Does the Universe Have to Have a Cause?

Before reading this post, please review the post on the issue of the Infinite Regress and the Cosmological Argument. In brief, to say that everything has a cause leads to an infinite regression: where did x come from, then were did y come from, where did z come from, etc. ad infinitum/absurdum/nauseaum. The religious response is that God was the first cause and that She is self-created and so that breaks the sequence. The post on Aseity addresses this in more detail; for our purposes here, the issue is that that response is not satisfying to an Atheist who has recently frequently begun to retort that if God doesn’t need a cause, then why does the Universe?

There are a number of responses to this question. First, the concept of God is wholly different than the Universe. The Universe is comprised of matter and energy which are governed by the laws of physics. The Big Bang was an explosion of - and presumably this would not be argued against (I have never encountered such an argument) - of a quantifiable (if wholly unknown) force which could theoretically be measured and empirisized.

Conceivably, the argument could be made that Big Bang as a gravitational singularity, that it is/was somehow exempt from the laws of physics. I have also not seen this argument made and doubt a materialist scientist would make such a claim but if I do encounter it in the comment section, I will try and come up with something!