If they would simply be annihilated after being created, why be created at all?

I feel like somehow, we are way off in our understanding of the universe and how it works. There are so many unanswered questions, such as:

1) If the big bang created space and time as we know it, what was there before that?

2) Why did the big bang suddenly occur 14 billion or so years ago? Why not a couple billion years before or after that?

I know that the steady state theory of the universe has fallen out of favor, but I wonder if some appeal could be made to some kind of fundamental force that has always existed and always will, which behaves with fluid dynamics, and the "islands" of matter that we experience are actually some kind of fluctuations in that fluid.