It's kind of hard for you to not know that answer and believe the universe was created from pre-existing matter as those would be mutually exclusive. If there was this reservoir of pre-existing matter that was used to create this universe then wouldn't there have had to have been laws of nature in place before this universe was created? You know... to govern the behavior of that pre-existing matter?I'm only confident I don't know the answer to that. I suspect 1 + 1 always equals 2 in every universe.