Then it takes twice as much faith to believe a higher being existed before anything else...

It's a chicken/egg.

If you want to be the most scientific these days it's bubbles of reality getting created when two dimensional planes intersect or just come close to bumping up together. Which forms a bubble dimension which would have essentially random physics every time.

Which is pretty fucking far down the line to "nothing" but at the end of the day, what created the planar dimensions?

All adding a higher power does is add an extra step. Maybe it's there, maybe it's not.

It changes nothing. Because something created that first.

There's energy/matter and no matter what we come up with to rationalize that (even the Matrix) it doesn't explain it the whole way through, all of this is fundamentally impossible and we just have to accept that.

And also even if there's an afterlife, were unlikely to get all the answers, because it almost certainly be some sort of middle management higher being who is just as ignorant of what made it, till maybe if/when it dies in which case our "ever after" has an end date.

Like, everyone just has to eventually reach the point they stop caring and settle for a personal "good enough". Organized religion just gives everyone a set playbook which makes it easier to accept.