> I'm intrigued by commenter Roger's (attempted) answer of the question of whether there is something rather than nothing.

Really? It's just playing semantic games with the definition of "nothing" and "something". It doesn't explain anything: neither why there is something instead of nothing, nor why that something is the way it is.

Thinking about Roger's comment some more, I believe the error he makes is that he treats "nothing" like the empty set {}, which can be used to form non-empty sets {{}}, {{}, {}}, {{{}}} ("something"), when really the term "nothing" denotes a concept closer to the non-existence of the empty set and the construction of sets from other sets.