Not at all. Our existing science allows for spontaneous generation of things all the time. Look at Hawking Radiation, for example. No miracle required.
The religious and spiritual explanations for the birth of the universe were generated when we could see just a cat and a tree. We didn’t really know what the planets were, or what the stars were, and had no idea of the size and age of the universe.
Today we can see out over 12 billion ly, know how the stars work, predicted and measured the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the ripples in it predicted by inflation, etc. etc. We see a hell of a lot more than a cat and a tree.
When facts keep being stubbornly weird, in my opinion there must be something wrong with humans’ critical apparatus.
I think you have correctly described the two possibilities. Existence is definitely here, and we understand that either it has always been around or it has come out of nothing. Both options seem difficult to accept or comprehend, but if they are the only possible choices then one of them must be the true one - all we have to do is identify it. Abandoning seems to me the same as succumbing to ignorance.
I was answering the implication that I was postulating a God, which I wasn’t, but I was not clear as to whether you were referring to me or not in that aside since I didn’t mention anything like that in my post. It was clear that you were not postulating one.
Even if we identify it’s one or the other, it’s still incomprehensible/non-sensical, at least to my human mind. The fact there is existence is not something I’ll ever wrap my head around, and I don’t think it’s possible to truly understand.
If you want to get really pedantic, virtual particles are the only ones we do know exist, and it’s the real particles that we don’t know about. Remember, all of our detection apparatus are made of particles, too.
We are all just one huge evolving probability function. 
Let me put it this way: “Virtual particles” in the sense of “off-shell things that appear in perturbation theory” don’t appear in the full theory, in which everything that actually does appear is on-shell. If you want to define the interpretation one gets from the approximate version as “this is what’s actually real,” that’s your prerogative.
My smart phone has demons in it… at least that’s what I thought was happening the first time someone texted “Congratulations” and I saw confetti all over the screen. Ditto those shaking icons.
Malware, gaslighting, or by design?
Perhaps not so much critical apparatus as the language we use, born of a period when the facts were not even dreamt of.
We have no language to talk about a period when time and space didn’t exist. We shouldn’t say what happened “before” but our language demands that use. We shouldn’t use “exist” to talk about “virtual potential” but we don’t have proper words for that. We use “something” and “nothing” as if it’s obvious those are the only two categories and encompass all, but those are words from philosophy rather than physics. Physicists can use mathematical formulations to describe universes that have no easy translation into words. Plain old everyday four-dimensional spacetime is not our everyday experience even though we wrongly talk about it as if they are the same.
Math and physics long ago went into a realm that requires specialized knowledge to communicate. Our brains are working just fine. They either created or discovered that math, depending again on which philosophy you adhere to. The rest of us need to stop this stubborn insistence that our unlearned words are equal to their advanced math and that the physicists are somehow the blame for our inadequacies.
It is believed that the universe is flat (“believed” here meaning measured to within a very small degree of uncertainty).
Physicists are to blame. Of course I don’t blame them for my inadequacies. My inadequacies are both my fault and the inherent limitations that come with my human nature. I admire scientists for their effort, dedication and power to help us all understand the world we live in.
On the other hand, scientists should be aware of the social dynamics where competing models of reality are constantly accepted and rejected by the public. The public in the West seems to generally accept science as a source of knowledge but people’s trust in science may dwindle if science’s esoteric nature alienates the general public and the illiberal forces in the society gain momentum. Society as a whole is science’s moral sponsor. If scientists lose the general public and choose not to care about it, they are to blame because this means scientists will knowingly limit themselves to strictly serving the goals of their employer be that businesspeople or the government.
So what are you proposing that scientists do?
Physics and mathematics can only (with some approximation and guesswork) go back to a short time after the big bang.
As to the cause of the big bang, what happened ‘before’ that, and the nature of reality, the honest answer from scientists is not, “It can only be expressed in esoteric mathematics”, but rather “We have absolutely no idea.”
What can you possibly be saying by this? That scientists should not go into esoteric areas because it might lose the general public? Science is not society’s moral sponsor. Scientists serve themselves and other scientists - as they should. Science education, both in schools and through reporters, can be improved, but advanced physics is not translatable into words. Does that means scientists can only work in fields that are translatable? That’s, to use a word, piffle.
“We don’t know” is not at all the same as “We have absolutely no idea.” Physicists do have ideas, lots of them. The ideas are not pulled out of their asses, but come from formidable models using advanced math. Whether any of them are right is not for anyone outside of the scientific community to decide.
We have mathematics, which can explain a whole lot more than our minds can comprehend or perceive. Which is actually kind of neat IMHO.
But to the OP’s point, not only was there nothing “before” the Big Bang, there wasn’t a “before” before the big bang as time has no meaning in an empty universe. Which, to your point, is admittedly a bit of a difficult concept to wrap one’s brain around in any meaningful way.
I, for one, reject the notion that “science” or “physics” should be treated as a “competing model of reality” with equivalence to models that can only be described as “religious dogma” or “fantasy”. The simple reason is that science strives for internal consistency that reconciles with observable evidence. Those other models do not.
I’m not even sure what this means. Science does not require a “moral sponsor” other than a desire to determine the truth about how our universe works. If your argument is that science needs better marketing so that it is relatable to the common ignoramus, that is another matter.
Whoops. I wrote in post #75 that “Science is not society’s moral sponsor.” I meant to negate UY Scuti’s “Society is science’s moral sponsor.” That’s a meaningless platitude. Science, like religion and politics and economics and anarchy, is part of society. Where else could its values come from? Nothing is outside society in that sense - and that is an acceptable use of the word “nothing.”
I usually find that people without a serious background in physics and mathematics tend to overestimate them.
I got most of the way through a masters degree in theoretical physics before I went into other fields. So I did 100% rigorous courses on general relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, particle physics, etc. My professors would derisively refer to any argument that didn’t consist of mathematical equations as ‘hand-waving’. However, mathematics and physics have their limits.
To me, “we have ten different contradictory theories, none of which can either be proved or disproved - and none of which would get us any closer to any kind of ‘ultimate understanding’ if they were proved”, is the same as saying “we have no idea”.
Well, a Black Hole is a perfect example. It is a singularity. It doesn’t actually physically exist in this universe anymore because the gravitational forces are so great that everything collapses into it. Even light cannot escape. When gravity curves space to that extent, it literally pinches it off into what amounts to an independent universe all its own.
It has no physical existence, but its mass is enormous. If a Super Massive Black Hole, which can be made from the mass millions of suns, somehow exploded, the amount of energy and matter exploding back into our universe would be stupendous. All of this would have instantaneously emerged from a singularity.
How do you know they wouldn’t contribute to understanding if they were proved?