The philosopher, mathematician, physicist, physicist, and theologian Gottfried Leibniz wondered, back in the 17th and 18th centuries

Why something instead of nothing?

And that question is still more relevant than ever: Why does matter, time, space… exist? In reality, there could be nothing, simply a total absence of existence of anything at all.

Even more so if, by observing the universe, our universe, and studying it with the eyes of science, we realize that it had a beginning.

Yes, that is indeed the case. The universe is not an eternal entity, it had a beginning going back 13.8 billion years ago.

But then:

 What was there before?

Well, since there is no time, there was no before, so simple and … so complex, so enigmatic and so mysterious.

Before the emergence of the universe, nothing existed, or at least nothing imaginable until now. Science, so highly valued in our 21st century, has no answer to the question “How could something arise from nothing?

How could something emerge from nothingness or pure potentiality?

Such an inscrutable event is what modern cosmology calls a Singularity.

For our personal worldview it is the First Singularity.