Good question, my understanding is that we frankly just don't know, it may be one of those things that we can't know, but that is getting awfully close to the realm of philosophy
> it may be one of those things that we can't know
This is true for anything we don’t know.
For the Big Bang, we know the intermediate problem: black holes. Gravity and quantum mechanics interacting at the same scale. The singularities there are accessible in a way the singularity of the Big Bang is not.
