It is hard not to come off as arrogant with 2000 years of subsequent knowledge under your belt, so to speak.
And I have no problem with a little compassion and empathy: there are a few nuggets of wisdom in the Bible (especially the New Testament), but arrogance is practically defined by the attitude that, “Our 2000 yr old scriptures should be the basis for modern morality”. [Ours, that is, but no one else’s].
When it comes to the question of why there is something and not nothing, you have nothing to be arrogant about because you have no adequate answer either. So, and this is just a friendly suggestion: get over yourself. 
I am so over myself that I’m coming around again from the other side.
But seriously, I think there is a lot of good science to suggest that something did indeed come from nothing, and how.
Really? Like what?
Well let’s start with something easy, “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing”, in which Lawrence M. Krauss details the evidence (experimental and theoretical) that suggests that not only can something arise from nothing, something should be expected to arise from nothing because nothing is essentially “unstable”.
Sean Carroll discussed the book recently in Discover magazine.
Sean Carroll brings up a very pertinent point. And Krauss actually discusses this in his book, indicating that he is assuming that when we ask “Why” we really mean “How”. But I think many would agree with Carroll, that what we are really asking is the sort of “Why?” that implies an intent or motive. But, taken this way, it is really just begging the question as to whether there is some plan or design (teleology) and for me that just leads to an infinite regress. But let’s allow Dr. Carroll to finish his own line of reasoning, shall we?
"All of these are interesting questions to ask, and none of them is addressed by modern physics or cosmology. Or at least, they are interesting questions to “raise,” but my own view is that the best answer is to promptly un-ask them. (Note that by now we’ve reached a purely philosophical issue, not a scientific one.)
“Why” questions don’t exist in a vacuum; they only make sense within some explanatory context. If we ask “why did the chicken cross the road?”, we understand that there are things called roads with certain properties, and things called chickens with various goals and motivations, and things that might be on the other side of the road, or other beneficial aspects of crossing it. It’s only within that context that a sensible answer to a “why” question can be offered. But the universe, and the laws of physics, aren’t embedded in some bigger context. They are the biggest context that there is, as far as we know. It’s okay to admit that a chain of explanations might end somewhere, and that somewhere might be with the universe and the laws it obeys, and the only further explanation might be “that’s just the way it is.”
“Or not, of course. We should be good empiricists and be open to the possibility that what we think of as the universe really does exist within some larger context. But then we could presumably re-define that as the universe, and be stuck with the same questions. As long as you admit that there is more than one conceivable way for the universe to be (and I don’t see how one could not), there will always be some end of the line for explanations. I could be wrong about that, but an insistence that “the universe must explain itself” or some such thing seems like a completely unsupportable a priori assumption.”
and…
[i]"If your real goal is to refute claims that a Creator is a necessary (or even useful) part of a complete cosmological scheme, then the above points about “creation from nothing” are really quite on point. And that point is that the physical universe can perfectly well be self-contained; it doesn’t need anything or anyone from outside to get it started, even if it had a “beginning.” That doesn’t come close to addressing Leibniz’s classic question [Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?] but there’s little doubt that it’s a remarkable feature of modern physics with interesting implications for fundamental cosmology."
Oh, and thanks for the reference to Sean Carroll. I had never heard of him before but (thanks to wiki) I now know that “Carroll is an outspoken atheist, who argues that scientific thinking leads one to a materialist worldview. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, on the grounds that he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion.”
Another gem from Sean Carroll off the same website:
“Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.”
Oh thanks for going easy on me. If nothing has an essential characteristic like instability, then it is not nothing but a thing like other things. By the way, how does Krauss know that nothing is “essentially” unstable? Since when does empirical science deal with essentials at all? How would someone observe not that some sense content is present in some observation or series of observations, but essentially present every possible time? That would take us beyond a science of probability to a science of absolutes with essential properties. That sounds more like Aquinas then modern science to me.
But, hey let’s go with it. If nothing is essentially unstable, then it follows that everything essentially stable. But the observation of say… uranium alone proves that isn’t true. 
Yeah thanks for the additional quote including “That doesn’t come close to addressing Leibniz’s classic question [Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?]” But, of course you claim you can answer it. I’m still waiting for your answer.
Scratch the word “essentially” - it was not meant to taken as you you are interpreting it. Krauss is saying that “nothing” is intrinsically unstable; it spontaneously tends to become “something”.
Why?
Why?
I like Carroll’s answer, myself, “Ultimately, the problem is that the question — ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ — doesn’t make any sense.”
Krauss has a bunch of equations. He claims that these equations model the universe. When he plugs in a nothing value, the equations evaluate to something … numbers which represent the existence of stuff.
I don’t find that particularly satisfying. It sounds like another creation myth. Not a very entertaining one.
Sounds a lot like the Greek creation myth, Before the universe there was Chaos, unstable “nothingness” fits the bill rather nicely.
Because.
Because.
You demonstrate your deep understanding of physics.
Thats what my dad used to tell me…
Your argument is getting bollixed up. Krauss is saying things he doesn’t mean or you are redacting a word from his text. Now the word nothing is in quotes. What does that mean? Is it a special kind of nothing or a nothing that is really a thing? Then you refer to nothing as “it” which implies that it is something. And again I ask how do you and Krauss know this stuff?
Krauss refers to three definitions of nothing in his book. The first would be the more classical definition, one that would have satisfied most any person before Einstein came along, i.e. empty space. Einstein showed that empty space was in fact something on it’s own, and so Krauss also deals with nothing as the absence of space-time. He further examines the possibility of a sort of nothing characterized by the lack of any physical laws governing space-time. In all three situations he explains how modern physics has demonstrated the plausibility of something coming from nothing spontaneously.