Where does the matter in the universe come from if there was nothing before the big bang?
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Imagine you’re a piece in a game of Monopoly. Everything you know about the universe must be deduced from the rules of the game as it is being played – you can’t ‘see’ the game from outside. After a while, our perspective as a piece lets us figure out many of those rules. We know we can only move so far and the probability distribution of that movement. We know we try to avoid certain places and that hitting certain places makes us jump to certain other places.
Now let’s add a house rule: whenever you land on Free Parking, the game ends and now you’re playing Chutes and Ladders with no memory of your previous existence in Monopoly.
As before, you can try to intuit the rules of Chutes and Ladders by observation as a piece moving around the game.
What you can’t do is figure out the rules of Monopoly because those rules no longer apply and you have no memory of them.
That piece is us. We can only examine the rules of the game we’re playing right now. We can’t examine the rules of some previous game we can’t observe. So it’s not that ‘nothing’ came before so much that ‘nothing knowable’ came before.
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