Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

[Heywood]

The choice between the forms (essences) of the universe to be created was either random or intelligent.

You're obviously a big fan of the false dichotomy. There's an obvious 3rd alternative: Non-random & unintelligent i.e. our universe could be emergent from a set of fundamental or extra-universal naturalistic functions with no intelligent intervention required. Given your (questionable) definitions we could also suggest 'intelligent & random' (e.g. a designer 'flips a coin' to determine universal attributes) or 'intelligent & non-random but naturalistic' (e.g. a designer uses a model based on existent naturalistic functions to generate a design).

You really need to abandon this theological apology. It is fundamentally untenable.

Your third alternative is easily dismissible on the basis that there is no reason to believe it to be true(other than to maintain an atheistic world view) and good reason to believe it isn't.

Yes there could be some magical, unobservable, or unknowable brute fact that dictates the universe is the way it is because it can only be the way it is . However, our current understanding of cosmology allows for more coherent models of the universe than you can count. Sting theory alone allows for at least 10^500 different ways the universe could be.

Your third alternative could be right, but the current physics say it aint.