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I just wrote a super long response and accidentally the tab and whole textbox. Anyway, it consisted of a few points,

1. being that, as far as I understand it, quantum fluctuations suggest that what we previously thought of as "empty space" is actually filled with subatomic particles coming in and out of existence, and in light of this, it is possible to imagine that, however unusual, the big bang could have spontaneously come from nothing and will return thereto eventually.
   
   
2. Continuing with the "cone" analogy (that our universe is a 4 dimensional object, analagous to a 3 dimensional cone, and that we are experiencing 3 dimensional transects along a 4th dimension of time, analogous to a 2 dimensional planar transect traveling along the 3rd dimension of height), you can't talk about something "before" our universe, because the very notion of time is a property of our universe. It's like asking "what is the height of point X outside the cone," when the very notion of height applies only within the cone object. We can imagine that such a point exists, but by virtue of its definition we can't know what it is, otherwise it would be part of our universe.
   
   
3. As I see it, the first atom probably emerged from a primordial soup of subatomic particles, but where those subatomic particles emerged from is still a big question. As mentioned, I suspect quantum fluctuation, I think that there's always some activity of particles coming and going out of existence, with statistics favoring small particles/energy levels over very short periods of time. Of course the chances of such a big bang mess of particles emerging spontaneously would therefore be be infinitesimally small, but in an infinite span of multidimensional possibilities, perhaps it was inevitable that such an unlikely event would happen somehow and since only under those circumstances could a conscious 3 dimensional brain come to exist, so we find ourselves in the unlikeliest of circumstances - and it could be no other way (else we would not be here to marvel at it).
   
   I'm still drunk, probably moreso than before, but I hope at least some of this makes sense. I have no authority in any aspect of physics, but I do enjoy reading and thinking about the nature of our existence. Two books - Flatland and In Search of Schrödinger's Cat have probably had an undue impact on my beliefs and theories. But fuck it, this is a minecraft server subreddit and I can ramble about half-baked cosmological perspectives if I feel like it.