Paper, invented by the Chinese, so, yes, relevant to this thread.
Of course I can think beyond myself. An expanding universe 13.7 billion years old with billions of stars in billions of galaxies is certainly beyond myself. If anything, this narrative surpasses your infinite God who only created the world 6k years ago. As for "nothing" becoming something, well you might need to take a further look at quantum physics. This is a very strange world that often defies our normal conceptions of the physics.
As for your assetion that an effect cannot be greater then it's cause, just look at a string of dominos. One is pushed over, an it pushed over 2 then 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.
When you consider the condition previous to the universe...a vast nothing...that was so much nothing that it was unstable...the instability was not at just a point, so one the domino was pushed, inflation occurred quickly.
However as you mentioned, in the end, the total effect must be zero. When creating a universe, you need three things, energy, matter, and space. Since matter is just a form of energy, we really only need 2 things, energy and space. With energy being positive, and space the reservoir for negative energy, we now have the condition for a universe from nothing, with a total energy of zero, which is, best we can tell at this point, the total energy of the universe.
No God, no supernatural, just physics.
