Our perception is fairly limited. It's a very human notion to believe that everything must have had something come before it. But keep in mind we are also the

Our perception is fairly limited. It's a very human notion to believe that everything must have had something come before it. But keep in mind we are also the ones defining before and after based on our perception. It happens that this matches our view of light propagation/etc, and our understanding of time. But that is today. Not during the big bang or "before" it. In fact, we also know there were times where the current physical laws did not necessarily apply, shortly after the big bang for example. Currently we believe fundamental forces took time to separate. Heck, even subatomic particles took a very significant amount of time to form. At a time when physical laws may not apply, things like "our view of the direction of time" would not have applied, either, for example, since most arrows of time boil down to the second law of thermodynamics, see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time. Which means even causality as we think about it breaks down somewhere in there. This is hard to wrap your head around because it's so alien to how we currently perceive the universe. We want things to fit that perception. Honestly, even before you get to "before the big the bang", we still can't explain why the universe inflated during the big bang (IE we have no idea what field did it, though we know some things about it, and just expect we will eventually discover it).