What we are complaing about is the wild eyed absudities proclaimed by Hawkins and the current Pied Piepers on the " Atheist of the Month " bandwagon speech and media appearance circuit. These men may be brilliant but they are quite insane and their wild eyed claims prove it, so does such wild enthusiasim on behalf of pipe dreams and " science fiction. "
It is absolutely astonishing how they can absolutely reject the employment of philosophical reasoning to prove the existence of God as unreasonable and also accuse those who place this belief on the solid ground of Divine Revelation as credulous. And at the same time claim their own unreasonable as Most Reasonable. Such hypocracy just boggles the mind.
I’d really like to keep the debate on the Big Bang itself, but I will just quickly say what I think about what you just said. I guess the absurdities you are talking about are hypothesis scientists make about before the Recombination, where we cannot observe anything. These are indeed not pure science. However, as I said, relativity used to be a pretty math and seemingly overcomplicated theory. Quantum physics was even worse, people called these worse names than what you could think of for Hawking.
Some people choose to exclude God from their views of the world. Why ? Not because they are in denial, or manipulated by the devil, just because they want to know what’s beyond the frontier of our current knowledge. They don’t want a magical answer, they want to know how the world works. Yes sometimes they speculate without evidence, and sometimes they will claim their hypothesis is the 100% truth. They shouldn’t, and they’re wrong for doing that, but they are human. However these speculations often pave the way for future theories.
About the philosophical reasoning, scientist reject it as a source of knowledge because humans are fallible. Why would you get a truth just through an internal reasoning ? If something is beautiful and works well in your mind, why should it be absolutely TRUE ? For example, the closest thing to philosophy I can think of in the scientific world is math. Math is not about the material world, it is internal thinking supposed to reach truths. Well sadly, a mathematician named Godel showed that the very concept of logic is flawed. It is impossible to have a coherent set of mathematical rules able to say “this is wrong”, “this is true” for every statement in this set. It is impossible. If math themselves cannot be trusted, why should philosophy be ? Finally, you can’t seriously use the expression “solid ground of Divine Revelation” when we talk about non-believers. I could say the Koran is solid ground of Divine Revelation too, and ask how you can dismiss it. For me and other atheists/agnostic, as far as we are concerned, the Bible is just a book. No offense, but really, if we don’t believe, we aren’t going to see anything in it except maybe pieces of interesting philosophy.
And even if they could prove their claims, how many people could actually follow their arguments, the math and physics and proofs involved? Certainly not me nor 99.9999%
of the people living at any one time. So then most people would have to accept it on an act of Faith and its acceptance would have to be enforced by the Dogmatic decrees of the State/Scientific dictatorship and anyone who disagreed would be punished in various ways which, while perhaps not violent, are quite effective - like denying one teaching credentials or tenure or access to professional positions or certifing them as enemies of the State or terriorists ( much like they are doing now to conservative Christians in the US., like they did in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia or even now in China).
This cannot happen. For a very simple reason: science is proving itself wrong ALL THE TIME. Theories evolve. The theory of evolution itself has gone a long way since Darwin. Before Einstein came along with the photoelectric effect, people were convinced they knew how matter work. Bam, back to basics because of Einstein. You can’t build a dogma and change it all the time, it doesn’t make any sense. Creationnists are already using this argument: science is changing its mind all the time, why should we trust it ?
About the inaccessible math, it is true that it is now well beyond the grasp of the average Joe, but that shouldn’t be an argument. I could make simplistic critics on the christian faith, blatant logical fallacies on the nature of God and conclude that Religion is not coherent. You wouldn’t agree. I had a few questions recently about free will. I asked them at a few christian people. Most of them couldn’t answer themselves and told me to read st Thomas Aquinas for answers. That is what I am doing at the moment but I can tell you, st Thomas Aquinas is well beyond the grasp of the average Joe too.
Overall, I really don’t want to enter a debate about whether or not christians are persecuted. I would just like to point out that for example, trying to teach creationnism in science classes is not part of the freedom of speech and not being allowed to is not persecution. Creationnism is not a scientific theory, unless you can provide an experiment that would be able to refute it.
I really really don’t want the debate do deviate too much so I am going to ask a question to you christians: what do you think matches the Big Bang Theory in the scriptures except “let there be light” ? When i read genesis, I was quite surprised to see the plants being created before the Sun. As an astrophysicist I’m also quite skeptical about the Earth being created before the Sun. (We left the Big Bang theory itself, but that is still interesting 
)
