That's really more of a philosophical question, and arguably not a particularly interesting one - ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), after all:

That's really more of a philosophical question, and arguably not a particularly interesting one - ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), after all: Either there's 'eternal' nothingness - an option which we have excluded empirically - or something always must have existed. We're trying to work out the nature of that something, and the meaning of 'always' (did time begin at the big bang, making the question of 'before' as meaningless as the question of what's north of the north pole; is our universe just the lastest stage in a possibly eternal cycle; does the singularity hide a mirror universe with an arrow of time pointing in the opposite direction; ...).