There was a thread started at ILP that explored these questions: https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194274
And some of the posts contain actual substantive arguments!!!
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Posted by EarthSky Voices
Lloyd Strickland
Originally published November 11, 2016, in The Conversation
Oh, indeed, a very different matter. Really, try to imagine nothing existing at all. Or try to imagine something always existing. Either way you are left only with "intellectual" or "philosophical" or "metaphysical" assessments.Many earlier thinkers had asked why our universe is the way it is, but Leibniz went a step further, wondering why there is a universe at all. The question is a challenging one because it seems perfectly possible that there might have been nothing whatsoever – no Earth, no stars, no galaxies, no universe. Leibniz even thought that nothing would have been “simpler and easier.” If nothing whatsoever had existed then no explanation would have been needed, not that there would have been anyone around to ask for an explanation, of course, but that’s a different matter.
And the part where God came into existence out of nothing at all...or always existed?Leibniz thought that the fact that there is something and not nothing requires an explanation. The explanation he gave was that God wanted to create a universe – the best one possible – which makes God the simple reason that there is something rather than nothing.
Of course: a leap of faith!
On the other hand, that hasn't stopped some secularists among us from imagining that they themselves are...God: omniscient and able to know if existence popped into existence out of nothing or was always around.In the years since Leibniz’s death, his great question has continued to exercise philosophers and scientists, though in an increasingly secular age it is not surprising that many have been wary of invoking God as the answer to it.
Logically for example.