The two most absurd things about cosmology and astrophysics

1. Gravity is recognized as a fundamental force of the Universe and understood to be stronger than all other known forces when there is sufficient mass. So you have black holes which are extreme concentrations of mass which overpower all other forces and are capable of entrapping even light itself.
But – supposedly at the moment of the Big Bang there was the Inflaton – all the matter of the entire Universe condensed into one point. The amount of gravity that would be concentrated in that point is inconceivably immense. Therefore it is absurd to even think that it would somehow explode and expand out.
In essence, it’s like believing that yes, gravity is a fundamental force and has this power that in extreme quantity can be responsible for things like black holes, but for some brief time at the beginning of the Universe for some inexplicable reason it either didn’t exist or was somehow turned off.
Even in the cases where fundamental forces are overpowered by extreme amounts of other forces – for example in neutron stars or hypothetical quark stars – it is understood that those overpowered forces still exist. But it would be absurd to suggest that any force for whatever reason, at some particular point in time, would simply stop existing. Yet isn’t that basically what is implied by the Big Bang?

2. There is the understanding that the Universe is expanding. Most people conceive of this as they would something like a ball of dirt exploding and all the bits radiating outward. But this conception is very wrong.
With the ball of dirt analogy if it explodes and the material is thrown out radially from a central point, that material is going out into the air – into already existing space. It would be absurd to say that the space around the dirt ball doesn’t already exist. Of course it exists. There is no difference between the space that is occupied by the matter of the ball of dirt and the space occupied by the air and everything else surrounding it.
But in the case of the expanding Universe there is nothing around what is expanding. There is absence of space. Therefore what is space expanding into?
Clearly this conception is simply false and not an appropriate analogy for the reality of what is actually happening, of what an “expanding universe” actually means.
Perhaps on paper, in a mathematical equation, it’s trivial to just “create” space by increasing a value. But in terms of reality, what does this even mean? Is it even possible for a human brain to conceive of this?
Given this, I think the term “expanding” is actually inappropriate and wrong.