New guy with questions

[StoryBook]

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Hello Atheist Community.
I’m a Christian (just to get that out of the way, and I fully acknowledge that 99% of faith-based statutes are indefensible)
I have many agnostic friends but only one atheist friend, and he is really more of a buddy, so I don’t have much of a source to engage my questions directly. When I bring up these questions to my agnostic friends they usually say something along the lines of, “I don’t know and you don’t know either,” almost to where it’s become a bad joke within our circle. And within my church, there are only a handful of other people who have studied the things I have studied, and we just end up agreeing with each other, which won’t lead to any growth, and I do not think that is good.
I know that I’m hiding behind the safety and anonymity of the internet but I’m nervous about coming to this community with my questions because I’ve heard the horror stories about militant atheists who are dogmatic or aggressive just as I’m sure you have heard of, and perhaps even experienced, the fanaticism, intolerance, and ignorance of people of faith, but I’ve had these burning questions for years now, and I want to know how the atheist community deals with these questions so that I can understand.
As I said before, I am a person of faith, yet I am not here to practice Apologetics, or try to convert anyone to my beliefs, I only want to see what the atheist community has to say about these questions, because Google sucks, and the rebuttals I’ve read have come from books written by Christians or other theists, so if any of these questions seem old or redundant or QED, please keep in mind I’m new to the forum, and if there is a thread which could address the issue, please send the link.
Let’s start here:
"A common linchpin of theistic arguments is the idea of Aristotle’s Causal Axiom, which seems to logically require a demiurgic entity to have flipped the switch to set things in motion.
Our present position, then, is this: We have argued that there always was motion and always will be motion throughout all time, and we have explained what is the first principle of this eternal motion: we have explained further which is the primary motion and which is the only motion that can be eternal: and we have pronounced the first movement [or: “Prime Mover”] to be unmoved."
- Aristotle, Physics, #8, chap. 9
I entertained this thought for years, until I read Max Jammer’s Einstein and Religion which delves into Plato’s Timaeus dialogue, (As a side note, Plato also advocated a similar Etiological argument)
In the Timeaus though, Plato brings up the possibility of the illusion of time. At that point, I had been well-versed in Relativity and the absolute absurdity of Quantum theory, but had never thought that time may perhaps be something in and of itself to make us comfortable with our view of the world. Time is a measuring tool, used to describe matter, just like weight and height, therefore time might not exist without matter to describe, so the eternal questions surrounding the beginning of the universe may be irrelevant because vocabulary like beginning, middle, and end imply the existence of time both before and after the point of creation, which may not be correct.
This view is becoming increasingly popular, the negation of the Beginning to irrelevance, to the point that models of the universe need no beginning, sending theists and cosmologists scrambling, till now we have models of self-replicating existences which always are and always will be. Admittedly they are very sketchy, but the implication is quite fascinating while we work out the details: that the universe no longer requires a point of creation, at least with regards to time, no beginning, at least in the classical sense.
Most of my Christian brothers have chosen to ignore this fact, calling it scientific gymnastics and saying it's more absurd to deny creation than to acknowledge a god, and I’ll admit, they’ve got a point, but still I entertained the idea and saw the validity in the science, so I chose to live uncomfortably with my faith till, if you’ll please pardon my attempt at transparency, God brought me a new revelation.
From there, I read about a dozen books on physics and watched Donnie Darko, and realized that I hated string theory and get bored to the point of anger and tears whenever my pot head friends try to insist it’s the greatest movie ever, and that string theory holds the potential for a unified theory, salvation, time-travel, and free tacos. Then I found Hawking, pop-science I know, but it was new to me, and his book of essays has been a powerful eye-opener.
In Black Holes, Baby Universes, and Other Essays, Hawking entertains the idea that perhaps we have, or at least we can discover the secrets to how the universe came to exist, but he quickly adds that even if we do know this, we still do not know why the universe bothers to exist in the first place.
This question, why? Even if we know the what, the why is what has driven me back into an uneasy faith. My first question to this Atheist community is how do you respond to Hawking’s question? We may know “the how?” and “the what?” of the universe’s origins, but why does it bother to exist in the first place?

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I don't have the IQ for this
If we figure out how it came to be, maybe we can the figure out why it bothers to exist?

anyways