Presumably at the beginning of the universe (Big Bang), the laws of physics themselves were beginning, just as space and time were. In such a situation, conservation of energy would indeed be totally violated, and thus we would have an escape: energy /can/ be created or destroyed when the laws of physics are changing.
During the beginning of the universe , everything was being formed. Our current knowledge of physics is unable to explain how energy was created. Only the very sharpest of minds in the world are capable of coming to an answer close to this. We need to know much more about our universe to find answers to such questions