mass and energy. If this is the case, then nothing as we now know it existed before the event called the Big Bang.
Now our point here is not to argue that order has never been seen to be created by an explosion, except in this one, creating event (which is true). Our point is to pursue the absolute unknowability of anything before the origin of space-time. This is because all of our logic, all of our senses, all of our knowledge depends upon the existence of space-time. We cannot experience any event without space-time. In fact “experience” and “event” are meaningless in an environment that is not founded on space-time.
So whatever reality existed before t = 0 of the Big Bang, we do not know how to imagine it. It is outside our sphere of reality.
But if we assume that at t = 0, all the rules of mass-energy physics and space-time itself existed, then it is required of us to consider that the explosion was caused, and did not just cause itself…with the cause existing at least at t = 0. If the cause came into being at the same time as the effect began, then “cause and effect” (a first principle) was created then as well.
If the creation of the first principles, the foundations of rational thought, occurred at the instant of the Big Bang, then what are we to say about reality prior to the Big Bang? We can only say that it seems more likely that rationality preceded the Big Bang than that irrationality did.
In fact, the Big Bang forms a boundary between material reality and another, far different reality that goes beyond our material reality: a transcending reality that is totally unknowable, but definitely transcendent.
And so transcendence beyond the knowability of material reality exists.
However, let’s consider that a cause did not exist for the explosion. Then the Big Bang is a self-caused, or non-contingent effect. Such effects have never been empirically seen to occur, except in this one initial creating event. This event then would be the single exception to the rules of physics and rational thought. The explosion would have occurred, and then the rules of physics and rational thought would have been created, at some later time. Maybe the Bang itself created the rules. First the Bang, then the Bang makes the rules. So the creating cause of the rules of physics and rational thought (the Bang) existed outside the realm of our reality (the rules). And that is the very definition of transcendence.
Again transcendence is shown to exist.
Either way, transcendence exists, and the empirical knowledge of the Big Bang has no bearing on the truth of that.