Thank you! 🙏

What is termed "secular Buddhism" finds a lot of Westerners who gravitate to it. However, the vast majority of Buddhists do not consider secular Buddhism "Buddhism at all. This is because it strips away some core things about Buddhism that the Buddha taught. What's left is something that doesn't resemble Buddhism practiced by half a billion Buddhists. This is often because, as you mentioned, there is a strong desire to have "scientific" parts as the only things that one practices in Buddhism. But this places demans on Buddhism that was never something Buddhism said it would answer. Even the Buddha refused to talk about certain topics because it wasn't part of why one should practice. Even in our world, we are very scientific now, but have a hard time explaining things or even understanding a fraction of our universe and existence. For example, we know that a particular medicine works, but even scientists can't tell you why a particular medication works in certain situations. They know how the body responds to it, and creates the desired result, but don't know why the body responds to it, etc. Yet, we would still take the medicine because it can help/cure us. Same with Buddhism. We may not understand fundamentally a lot of these concepts, but we have faith in the Buddha (as a "Buddha") that it's important that he taught it, and it's important because he refused to answer about other things. So, it can be challenging for us with a Western mindset to adopt something we don't feel comfortable with. But Buddhism will make us come face-to-face with a lot of things we are not comfortable with overall in order to break the cycle of rebirth. Otherwise, we will just keep doing what we are doing. Rebirth, and the conditioned and impermanent forms that take place each time, *is* suffering (dukkha, which doesn't have a perfect English translation). So, it's not just this existence that may be promoted in secular Buddhism, but it's the constant forced rebirth which is the "problem", so to speak. Don't worry about needing to understand everything right away, or even if something is scientifically true or not. You'll have lots of Buddhists around the world who of course don't know if it's true or not, but we will understand it's part of the religion and move forward with our practice hoping to understand it fundamentally as we progress. Here's more info: alanpeto.com/buddhism/buddhism-religion-philosophy/

The Buddha purposely didn’t go in depth (or even talk) about certain topics if it didn’t help with enlightenment. To broadly answer your question, the Buddha did say the universe is vast, but I don’t recall him articulating timeframes. We can look at rebirth and karma where it is described as a beginning less and endless thing. So, we can look cylindrically to then universe the same way. But it’s really about us rather than the universe which is our focus of practice.