Oh, and to address your “Big Bang to Big Crunch ad infinitum” idea: that would require a mathematically impossible level of order and design (based on even the most generous age of the universe of -14.6B yrs; and it could be as little as several thousand years depending on your level of interpretation of the Bible) to BOTH events, infinitely, which essentially requires a God untethered to any universe to keep such a cycle from collapsing into full random nothingness.