Where it ALL Began?

I'm not a physicist.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I launch into this, so you know I claim no qualified scientific backing to anything I'm about to say.  Then again, what I'm about say probably makes that opening statement redundant anyway:

I don't entirely buy the Big Bang theory.

No, I'm not about to argue the case for Genesis: I spent 12 years going to Catholic schools, and the main thing I took from all of those Religious Studies classes was that it was all bollocks (but that's a rant for another day).

My lack of conviction with regard to the birth of our universe stems from two questions:

1. What came before?
2. What happens when a galaxy dies?

There are several theories concerning what lies beyond our universe and where it all may have come from.  These are too numerous and complicated to get into in any great detail here (not least because I barely understand most of them), but as far as I'm aware, one of the most mathematically sound (or, at least, broadly accepted) at the moment suggests vast sheets of...stuff, flapping around out there, beyond our particular plane of existence.  As these sheets ripple, they will occasionally touch, and the result is a singularity that spawns a universe, much like our own.

The issue I have with these theories - aside from their unfathomability to my scientifically illiterate little brain - is they seem predicated on the assumption that our universe is not all there is, and that there must be something grander out there, beyond its borders.

But what if there isn't?  What if our universe is all there is?  What if the Big Bang was actually just a Big Bang?

Two of the biggest clues backing up the theory of the Big Bang are the motion of the galaxies in the observable universe - everything appears to be moving away from a central point (the singularity) - and background radiation, said to be left over from the initial expansion.

So, I got to thinking about that singularity.  Essentially, it's a Black Hole: a single point in space in which everything is condensed into one, solid thing, even down to an atomic level (blow up an atom's nucleus to the size of a football, and its protons and electrons will be orbiting miles away - in a singularity, even atoms' component parts are squished into a single point).

A particularly big (Super Massive, you might say) Black Hole lies at the heart of every spiral galaxy: it's what gives such galaxies - including our own - their shape.  We're effectively water going down a plughole, which means our precious Milky Way won't last forever.  Eventually, everything that makes up a spiral galaxy will be devoured by the Black Hole at its heart, or the Black Hole itself will reach a point where it can no longer contain itself.  Either way, the time will come when it explodes, throwing all that made up that galaxy out into the cosmos, to be picked up in the wake of other galaxies, or clump together to form new nebulae and, eventually, new galaxies.

If that's the case, then couldn't the effects we attribute to the birth of the universe not simply be from the death of a galaxy?  What if 14 billion years ago, a galaxy reached the end of its life, went the way of Thunder in Big Trouble in Little China, and spread its guts out into the deep, dark infinite, to continue the universe's eternal evolution?