Perhaps we need a change of terminology. I maintain, with Stenger, that the initial state of the universe at time zero, was "a state of zero energy", as romansh has suggested. Whether "a state of zero energy" is "nothing" or whether "nothing" is "a state of zero energy" may be debated.-If you then start to ask what was "before" this initial state, you are implying that time existed before the initial state, but that means the initial state was not the initial state, so you are talking self-contradictory nonsense. This all seems perfectly logical to me.