Then the laws governing such things nonetheless existed pre-existence. True nothingness would not only involve no matter, no particles, but also no laws of any sort.
You basically just added another elephant underneath the 1st one, and pronounced the paradox solved.
**
**Because in the immortal words of Gilda Radner, “It’s always something.”
Clever, and philosophically valid.
You know the inhabitants of Mercury spend all their time considering why the conditions there preclude intelligent life?
Maybe there are plenty of universes with nothing. Ask their inhabitants how it is. But unless there is some reason why there can’t be something (and we know there cannot be) the only answers you get will be from those in universes with something.
No idea.
Right, the (weak) anthropic principle is sufficient to answer the “why” part. There may be universes created all the time containing nothing, but there wouldn’t be any beings in them to remark on it.
The “how” part can be addressed by various physical, metaphysical, and mathematical theories and hypotheses that support the notion of creating something from nothing, or of a static hyper-universe in which this one is contained and in which time is an artifact of our perception.
That’s probably as far as one can usefully take it without engaging in philosophy or religion.
Keeping in mind that “the laws of physics” apply only to the known natural universe, yes. But they don’t address conditions outside the universe from which this universe may have arisen.
But within the universe, that’s indeed the case. For example, if you had absolutely nothing in some arbitrary volume of deep space that was a perfect vacuum, then at any instant in time you could know that its energy was precisely zero. But energy and time are conjugate variables governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, just like position and momentum, so both cannot be simultaneously knowable with arbitrary precision, such as “precisely zero”. This is reflected in uncertainty in energy at any instant in time, which causes energy ripples called vacuum fluctuations (quantum fluctuations) whereby virtual particles – particle-antiparticle pairs – are constantly appearing out of nowhere and annihilating each other.
There is a satisfactory answer. It’s called the Anthropic Principle and it is something philosophers have been kicking around for centuries. As a result it is pretty well refined.
There is loads of reading to be had on the subject and it can get quite involved but this is the answer to the OP (or at least as good a one as can be had without getting a PhD in philosophy).
I didn’t pronounce jack solved - I asked a question and then said that if a theory applied, then perhaps we had an answer. That is not how I pronounce things solved; if you want to see that go to one of the theism threads. 
But regarding this “no laws” thing - wouldn’t that mean that in true nothingness, there would be no law saying that “something” couldn’t spontaneously appear? “Why not?” becomes a pretty decent answer then, perhaps even escalating to “There cannot possibly have been a reason for it not to happen.”
Oh, and for the record, I don’t consider the anthropic principle to answer jack. That’s like saying that the answer for “why is the earth in the orbit it’s in” is “because we’re living on it, and if earth was in a different orbit we’d probably be dead.”
Because for every 1 billion antimatter particles there was a billion and 1 matter particles, so matter won. Why were there a fraction of a fraction more matter than antimatter particles? Because in this version of the simulation they didn’t want things to be too boring. 
That’s really the answer, in a nut shell…if this didn’t happen, and there was a balance in matter verse antimatter then we (collectively as life in this universe) wouldn’t be around to notice.
There were a lot of low probability events that made this discussion possible, such that some would say this proves that a God or gods exist. However, if those low probability events didn’t happen then simply we wouldn’t be here to discuss it. Myself, I’m quite taken with the simulation theory these days, so I like to think that those running the Matrix just wanted an interesting simulation to play in. Or, if you like the multi-worlds/universe theory, consider the myriad universes that didn’t make it for a whole variety of reasons, including those where there wasn’t any matter (or antimatter) at all in the end. This is just one where things worked out, thus allowing us to discuss.
The problem is that we can only think about the world in terms that are essentially computational—i.e. we start from some information, process it, and return different information. This is just the way modeling works; understanding stuff is, roughly, just creating a sort of computational simulation of it.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the way the world works. Indeed, in order to ground the computation our minds perform, we need non-computational processes, as otherwise, we land squarely in an infinite regress (computations grounded in computations grounded in computations…).
The problem is, within a computational model, it always makes sense to ask for some fundamental set of facts, say a system of axioms, from which every property of the model can be derived. Thus, for a computational model, something always comes from something; and since that’s the only way we can reason about things, it seems to us that something always must come from something, period. There must be some base facts, some axioms, such that no further question is possible, and those must determine all that goes on. But for each such set of base facts, we can ask: but why?
This is essentially the question of why there is something, and not nothing. Why are there fundamental facts at all? Why not none?
The usual answer is that those facts must be necessary—i.e. they could not possibly be different. I don’t think that’s really sufficient.
Rather, I believe that the question itself is just mistaking the map for the territory: it simply doesn’t follow that because there is some set of fundamental facts to all our models of the world, and to every way we can reason about the world, then there must be some fundamental facts to the world as such, period. That conclusion simply isn’t warranted.
So the problem of why there is something instead of nothing may be a pseudo-problem, imposed simply by our way of reasoning about the world. If we could apprehend the world directly, without some form of mental model, the question simply wouldn’t occur to us; but since we can’t, since we’re caught up looking at the world through a computational looking glass, there seems to be a necessity for final facts.
Thus, the question cannot be answered; but that’s OK, since it also doesn’t point to an actual problem.
It’s often claimed that information might, in some way or another, foundational to the world. But it’s exactly the other way around: information only exists in the world as it is being modeled. Take the set of all numbers: it has very little information content—as can be seen that I’ve just described it using just a couple of words. But subsets of that set can have near-arbitrarily large information content: basically, the information content there is equal to a formula, or computer program, that picks out every element of that subset, and those can be quite complex.
Moreover, the subset’s complement has the same information content: if I’ve picked out the subset, I can just as well pick out its complement. So we split the set of natural numbers, which has very little information, in two, each of which has a huge information content. It’s like ripping a piece of paper in two: the piece itself is easily described, but it takes a quite complex description to describe the precise shape of the tear.
This information yields the ‘fundamental facts’ of each piece. Now, every model only ever grasps a subset of the things in the world—in fact, by necessity: since models are computational, while the world isn’t (in order to ground the computations going on), every model only ever models a part of the world. Every model thus has a certain non-zero information content, a certain set of fundamental facts. But the world doesn’t: it’s like the white piece of paper, only more so. ‘Everything’ and ‘nothing’, being complements of one another, have the same information content: zero.
So the ‘world’ as we talk about it exists as a computational entity with a nonzero information content in necessarily incomplete models of the world as it is in itself. The former necessitates the fundamental question: why those fundamental facts? Why any?
The latter, however, don’t, and so long we don’t confuse the two, we’re good.
Out of all the hypothetical realities in which something either does or does not exist, the ones in which nothing does exist are realities in which there’s no meaningful distinction between the hypothetical reality and the real reality.
That leaves the ones in which something does in fact exist.
Consider this: Would you be asking the same question if the situation was reversed? When you can answer that question, it will be time for you to leave this place, Grasshopper.
There are several variants of the anthropic principle and I don’t think that’s a good description of what any of them assert. A more appropriate analogy would be to ask questions like: how come the earth’s orbit and its consequent temperature range is exactly right for liquid water to exist and exactly the kind of temperature range we need; how come the atmosphere contains exactly the oxygen we need to breathe and metabolize; how come the flora and fauna are just what we need to eat; how come the earth’s axis is tilted in just such a way as to produce seasons and therefore a broad diversity of life, and so on. Amazing, isn’t it, how everything is exactly right?
Obviously part of the answer is that we evolved and adapted to the environment we were in. But it turns out that life as we know it, at least carbon-based life, can only exist in a relatively narrow range of environmental conditions, and life formed and flourished here because earth had the right conditions, and here we are. That’s far from being a trite observation as you claim. It is the core of the explanation for how we came to be here, it offers insights into the probabilities of intelligent life on other planets, and it’s not only a valid illustration of the anthropic principle but it’s somewhat analogous to the strong anthropic principle which, applied to the universe, says that we observe certain specific physical laws and constants because these are necessary for intelligent life to develop. One might note, for example, that if certain physical constants were just slightly different, stars would never have formed, or would have different lifecycles that wouldn’t produce the heavier elements; in either case, or a million other permutations of these, life in the universe would be impossible.
If it helps, there isn’t really that much something anyway. Atoms are mostly empty space, space is mostly empty space; really, taking the universe overall you might as well round down to zero.
Right - the anthropic principle is an erroneous or trite way of saying “the conditions on the planet are strongly correlated with the properties of the residents of the planet.” And based on this fact we can draw inferences on the likelihood of other planets having life that resembles ours.
But the error is presuming that correlation equals causation. The planet earth is not livable because we live on it. (And if we continue to ignore global warming and such we might see that demonstrated in an extremely inarguable way.) And, similarly, it’s invalid to say that the universe exists because we exist within it. Sure, we can infer that the universe does exist based on the fact we exist in it, and we can infer that our chances of finding life in other universes is greatly increased when those universe in fact exist. But to presume that our existence somehow causes the universe to exist is, again, a fallacious argument confusing correlation with causation.
That is actually a perfect example of times to invoke the anthropic principle.
For years, astronomers and mathematicians tried to come up with a reason for the Earth orbiting the distance that it was. There were some pretty complex mathematical formulas to try to show why the planets were in the orbits they were in.
At a certain point, we realized that the planets are in pretty much random orbits, and the “reason” that the Earth is in the orbit that it is, is because if it were not, then we wouldn’t be here.
For this to happen, we had to realize that other stars had planets around them, as well, and that there are countless numbers of planets out there. There is no reason for the earth being in the orbit it is, but there is a reason for us being on a planet that is in the orbit that it is in.
Same thing with multi-verse concepts. If there is only one universe, then it makes sense to ask why the laws of the universe are the way they are in order to promote life. If there are an infinite number of universes, it doesn’t make any sense to try to figure out why the laws are the way they are, if they are different i other universes, then it shows that there is no reason that they are the way they are, but the reason for us being here is because the laws are as they are.
Without either knowing for sure what “lies beyond our universe”, or pinning down the reason for the laws being the way they are, we cannot say whether or not the anthropic principle is “jack”, or whether it really is the only answer you are going to get.
For instance, do you actually have a better explanation as to why the earth is in the orbit that it is in?
“Why not?”
And that’s why the anthropic principle doesn’t help at all in trying to answer the question of why there is anything at all: it can select something from a range of conditions, but we’re asking about why that range of conditions exists in the first place. So anthropic reasoning makes matters worse, not better: if it’s the case that we exist in this universe because out of the entire multiverse, this is the one supporting life like ours, then this not only doesn’t tell us anything about how this universe came about, it infinitely multiplies the question by postulating an entire multiverse of universes that we don’t know how they came about.
How could a “nothing” universe exist? If a universe is all of time and space and its contents, and you take away all the contents, that leaves you time and space. Is it possible to have a universe without time and/or space and, if not, isn’t there some sort of energy involved when time and space interact?
That’s actually not an answer.
Well, and that is why the AP isn’t meant to answer questions as to why something is the way it is, but rather to explain why we cannot have an answer as to why something is the way it is.