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So am I to take it that you are promoting the view that something can physically expand into nothing?
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The standard cosmological picture does not say that the (stuff in the) universe expands to fill up an infinite empty space. It says that space itself is expanding. That's a completely different concept. There isn't any terribly good analogy for this, but its completely self consistent mathematics.
To the original question, nobody has any answers much better (or worse) than god.
There has been some recent progress though. Tracing back the big bang eventually leads to an infinite density universe. The infinity signals the break down of classical physics. Someone recently showed that the big bang singularity does actually "fix itself" in loop quantum gravity (the main competitor to string theory. the two are more or less on equal footing right now). Since this initial state is now relatively well-defined, I think some kind of answer might be around the corner.
There will still a "what was before that?" question, but I think there is always something that just has to be accepted as axiomatic. Why are the laws predicting these things the way they are? They just are. If there's a deeper theory, then you can ask the same question again, but the process never ends.