I have a friend who used to ridicule me by asking why, logically, there should be something rather than nothing.

One day I responded by asking why, logically, there should be nothing rather than something.

Something went bang. There is no logical reason why that something (which contained our later universe at the very least) should not have been eternal in itself, the end result of an eternity of earlier processes.

There's no particular reason to assume that the entire cosmos must have had a First Cause. Why not? Because the entire cosmos is different in kind than the individual elements in it, all of which do appear to require a previous cause.

A crowd of people is quite distinct from the individuals within it, and it follows different rules. A crowd, for example, can break up, then reassemble with some different members. No individual can do that.

A collective totality doesn't usually have just the same characteristics as its constituents. The same principle ought to apply to the cosmos.

Just sayin'.