If I ask you why the laws of chemistry are what they are you can avoid answering by talking about how we observed the laws of chemistry and speculating about other laws of chemistry would be unjustified. But that is not nearly as satisfying as producing an actual answer, by applying quantum mechanics to collections of electrons, protons, and nuetrons, and deriving chemistry from lower level physics.
In the same way, you are avoiding answering the "why is there something rather than nothing?", not actually answering it. And while I don't know how to answer that question, and see no reason why you should be expected to know how either, it is better to honestly avoid answering it with "I don't know".
I don't see that as the same kind of question. The laws of chemistry are a higher-level approximation of quantum mechanics. Maybe the laws of quantum mechanics are a higher-level approximation of something else, too. Talking about that is different than talking about alternative versions of the laws.
I'm not avoiding answering the question; I'm rejecting the premise of the question. I don't think there is an answer, any more than there's an answer to the question "What is the smell of the color green?". We can construct the question linguistically and imagine scenarios in which it's valid, but that doesn't mean it applies to reality.
This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group. The question was, should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther? We argued for a long time. The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth. The anti-atheism group said that, while that may be true, it's going to doom us to be a group exclusively for eccentric nerds, and we need to develop broad appeal, even if that's hard and requires us to leave our comfort zone.
Things got abstract very fast; my take was that we need to get back to practicalities. Different attitudes to religion have different effects on different types of people; we need to optimize for desired effects and accept what tradeoffs we must. We can't appeal equally to everyone. So I came up with a sort of typology.
The Four New Members
Annie