I think there is a huge gulf between direct experience and just taking another person's explanation as gospel. I like to think that the age of "religion" is behind us but the age of "spirituality" (based on direct experience and not just another charismatic Jim Jones figure) may be ahead.
Just my two cents in a deep well.
One other point: trying to explain everything away with physics always ends at a point of "just give me one free miracle". There are other hypotheses, De, beyond the two you mentioned. Roger Penrose has posited one in which the universe at the end cycles back (becomes indistinguishable from bing bang conditions in physics terms) into another universe.
And if THAT's what is happening, it curiously resembles what Indian mystics described as the cosmic "origin" thousands of years ago, based upon their direct experience in Samadhi. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samadhi) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology)
But Penrose claims there is actually experimental evidence for his hypothesis in the non-uniformity of the cosmic background radiation (Hawking Points). This evidence contradicts the Multiverse hypothsis, and also says that the Big Bang isn't the beginning.
Neither of your other hypotheses have a SHRED of physical evidence to back them up (edit: other than cosmic expansion)...just replacing a purposeful universe with a great shrug of the shoulders, IMO. I'd say, at this point, Penrose is arguably THE greatest living physicist. More to the point, he is the only living physicist I am aware of who clearly has evidenced the sort of supernaturally deep, disruptive genius we saw in Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman (those three were like space aliens;-).
Beyond Penrose, all the notably living others are really smart -- but IMO not insanely genius/great (http://academicinfluence.com/rankings/people/most-influential-physicists-today#thorne). Penrose is very old now, but his hypothesis and other major contributions came to him many decades ago when he was tolerably young; only the evidence is more recent.
“It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry