That sounds very hand wavy and not at all convincing. You could just as easily say that time is an emergent property of the universe, so the universe has always

That sounds very hand wavy and not at all convincing. You could just as easily say that time is an emergent property of the universe, so the universe has always existed and needs no cause. The problem in doing that with God is you have something intelligent and complex enough that it was capable of creating the universe with the metaphorical snap of its fingers. This is a harder pill to swallow than the universe just existing, because the universe is not intelligent, is less complex, and can't create things whole cloth.