Something Rather Than Nothing

I have a lot of respect for physics and the people who make it their speciality. However, I never ceased to be amazed by the level of arrogance and what I believe to be a poverty of imagination often shown by "experts" trotted out on telly. Watching a Horizon programme tonight entitled "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?", there were several such experts trotted out. It played like a satire on all things cosmological. "The universe exploded from nothing, this is Cosmology's greatest discovery." The term "LOL" was invented for such statements. The programme's constant visualisation of an explosion was annoying, given that whatever the Big Bang was it was no "explosion" as we understand the term. Which made the "radical" notion of Inflation -invented to account for the relative uniformity of temperature throughout the universe (an explosion would be lumpy, you see!) - just a little ridiculous. Why should the Big Bang pause to make a small space uniform before exploding vastly? Why couldn't the Bang be a uniform expansion from its initial point? Why should it bear any resemblance whatever to what we regard as an explosion?
I am familiar with Dark Matter, and even Dark Energy, but Dark Flow! If there was anything wrong with the equations, another "Dark" thing seemed to be trotted out, invisible and undetectable, and so conveniently incontrovertible. Doesn't that remind you of another concept like say "God"? Yeah, yeah, science is the new religion, etc.. Given that we have cosmic spaghetti (string theory) can we have a helping of Dark Pasta? Even the Italian sceptic trotted out was there just to say bah, humbug, but offer little by way of an alternative. Dark Theory, perhaps?
Ironically the one thing I did wholeheartedly agree with was the outwardly ridiculous proposition that Nothing is actually Something (Nature's not the only one to abhor a vacuum), but then can I introduce you to an old Greek friend of mine called Parmenides....