Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

[Ben Davis]

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.

Not quite. There are many possible coherent models but since no-one knows anything of the nature of existence before the current form of our immediate universe, a wide variety of alternatives are admissable and since we know that events in our universe are the result of unintelligent and naturalistic processes, many of which are non-random, it's not such a stretch of the imagination to suggest that other such processes may have been in place to 'cause' the current state of our immediate universe to come in to existence; some 'selection' process which describes which of the possible models can exist.

But that's not the point, I was simply illustrating the false dichotomy that datc was offering and your point reinforces mine.