I stated the proposition the way I did because I was reminded of lyrics of the Rogers and Hammerstein song, "Something Good" from the "Sound of Music". Of course I cannot demonstrate a universal negative, in the way I phrased it, but the real issue is whether or not something can come out of absolute nothing, and the metaphysical intuition is that a negative answer seems obvious. Universal empirical observation indicates the same, as far as I know. If you were playing at the world championship of poker science and metaphysics, and you had to bet on it, which proposition would you bet is the more plausible truth?
I not sure to which physics theories you are referring, but I doubt whether they can validly contradict the causal principle. Alamo-Girl alluded to it. It can be expressed in the syllogism that
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Cordially,
Something along those lines must have bothered Kant and he was smart enough to scramble and "transcendentalize" his starting point. Aristotle didn't play the hocus-pocus and was sensible enough to simply remind us that some first principles are not demonstrable.
If anything, a syllogism is a demonstration; certainly the Greeks demonstrated that something must be eternal. Although to get there, they had to assume something. In this we haven't changed a bit since then.
Your syllogism is valid but as neither premiss is necessarily true, the result isn't necessarily true. Secondly, for the syllogism to be valid, "universe" must be a subset of "whatever" otherwise your first statement is only paraphrase of the conclusion.