Edward Feser reviews John Leslie’s and Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? over at First Things. Fifty Shades of Nothing
While Kuhn does not settle on a particular position, he does indicate that he thinks that either the existence of things is a brute fact without explanation, or there is something that is self-existent in the sense that its essence entails that its non-existence is inherently impossible. The only remaining question in the latter case would be what else we could say about this self-existent reality (e.g., whether we ought to ascribe to it the standard divine attributes).
For the reason given by Gerson, though, I think that if Kuhn is willing to concede even this disjunction—that either the universe is an inexplicable brute fact, or there is something self-existent—then he has really implicitly conceded that there is something self-existent. For the universe could be an inexplicable brute fact only if there were no possible explanation of it, and once it is conceded that it is at least possible for there to be something self-existent, then we have a possible explanation, viz. that that self-existent thing is the cause of the world. As Gerson says, it is no good for the atheist to say, “Maybe there is no explanation,” when the theist has just given one.